Chapter XIX: Leo and Attila—the Rescue of Rome

Sadly and slowly after that the terrible days and weeks passed on. The great festivals of the Church were over. The daily festival of the perpetual Eucharist indeed went on with its ceaseless pleading of Redeeming death, and ceaseless participation of the ever-renewing Life, its blending of triumph and of tender tears, “Pretium et poculum,” for ever.

And day and night in Ethne’s heart Patrick’s hymn still made melody—

“Christ in the fort; Christ on the sea; Christ above, beneath, around, within, for ever.”

For in Ethne’s heart alone nothing could quench the hope that Marius would yet return.

Still came in, day after day, the tidings of mourning, lamentation, and woe. The long resistance of Aquileia had enraged the Huns to madness; and her capture and destruction had apparently awakened in them an insatiable thirst for blood and ruin. For the time even plunder seemed subordinate to mere wild waste and ravage. Week by week came the cry of cities sacked and burned and laid waste for ever; Concordia, thirty miles from Aquileia, and Altinum.

Then followed another phase of horror. The mere blind fury of revenge seemed at last assuaged; and the hideous savage hordes entered on another stage of devastation; the lust of plunder and of drunken orgies seemed to revive and gain the upper hand. The rich plains of Lombardy had been laid waste, the flourishing cities of the coast had been blotted from the earth, and now the great cities of the interior, Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Pavia, and finally Milan, appalled by the fate of Aquileia, opened their gates, and from these came the tidings how the Huns, “_bacchabantur_,” were holding hideous revels and orgies there night and day. Meanwhile Rome herself had virtually no walls to defend, no gates to open. Rome, with her temples and palaces, each as a city within itself, lay absolutely defenceless and bare before the Tartar hordes.

The thunder-cloud drew nearer and nearer, and more and more the Aventine household realized their utter helplessness. It was reported that Aetius was on the point of taking flight with the Emperor. But still Leo stood firm, still the prayers went up from the basilicas. More and more the mother, the sister, and the bride seemed to find themselves most at home in the ancient churches of the catacombs, by the tombs of the martyrs of the early days, as the darkness deepened around them; until, at last, faint rumours began to creep into the city, of debate and division in the camp of Attila himself. The spell of Rome began to work; too much, his chieftains began to feel, was staked on the life of one man. The last royal life that had braved the great enchantress, the great queen City, had paid the penalty of victory by death. If Attila were to fall as Alaric had fallen, some began dimly to feel, who would hold his unwieldy empire, his hordes of many divided tribes, together? Moreover, the inevitable curse of polygamy was in Attila’s own house. Which of all the sons of his many wives would win the allegiance of these disorganized hosts? The great defeat and slaughter of the previous year, the _Hunnenschlacht_, on the plains of Châlons, could not have been forgotten; and something stronger than defeat in battle was doubtless beginning to dissolve the terrific forces of dissolution from within. Cruelty and lust and violence cannot create or unite; man remains human through all; and the avenging of such crimes must eventually grow out of the crimes themselves. No inspiring loyalty, no sacred memories or hopes, no great purpose of patriotism or even of conquest, held that vast horde together; nothing but only that one gigantic will. And if Attila hurled his life against Rome and conquered, and fell, like Alaric, what would become of his Huns? Probably, moreover, this hesitation and division of purpose began to invade the heart and will even of Attila himself.

At length the echo of these debates and divisions penetrated faintly to Rome itself, and vague suggestions began to be made of sending an embassy to Attila himself, entreating peace.

But if such an embassy were possible, who would risk themselves to be the ambassadors? Ambassadors had been sent before to Attila from the Eastern empire with a secret mission of assassination, and he had discovered it; and the ambassadors had barely escaped, through a rare generosity, with their lives. Who would venture on such an embassy from the Western empire, with such a memory of treachery confronting them? It was no mission for a soldier,—a message of abject submission and supplication;—yet to venture on it demanded more courage than any battle-field.

There could have been but one name on the lips and in the hearts of all, the name of the man whom Rome had waited for those forty days so many years before to make him her leader and bishop. There was not a hope but in Leo; not a man besides who could be trusted with such a mission, or would undertake it.

