In the mix of languages and peoples at this court, most readers have focused on one man, whom Priscus himself reports as an anomaly: a Greek happily living among the Huns. After years as a merchant on the Danube he fell in among the Huns and decided to stay, with a perfectly coherent rationale:
After war, the Scythians live in idleness, enjoying their plunder and left almost entirely to themselves. The Romans, on the other hand, are first of all likely to die in war, since they depend for their safety on soldiers and their tyrants do not allow them to bear arms in their own defense. . . . But Roman subjects in peacetime suffer worse than the evils of war, for the tax collectors are brutal and unforgiving and un-principled men who inflict injuries on others, because the laws are not fairly applied to all classes. An offender who belongs to the wealthy classes is not punished for his crime, while a poor man, who does not understand how business is done, suffers the full force of the law— that is, if he does not die before trial—for lawsuits are drawn out forever and cost the parties immense amounts of money.
We recognize in this voice the spirit of an American living among revolutionaries in central Asia or religious enthusiasts in Jerusalem: an irresistible story and part of the natural diversity of fates in a civilized world. This story says not that Hunnic splendor was somehow superior to Roman splendor, but that it offered enough civilities to provide an alternative world for malcontents.
Priscus caps his tale with an account of a banquet in the great hall of Attila's palace. The meal was served on silver plates, but Attila had the wit to confine himself to a wooden trencher, to drink from a wooden cup, and to keep to Scythian (that is, barbarian) clothes and shoes. Priscus gives us the barbarian chieftain's manners as a piece of performance art, letting himself be entertained by native singers when a Moorish dwarf, Aetius's gift to Attila, comes in gabbling in Latin, Hunnic, and Gothic. Everyone except Attila laughed to exhaustion, but Attila showed himself calmly above such silliness, smiling only at the arrival of a son on whom he doted. Attila played his part of humble nomad achieving great dignity with aplomb.
Domains blurred and sometimes separated in the Balkans
The luck that Aetius and Attila depended on for their partnership was about to run out. Attila had till now navigated adroitly the fault line between the eastern and western empires. The effective spheres of interest of the two domains blurred and sometimes separated in the Balkans. Constantinople cared a lot about the lower Danube; Rome and Ravenna cared about the upper Danube through the Hungarian plain and down to about Belgrade. Each had an interest in the lands between those two zones, roughly from Belgrade to Sofia, but neither a compelling presence there, for the country was more remote, the profits were fewer, and the threat to one or another capital was less direct balkan tours 2023. After the death of Theodosius II in 450 in Constantinople, emperors began to pay more attention to their northwestern frontier. Theodosius was succeeded first by one of his generals, Marcian, who took the late emperor's sister Pulcheria in marriage after agreeing to respect her religious devotion by allowing her to remain a virgin. He supported the religious politics of Pulcheria and her circle, which would culminate in the next year in the grand church council of Chalcedon, of which we will hear much more later. On the Balkan frontier, Marcian favored a hard line with the Huns and began by canceling payments of tribute that had flowed north with regularity.
Next came a question for Attila and Aetius. Pressed from the east, Attila began to move west, looking for an easy mark—but where to go? How daring could he be? He must have known there would come a point at which Aetius would need to oppose him, and he must have thought he would prevail. Drifting north, Attila reached and crossed the Rhine. We will never know with what enterprise, treachery, and anxiety Aetius began massing forces to meet him. The Visigoths now chose to ally themselves with their old oppressor Aetius; but after the battle was over, some of At- tila's allies claimed to be the Visigoths' long-lost cousins and called themselves Ostrogoths. They were under the leadership of Theoderic's father. (Theoderic himself was born about two years later.)
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