Attila:The Scourge of God

AFTERWORD

The murder of Valentinian III ended the Theodosian dynasty which, for all its defects, did provide a measure of stability to the crumbling Roman state. Deprived of the inspired leadership of ‘the great safety of the Western Empire’, as a Byzantine chronicler has described Aetius, that empire entered its terminal decline. Valentinian’s successor, Petronius Maximus, lasted barely three months before being lynched by an angry mob, as he prepared to flee Rome ahead of a Vandal assault on the city.¹ He was briefly followed by Avitus, who had served Aetius so well in Gaul but who, falling foul of the Senate (enjoying a temporary, astonishing revival of its power) was sentenced to death by that assembly. Next, German warlords proceeded to set up a succession of puppet emperors (of whom Majorian, another former colleague of Aetius, alone showed any promise), the last of whom, Romulus Augustus (sic!) was deposed in 476, bringing to an end the Roman Empire in the West.

Gaiseric, who contributed more to the destruction of the West than any other individual, outlasted that empire by a single year. Like the Huns’, the Vandals’ legacy was entirely negative, their name linked for ever with cruelty and destruction. Two generations after Gaiseric’s death, they were routed by the East Roman army of Justinian and, like the Huns, wiped from the slate of history. (After Attila’s death, the Hun Empire rapidly disintegrated, leaving no mark on posterity except a memory of massacre and devastation with which the name of Attila, ‘the Scourge of God’ will ever be associated.)

Was the work of Aetius, then, all for nothing? By no means. Although he probably appeared too late on the scene to rescue the Western Empire, not only did he save Europe from Asiatic domination, but his career helped to make possible the future harmonious co-existence between Germans and Romans within the limits of the former empire. The Catalaunian Plains was the Western Empire’s greatest (although final) triumph. The victory was due to a new development of seminal importance: Romans and Germans combining to repel a common enemy. This contrasts with previous Roman policy towards federate ‘guests’: reluctant toleration and containment as with the Visigoths and Franks or, in the case of the Burgundians, military suppression. Henceforth, the political dynamic lay with the constructive interaction between the two peoples, a process which survived the dissolution of the empire itself.

The conversion of the Frankish king Clovis to Catholicism in 498 — an example followed eventually by other German monarchs — removed the last major barrier to co-operation between Germans and Romans. (Hitherto, the Franks, like other German tribes, had been Arian Christians, heretics in Roman eyes.) Aetius laid the foundation on which Theoderic (no connection with the Visigothic kings of that name) was able to build his successful Romano-German synthesis in Ostrogothic Italy. This, despite renewed conflict between the two peoples in the course of Justinian’s re-occupation of the West, was to prove a lasting achievement. From it developed European medieval civilization, embodied politically in the empire of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, whose heir is, arguably, the European Union.

The two thousand years of the Christian era have been significantly occupied by Rome. The Western Empire lasted almost a quarter of that period, the Eastern nearly three-quarters, surviving (admittedly in increasingly attenuated form) until 1453 — less than two generations before the birth of Henry VIII, which, in the long perspective of history, is the day before yesterday. Rome’s influence on architecture, law, languages, ideas, the arts, religion, government, etcetera, etcetera, has been immeasurable — and lasting. To take just one example: for nearly two centuries British India was ruled by classically educated young men, who took as their model for government that of Imperial Rome; on the whole, whatever one thinks of the morality of imperialism, they made a pretty good fist of running the subcontinent. Rome’s legacy has, in the main, been a noble one, whose preservation and transfer owes not a little to Aetius — ‘the last of the Romans’, as Procopius described him.

¹ This resulted in a second (and much more destructive than that of 410) Sack of Rome.