Italy and Gaul; two masters-general of the army who were devoted to Stilicho; the quaestor Bonaventura; the imperial treasurer; and many others, their names now forgotten to history, though not to the hearts that loved them.
Following the massacre, every fawning courtier who had previously sung Stilicho’s praises suddenly saw the light, admitted that they had always mistrusted him from the start, and fervently agreed that he had indeed been the most heinous and malicious of traitors.
The many friends of Stilicho were horribly tortured, to make them confess to treachery. Without exception they went to their graves in silence, nobly justifying by their deaths Stilicho’s friendship with them in life.
Stilicho’s wife, Serena, was also killed, strangled in a dungeon with a ligature of silk. They say that she went calmly to her end, praying to Christ for the souls of those who killed her. They say that she died with a strange serenity, as befitted her name. As if she could already see her beloved husband waiting for her there, on the shores of that eternally sunlit country, beyond the cold dark river she must cross.
But Stilicho’s troops, at least, refused to believe that their commander had been a traitor. And the only immediate result of the massacre was that thirty thousand of them, in their furious indignation at the behaviour of the imperial court of Rome, promptly went over to join Alaric and the army of the Goths. Whereupon Alaric, sensing that the empire was once more coming apart, turned his eyes again on the prize of Rome.
A mood of festering hatred settled over the courts of the city. A mood of sullen coercion, abject flattery, and naked fear showing through the ghastly smiles.
Attila did not smile. Still a prisoner, his life spared, still the best guarantee that the Huns would not turn against Rome.
Honorius spent more and more time in Ravenna with his chickens.
Galla Placidia spent more and more time in Rome giving orders.
And the Hun boy spent more and more time alone in his dim-lit cell, his fists bunched up and pressed against his ears, or into the red stars of his eyeballs. Torn apart by the promises he had made to Stilicho, by what he knew Stilicho would have wanted of him, and yet also by the knowledge of what had become of Stilicho himself. That most loyal servant. ‘Do what is right, Attila.’
But another year passed, and the Huns did not come.
Although at all times the boy remained under strict guard, his lessons were resumed, his regime was relaxed, and he was even given a slightly larger chamber.
Other hostage children came and went, depending on what diplomacy had achieved with the various Germanic peoples who threatened the empire’s borders. But Attila would mix with none of them. He despised them all.
He especially depised the two Vandal princes, Beric and Genseric, the most willingly and thoroughly Romanised of the hostages. They had been released before back to their people, and now returned to Rome quite eagerly, under some new diplomatic deal.
They were a few years his senior, perhaps sixteen and eighteen respectively, and very much convinced of their own superiority and their urbane and raffish wit. On one occasion, Attila heard them making a cynical joke about the deaths of Stilicho and Serena. He turned to them and, fixing them with those eyes of his, which even at this age were beginning to take on a terrible aspect beneath his lowering brows, said that if he ever heard them saying such things again he would see to it that they were both dead before nightfall. The brothers looked at each other and laughed at this outrageous threat. But their eyes betrayed more than a little anxiety; and they never mentioned the murdered general or his wife in front of the boy again.
Nevertheless, the Vandal princes, perhaps under pressure from more highly placed palace courtiers, continually tried to persuade the boy to relax and enjoy the soft delights that Rome had to offer. For it is well known that the Vandals are the most slothful of people.
‘Do you have hot baths, and fine wines, and robes of silk, and such foods as we eat here, back among the black tents of your people?’ Genseric asked him mockingly.
Beric added, ‘I have never yet seen a Hun in a robe of silk, have you, Genseric?’
‘Indeed not,’ murmured Genseric, stroking his own silken robe as he spoke. ‘In a motley of dusty leather leggings and, I think, rabbit fur, perhaps, but in silk? No.’
And they smiled mockingly at the bristling boy.
