Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 3 (1897).djvu/488

 466 THE DECLINE AND FALL their king and father ; but their tears were mingled with songs and acclamations, and his funeral rites were performed in the face of a vanquished enemy. The Cxotlis, clashing their arms, elevated on a buckler his eldest son Torismond, to whom they justly ascribed the glory of their success ; and the new king accepted the obligation of revenge as a sacred portion of his paternal inheritance. Yet the Goths themselves were astonished by the fierce and undaunted aspect of their formidable antagonist ; and their historian has compared Attila to a lion encompassed in his den, and threatening his hunters with redoubled fury. The kings and nations, who might have deserted his standard in the hour of distress, were made sensible that the displeasure of their monarch was the most imminent and inevitable danger. All his instruments of martial music incessantly sounded a loud and animating strain of defiance ; and the foremost troops who advanced to the assault were checked, or desti'oyed, by showers of arrows from every side of the intrenchments. It was determined in a general council of war, to besiege the king of the Huns in his camp, to intercept his provisions, and to reduce him to the alternative of a disgraceful treaty or an unequal combat. But the impatience of the Barbarians soon disdained these cautious and dilatory measures ; and the mature policy of Aetius was apprehensive that, after the extirpation of the Huns, the republic would be oppressed by the pride and power of the Gothic nation. The patrician exerted the superior ascendant of authority and reason, to calm the passions which the son of Theodoric considered as a duty ; represented, with seeming affection, and real truth, the dangers of absence and delay ; and persuaded Torismond to disappoint, by his speedy return, the ambitious designs of his brothers, who might occupy the throne and treasures of Toulouse.^" After the departure of the Goths and the separation of the allied army, Attila was surprised at the vast silence that reigned over the plains of Chalons ; the suspicion of some hostile stratagem detained him several days within the circle of his waggons ; and his retreat beyond the Rhine confessed the last victory which was achieved in the name of the Western empire. Meroveus and his Franks, observing a ■•' Jornandes de Rebus Geticis, c. 41, p. 671. The policy of Aetius and the behaviour of Torismond are extremely natural ; and the patrician, according to Gregory of Tours (1. ii. c. 7, p. 163), dismissed the prince of the P'ranks, by suggesting to him a similar apprehension. The false Idatius ridiculously pretends that Aetius paid a clandestine nocturnal visit to the kings of the Huns and of the Visigoths ; from each of whom he obtained a bribe of ten thousand pieces of gold as the price of an undisturbed retreat.