"Attila shouted that he would have crucified him and given him as food to the birds." ~ Priscus and the Roman Embassy to the Huns of AD 448

The Roman Embassy to Attila by Cecila Lawrence, as it appears on the cover of
Given's Fragmentary History of Priscus. 

Much of our detailed knowledge of Attila and the Huns comes from one relatively obscure source, the late 5th century History of Priscus. It’s probable that you’ve never heard of Priscus because his history was considered lost after about the 10th century AD. All that survives of it are fragments that later historians have recovered from other ancient and medieval sources that incorporated or paraphrased certain passages of interest. Excerpts from Priscus may be found embedded within works such as the Gothic History of Jordanes, the Histories of Procopius, the works of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the Suda, the History of John of Antioch, and several others.

Priscus possessed such in depth knowledge about the Huns because he had a personal encounter with Attila himself. In AD 448 or 449, Priscus was part of an embassy to the Huns sent by the Emperor Theodosius II and his right-hand eunuch, Chrysaphius. At that time, Attila was threatening both the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and both halves were making every possible attempt to pacify the barbarian and his pillaging horde. In fact, Chrysaphius and Theodosius had made a secret pact with one of Attila’s leading advisors, Edekon by name, to make sure that Attila rested in peace—for good. Unbeknownst to them, however, Edekon had revealed everything to Attila, and the King of the Huns was well prepared to deal with the potentially treacherous Roman embassy when it arrived.

Priscus has left a fascinating account of his visit to the Huns and his initial meeting with Attila. Following is an excerpt from the Fragmentary History of Priscus as translated by John Given, detailing the opening phase of what must have been a very frightening encounter:

You may also listen to the excerpt at the video above. 

FRAGMENT 8: From the Excerpts on Romans’ Embassies to Foreigners of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos

After the eunuch Chrysaphius urged Edekon to kill Attila, Emperor Theodosius and the magister Martialios decided, as they discussed the events, to dispatch as ambassadors to Attila not only Bigilas but also Maximinos. They also decided that Bigilas, as a pretense, should keep occupying the translator’s post and should do whatever Edekon thought best, and Maximinos, since he knew nothing of their plans, should deliver the emperor’s letter....

With earnest entreaty, Maximinos persuaded me to accompany him on this embassy. And so, closely following the road alongside the barbarians, we reached Serdica, a thirteen days’ journey from Constantinople for a lightly armed man. There, as we settled into our quarters, we thought it would be a good idea to invite Edekon and his barbarian companions to a feast. We bought sheep and cows from the locals, slaughtered them and made our meal. At the height of the banquet, when the barbarians were extolling Attila and we the emperor, Bigilas said it was not right to juxtapose a god and a man—meaning by “man” Attila and by “god” Theodosius. The Huns were agitated and, their temperatures rising little by little, grew angry. We turned the conversation to other topics and appeased their anger with friendliness...

Arriving at Naissos, we found the city bereft of people because it had been overturned by the enemy, though there were some people in the sacred lodgings who were suffering from diseases. We camped a little bit upriver in a clearing, since the bank was everywhere covered with the bones of war casualties...

After passing the night, we traveled from the region of Naissos to the Istros River....After we crossed the Istros and traveled about seventy stades with the barbarians, we were forced to wait on a plain so that Edekon’s men could inform Attila of our arrival. The barbarians stayed with us and acted as our guides. As we were taking our dinner in the late afternoon we heard the rumble of horses coming toward us. Two Scythian men arrived and ordered us to go to Attila. First, though, we asked them to join us for dinner. They dismounted and we sumptuously entertained them. On the next day they led us along the road. Around the ninth hour of the day we reached Attila’s tents (and there were many tents there). We wanted to pitch ours on the crest of a hill, but the barbarians who met us prevented it, since Attila’s tent was on lower ground.