Attila rejected their approaches with contempt. Indeed the brothers, like all the other hostage children, seemed to him as blissfully foolish and unaware of the truth about their world as sleek and fattened cattle in rich pasture, feeding and lolling complacently in the warm summer sun, oblivious of the fact that when winter set in their keepers would in a trice become their killers.
He kept himself even more isolated than before, and one rolling glare of his eyes was usually enough to make even the stoutest adversary back off.
The other children plumed themselves on their ability to speak Latin and Greek, seduced by what they saw as the superior culture of their hosts. They would quote Horace or Virgil to each other, or the exquisite couplets of Sappho; and they would half close their eyes, and sigh, for all the world like the most enervated aesthetes of Baiae or Pompeii. Attila continued to learn Latin doggedly, and with grim determination, just as he continued to learn his Roman history, while regarding his Greek pedagogue, poor, put-upon Demetrius of Tarsus, with scorn.
He learnt of the great victories of Scipio Africanus, of Caesar in Gaul, of Fabius Cunctator, Fabius the Delayer, who defeated the Carthaginians by refusing to engage, but by harrying them with constant guerrilla warfare.
‘That is how my people would fight Rome,’ said Attila. ‘With patience and guile.’
Demetrius snapped, ‘You will desist from-’
‘All these great heroes of Rome defeated other peoples and extended Rome’s boundaries so gloriously,’ queried the boy. ‘Does that mean that warfare and conquest are always glorious?’
The pedagogue was wrong-footed, as usual. ‘Only if the victor is also the party of superior laws and culture,’ he said carefully. ‘As is Rome, compared to the uncouth tribes beyond its borders. Indeed, if Rome were not a superior culture, Providence would never have permitted her to win such an empire in the first place.’
The boy considered briefly, then smiled. ‘In philosophy,’ he said, ‘that is what would be termed a circular argument. And logically it is quite worthless.’
Demetrius was rendered momentarily speechless. The boy laughed.
Once, Rome had been great. That much the boy perceived, and grudgingly admired. When he read of Regulus, or Horatius, or Mucius Scaevola, those strong, grim-faced, relentless heroes of ancient Rome, his blood thrilled in his veins. And when he gazed up at the lofty buildings of the city, he admitted greatness when he saw it. But that was long ago and from another world. Now it was all decadence: a rotten fruit, a hollow shell. The Romans had lost their way, and did not even know it.
As for the barbarian peoples whom Rome continued to cultivate and disarm, they forfeited their barbarian virtues without gaining any of the countervailing old Roman strengths: fortitude, stoicism, self-discipline, warrior hardihood; a pride in self and nation and race; and that humility before the gods which is the mark of true wisdom: a proud and even joyful acceptance of whatever fate the gods have decreed for you, no matter how terrible that fate might be.
Instead, the princes of the Vandals or the Sueves or the Burgundians were wretchedly seduced, passing their wasted days in listless self-indulgence, like Beric and Genseric. And when they were released back to their people, they took with them chefs and court dancers and masseurs, tailors and musicians and poets, and established them in their barbarian homes in a clumsy and ludicrous aping of Roman ways. They even took back with them their own personal hairdressers.
The only time a court hairdresser ever tried to get close to Attila’s shaggy mop, he ended up regretting it.
The Goths at least, it was said, were made of sterner stuff. And in the fitful skirmishes between the Huns and those tall Germanic horsemen, with their mighty ashen spears and their tawny plumes nodding in the wind, it seemed that their reputation was deserved. But many too many of the barbarian tribes were being destroyed: not by weapons of war, but by baths, and wine, and silk.
Attila gagged on the perfumed courts of Rome, even as he saw that those courts were tottering. Within, amid the vast colonnaded staterooms of marble and gold, malachite and porphyry, the emperor and empress and their fawning courtiers might dress in brocades heavy with rubies and emeralds, their white arms wreathed in gold bracelets, their hair piled high with pearl diadems, as they glided in sinister silence beneath their vast, self-