And Leo did not fail. He went; and with him two distinguished civilians—Avienus, once a consul, and Tregetius, a prefect, to propitiate Attila by two high official names,—mere names then, and long since, forgotten names, save as adjuncts to Leo. In this embassy, once more the names of the Emperor, “the Senate and People of Rome,” were united, not in a decree but a supplication; the parody of a People and Emperor and the shadow of a Senate. But the ambassador was a true Roman and a Christian, a genuine man and a living saint. And Attila had shown that he recognized a true man when he encountered him, and would listen to a saint when he saw him.

Silent among the silent multitudes the three veiled women, Damaris, Lucia, and Ethne, watched the procession leave the northern gate and wind along the plain. They felt in their inmost souls the depth of humiliation symbolized: an entreaty from the Imperial city for mercy from a Tartar savage; an appeal from the Christian Church for compassion from a heathen destroyer, the symbol of whose worship was a scimitar planted hilt downward in the earth. But in reality they all felt the appeal of Leo was from man to God, from princes in their vanity and nothingness “to the Lord of those who rule, and the King of those who reign.”

Thus once more a Roman was found to throw himself into the chasm for the salvation of Rome.

The suppliant embassy went northward to the camp of Attila in Lombardy, to the place where the Po and the Mincio meet; and the multitudes of Rome dispersed again to their various forms of labour or idleness, some of them no doubt, like the little company on the Aventine, to the basilicas or quiet oratories to pray the great prayer of Christendom, and the prayers of Leo himself, and to wait.

They had not long to wait. Attila’s movements were not slow, nor his decisions vacillating. He saw Leo and believed in him. But what can any of us say as to the Presence he _felt in_ Leo, or _round about_ Leo? Legend has told and Raphael has painted in his immortal picture, that he saw the apostles Peter and Paul hovering about Leo in the air, as the champions of Rome, and that Attila and his Huns cowered in terror before the heavenly vision. Prosper, Leo’s own secretary, tells us simply that Leo “_committed himself to God, Who never fails to aid the labours of those who trust Him; nor did less ensue than his faith expected_.” Leo, no doubt, would scarcely have been surprised at the apparition of St. Peter and St. Paul; he certainly believed that the honour and primacy of his See belonged to Peter and not to himself. But always, above and beyond Peter, Leo beheld Christ, “never relinquishing the care of His beloved flock.” In that Presence he lived, and more than once we know Attila had recognized that mysterious, supernatural Presence in saintly men. The spell of Rome may indeed have been upon him, and the superstitious dread of the terrible tendency to revulsions in the affairs of men, which haunts the high places of the world; perhaps also some natural qualms of conscience for the miseries inflicted on myriads of human creatures, some echo in his heart, which was still human, of the cries of tortured men and wronged women and innocent babes. All this probably wrought for Leo, and also the kinship one great man feels for another; the weight of a spirit accustomed to rule, the force of that “saving common-sense” which often has a persuasiveness stronger than genius, and _was_ the genius of Leo.

But it was something mightier than all this, we may be sure, which conquered Attila. The very best and deepest in us all, however seldom it is reached, is after all the strongest. It was the very deepest depths in Leo, the depths over which broods the living Spirit of God, that met the depths of Attila, and moved him irresistibly “to think and to do the thing that was rightful,” to conquer his own evil will, and spare Rome.

Rumour says that he veiled his surrender in a grim humour which was natural to him, saying, “I can fight with men, but the wolf and the lion (Lupus and Leo) are too much for me.”

But whatever the motive, surrender was made. The vast host from the eastern wilds turned back again eastward, never more to sweep in devastating floods over the West; and Leo returned in peace to the Rome he had saved.

Rome, at all events, did not receive her deliverer as Troyes had received the Bishop to whom she owed her existence. To the great city which he had defended when abandoned by all her natural defenders, Leo became thenceforth Rock and Refuge, Chief Shepherd, Supreme Ruler, Father, Pope. Thenceforth Rome and her Pope were identified. The magic of her old Imperial name was transferred to him; the granite of his ancient Roman character guarded her. Leo spoke “to the City”; the city still spoke, as no other voice could speak, to the world. The “ad Urbem” and “ad Orbem” were thenceforth not to be dissociated.

We do not hear of any pomp and ovation to do him homage on his return. The city was saved; but the salvation was from a humiliation only possible through the degradation and corruption of the city itself. And this moral degradation continued.