names of many others, her kinswomen and contemporaries, Pulcheria,
Eudocia, Eudoxia, and Honoria, whose influence appears, in the pages
of the Byzantine historians, to have largely determined the destinies of
their age. “It is indeed," writes Gregorovius, “a remarkable historic
phenomenon, that in periods of decadence some female figure generally
rises into prominence”; and Professor Bury has also remarked that the
influence of women was a natural result of the new mode of palatial life—a result which is obviously apparent in the attribution of the title of
Augusta to Eudoxia in the East and to Placidia in the West. Yet one
cannot but feel that the Byzantine historians have been led by a certain
“feminism,” if it may be so called, which is characteristic of their
historiography, to attribute to women, at any rate as regards the
West, an excessive influence on the politics of the period. The fifth
century was the age of the erotic novel—of Daphnis and Chloe, of
Leucippe and Cleitophon; and it would almost appear as if Byzantine historians had infused into their history the eroticism of contemporary
novels.[1] It is therefore permissible to doubt whether Honoria was
really responsible for the attack of Attila upon the West, or Eudoxia
for the sack of Rome by Gaiseric : whether Olympiodorus’ account of
the relations of Honorius and Placidia after the death of Const&ntius is
not a play of fancy, and the story given by Joannes Antiochenus[2] and
Procopius of the seduction of the wife of Maximus by Valentinian III, which led Maximus to compass his death, is not equally fanciful.
The figure of Attila owes much of its fascination to the vivid descriptions which Priscus gives of his court and Jordanes of the great battle of the Mauriac plain; and the Nibelungenlied has added the attraction of legend to the appeal of history. Attila has, indeed, his significance in the history of the world. It matters little that he was vanquished in one of the so-called “decisive battles of the world”: if he had been the victor on the Mauriac plain, and had lived for twenty years afterwards, instead of two, he would none the less have fallen at last, if only the allies who stood together in that battle had continued their alliance. The real significance of Attila lies in the fact, that the pressure of his Huns forced the Romans and the Teutons to recognise that the common interest of civilisation was at stake, and thus drove them to make the great alliance, on which the future progress of the world depended. The fusion of Romans and Teutons, of which the marriage of Ataulf and Placidia, as it is described in the pages of Olympiodorus, may seem to be a harbinger, is cemented in the bloodshed of the Mauriac plain.
- ↑ Most striking is the fragment of Malchus (Müller, F. H. G. IV. p. 117) describing the armour of Harmatius and Zenonis. It reads like the passage in Dante which tells the story of Paolo and Francesca.
- ↑ The fragment of Joannes Antiochenus in which this story occurs (Müller, F. H. G. iv. p. 614) contradicts another fragment, in which a totally different version is given; and it is rejected as spurious by Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, i. p. 181 n. 4.
