Attila the Hun: A Barbarian King and the Fall of Rome by John Man

Author:John Man [Man, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Ancient, Rome, Huns
ISBN: 9780593054215
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 2005-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

6

IN THE COURT OF KING

ATTILA

ATTILA LIVES AND BREATHES TODAY BECAUSE OF ONE MAN, a civil servant, scholar and writer: Priscus, the only person to have met Attila and to have left a detailed record of him. It is largely from Priscus that we get a sense of his true character – less the beastly barbarian, more the revered leader with mixed qualities: ruthless, ambitious, manipulative, swift to anger, even swifter to pretend it, acquisitive for his people but personally austere, terrifying in opposition, generous in friendship. It is the portrait of a man who almost has it in him to change the course of Europe’s history.

For Priscus, a bookish 35-year-old with a flair for writing, this was an absolute gift of a story – a visit to the empire’s greatest challenger, court intrigues, an assassination plot, a journey full of incident and tension, deception and life-threatening revelation. These bits of Priscus’ Byzantine History – eight volumes originally, most of it lost – would make a good thriller, which is why his account was quoted so thoroughly by others and has survived. Priscus slips easily from history into narrative. He lacks a flair for the details of daily life, military matters and geography, because they did not loom large in the literary tradition of his classical models, but he has a novelist’s feel for relationships, because diplomacy was his main interest. His point of view is not all-seeing, not quite eye-of-God, because he does not enter minds, even concealing his own emotional responses. He is good on structure, though. He reveals up front what he could not have known at the time, but learned later. As a result, we know of the assassination plot, although he doesn’t until the very end. His whole journey is undertaken in ignorance, which injects a modern undertow of tension. Who knows what, exactly? When will all be revealed? How is he going to survive?

What follows is a version of Priscus’ account. The narrative technique is modernized by putting much of Priscus’ indirect speech into the form of direct quotation. I have added some details from other sources and brought others forward when it seems we should know them sooner. But the structure, the characters and many of the direct quotes are in his words, taken from the 1981–3 translation by R. C. Blockley (for details see the bibliography). Quotations from Priscus and other original sources appear in this different typeface to distinguish them from my own words.

* * *

The story starts with the arrival of Attila’s envoys at the court of Theodosius II in Constantinople in the spring of 449. The eminent team is led by Edika, the ex-Skirian leader and now Attila’s loyal ally, who has performed outstanding deeds of war. Orestes, a Roman from the strip of land south of the Danube now under Hun control, is the second senior member of the party, with a small retinue of his own, perhaps two or three assistants. Orestes, though rich and influential, is one of Attila’s team of administrators.

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