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 ATTICUS HEEODES ATTIRET 95 mpved to Athens, where he spent 20 years and rendered many services to the, citizens, who raised statues in his honor. Retailed hy Sulla in 65 B. C., he resided in Rome, and was celebrated for his hospitality, numbering among his friends Hortensius, Pompey, Caesar, Brutus, and above all Cicero. He had no ambition, iiade a generous use of his great wealth, and during the civil wars was able to be on friendly terms with men of all parties. He starved himself to death to avoid other physical suffer- ings. He possessed a very extensive library, and employed his slaves to copy MSS., selling the copies. His annals, a general history ex- tending over 700 years, were highly prized by classical writers, but have not come down to us. His name has been preserved by the let- ters addressed to him by Cicero, and by a biography written by Cornelius Nepos. ATTICdS IIKUonilS, Tiberias Claudius a rich citizen of Athens, born about A. D. 104, died probably in 180. He opened a school of rhetoric at Athens and afterward at Rome, having Marcus Aurelius for one of his pupils. His speeches are^said to have excelled those of all contemporary orators, but none of them are now extant. He was consul in 143, and for a time administrator of the free towns of Asia. Having inherited an immense fortune, he adorned Athens with magnificent public buildings, constructed a theatre at Corinth, aqueducts at Olympia and Canusium, a race course at Delphi, and a bath at Thermopylfe, and restored several decayed cities of the Peloponnesus. ATTIKAMEGl ES, or Whitefish Indians, an Al- gonquin tribe residing inland back of Three Rivers, Canada, closely allied in language to the Kilistenons or Crees. They were noted for their singular care and veneration for the dead. War and disease swept them away about 1058. Father Jacques Buteux, the great mis- sionary of the tribe, was killed among them in May, 1652. ATTILA (Magyar, Etele ; Ger. Etzel), king of the Huns, died in 453 or 454. About 434, with Bleda, his brother, he succeeded Roas, his uncle, in the leadership of the nation, which then included or swayed the northern tribes from the Rhine to the Volga. The brothers threatened to invade the eastern empire, but Theodosius II. obtained peace by the surrender of territory south of the Danube and the pay- ment of an annual tribute. Attila assured the Huns that he had discovered the sword of the Scythian god of war, with which he was to procure for them the dominion of the world. Ho called himself the scourge of God, and his subjects looked on him with superstitious awe. In 444 he ordered the murder of his brother as a dictate of the divine will, and the fratricide was celebrated as a victory. He in- vaded the Persian dominions, but being defeated in Armenia, he turned toward the eastern em- pire. With an army of upward of half a mil- lion men, mostly cavalry, he overran Illyria and 69 VOL. ii. 7 all the region between the Black sea and the Adriatic. Theodosius II. was overpowered in three battles. Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece were devastated, and more than 70 of the most flourishing cities destroyed. Theodosius ob- tained peace again only by an enormous ran- som. About 451 Attila turned west toward Gaul, marched through Germany, crossed the Rhine, the Moselle, and the Seine, and en- camped before Orleans. The inhabitants, en- couraged by their bishop Anianus, resisted the first attacks of the assailants, and were soon relieved, on June 14, by the approach of the army of Aetius, the commander of the Ro- mans, with their allies the Visigoths under. Theodoric, the Franks under Meroveus, the Burgundians, the Alans, and other barbarians. Attila retired into Champagne, and took his stand in the Catalaunian plains where Chalons- sur-Marne is now situated, and there fought about the end of June the most murderous battle ever known in European history. (See AETIUS.) Attila was defeated, and recrossed the Rhine, but in the next year again assailed the empire, invading Italy. He destroyed Aquileia, Padua, Vicenza, Verona, and other cities, whose fugitives afterward founded Ven- ice ; pillaged Pavia and Milan, and established his camp at the confluence of the Mincio and the Po, near Mantua. Rome was saved by the personal mediation of Pope Leo I., who visited the barbarian in his camp, and is said to have awed him by his sacred character. The chron- iclers say the spirits of the apostles Peter and Paul appeared to him with menaces, a le- gend immortalized by Raphael. In July, 452, Attila, having concluded a truce, returned to the Danube, meditating for the next year a new invasion of the eastern empire, or, as some maintain, a return to Italy. But he died in his capital or camp in Pannonia, the night of his nuptials with the beautiful Ildico, whom he had married in addition to the many wives he already possessed. The courtiers found him in the morning dead, either through sudden ill- ness, or, as some suspected, through the treach- ery of Ildico, whose people, the Burgundians, had suffered much at his hands. His body was put in a coffin of iron, over which was one of silver, and a third of gold. He was buried se- cretly at night together with a mass of treas- ure and arms, and the prisoners who dug the grave were killed. He is also celebrated as a kind of national hero by the Hungarians. ATTIRET, Jean Denis, a French Jesuit and painter, born at Dole in 1702, died in Peking in 1768. He studied at Rome, and had already produced some good pictures when he entered the society of the Jesuits at Avignon. In 1737 he went to Peking, at the solicitation of the French Jesuit missionaries stationed there, and was employed by the emperor Kien Lung. He produced an immense number of paintings and drawings, mostly in water colors, accurate- ly depicting Chinese physiognomy, dress, and habits, as well as triumphs, festivals, and pro-