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Once we settled down where the Scythians wanted, Edekon, Orestes, Skottas and some other select men came and asked what our embassy was eager to procure. We expressed our confusion at the senseless question and kept looking at one another, but they continued to trouble us for an answer. When we said that the emperor bade us to speak to Attila and to no one else, Skottas replied angrily that their order was from their leader; they would not have come to us out of their own desire to meddle. We said that it was not customary for ambassadors to be questioned by intermediaries about why they had come without their meeting nor even seeing the parties to whom they had been sent. This, we said, was not unknown even to the Scythians, who often sent ambassadors to the emperor. It was necessary that we receive identical treatment; otherwise we would not disclose the embassy’s purpose. So we spoke, and they withdrew to Attila.

Again they returned, though without Edekon, repeated to us all the reasons for which we had come on the embassy, and ordered us to go away by the quickest route possible unless we could name anything else. We were still more mystified by these words since it was not easy to see how decisions made by the emperor in secret had become clearly known. We believed that it was to our benefit to answer nothing further about the embassy unless we gained access to Attila. So we said it was their leader who asked whether we came to negotiate the things listed by the Scythians or other matters too; we would not discuss it with anyone other than him. They immediately ordered us to leave....

At this point, Priscus goes off on a slight tangent, explaining that Bigilas was insistent on meeting with Attila, boasting that if he would be able to meet with him, he would easily persuade him to make peace. It is not clear that Priscus or anyone else among the Romans knew at this point that the true purpose of the embassy was to arrange the assassination of Attila. Priscus explains, however, that unbeknownst to Bigilas, the plot had already been revealed to Attila by Edekon.

Priscus continues:

We had already loaded our baggage onto the pack animals and were attempting—out of necessity, at nighttime—to begin our journey, when some of the barbarians came and said Attila told us to remain because of the late hour. To the place from which we were getting ready to set out, some men brought us a cow and some river-caught fish sent by Attila. Then, after dining, we turned to sleep. When day came, we thought that the barbarian would reveal some kind, pleasant news.  Once again, however, he sent the same men, advising us to go away unless we had something to say beyond what they already knew. We said no and began preparing for the journey, although Bigilas vehemently argued we should say that we had more to say.

Seeing Maximinos very dejected, I went out with Roustikios since he knew the barbarians’ language fluently. (He had come with us to Scythia not on the embassy, but for some business with Constantius, Attila’s Italian secretary, whom Aetius, the Western Roman general, had sent.) I came to Skottas—Onegesios was not present at the time— and, addressing him through the translator Roustikios, I said that he would receive numerous gifts from Maximinos if he helped him get access to Attila. The embassy, I said, would benefit not only the Romans and the Huns but also Onegesios, since the emperor wanted him to come and mediate the nations’ differences, and he would receive magnificent gifts when he went. Since Onegesios was away, I said, he needed to support us, and more his brother, in pursuit of this good business. I said we knew Attila followed his guidance too, but we would not firmly believe the reports about him unless we came to know his power through experience. He replied that no one any longer doubted Attila deemed his words and deeds equal to his brother’s. And he immediately mounted his horse and rode to Attila’s tent.

I returned to Maximinos, who with Bigilas was perplexed and at a loss regarding the recent events. I repeated what I said to Skottas and what I heard from him, and said that we needed to prepare the gifts for the barbarian and to calculate what we would say to him. Both of them leapt up (they happened to be lying in the grass), praised my actions and called back those who had already departed with the pack animals. They considered how to address Attila and how to give him the emperor’s gifts as well as what Maximinos had brought for him. As we were worrying about these things, Attila summoned us through Skottas. And so at last we came to Attila’s tent, which was guarded by a barbarian multitude arrayed in a circle.

When we reached the entrance, we found Attila seated on a wooden chair. Maximinos approached, as the rest of us stood a short distance from the seat, and he greeted the barbarian. Giving him the emperor’s letter, he said that the emperor prayed that he and those around him were safe. Attila replied that the Romans would have what they desired for him. He turned his attention straight to Bigilas, called him a shameless beast and asked why he wanted to come to him, considering that he knew his and Anatolios’s peacetime agreement that no ambassadors should come to him until all fugitives had been surrendered to the barbarians. Bigilas said that there was not a single Scythian fugitive among the Romans; those who had been there had been surrendered. