CONSULS OF GOD
service to all. Thus he began the transformation of the Augustinian Civitas from a nebulous Utopia into a reality.
As a statesman of this Civitas Dei he also rode out to meet Attila, the Hun, hoping thus to save Rome from ravage by these hordes. We do not know if it was the bearing and address of the Pope alone, or whether it was also the military situation which induced the barbarian leader to stop short of marching on Rome and visiting upon it still more dreadful woes than Genseric, the Vandal, would a few years later. The people of Rome loudly praised the deed of Leo and then soon forgot it. When the anniversary of the rescue came the Pope preached to only a few faithful. The mob was satisfied with its Pope so long as the mills on the Janiculum saw to it that no one went to the circus hungry. Leo is remembered, however, primarily as the saviour of Rome. The legend which says that the Prince of the Apos- tles appeared girded with a sword when Leo and Attila met, has been immortalized by Raphael in the frescoes of the Vatican. They reflect the conception which at heart the Pontifex had of his activities. He knew that he was the agent of the eternal Peter. He called his See a place of trembling responsibility; and if he also had a dark awareness of the future he sundered the honour and sacredness of the office from the worthiness or unworthiness of its custodians.
After Leo's death a century of bitter conflict passed over Rome, The Germans secured control of Italy. Ottocar, the Herculean Scyth- ian, exiled Romulus, the pretty, weeping boy who could term him- self the last Emperor of the West, to the ancient Lucullian estate on the slopes of the Mysenium (476). He then made himself king, and remained in office until 495 when Theodoric struck him down at a feast of reconciliation in Ravenna. The King of the Goths made the first great attempt to weld Germanic and Roman natures into a unity, the foundation of which was to be the superior Roman culture. The thirty years of his reign and the sixty years of his East-Gothic kingdom brought the Papacy face to face with a situation not unlike that of a sailor caught between Scylla and Charybdis. When the Patriarch Acasius of Constantinople favoured the teachings of the Monophy- sites, the first great schism between the Church of Rome and the East was at hand. After a peaceful understanding with the Arian Theo- doric, Pope Gelasius proved himself a master of the Emperor of By-
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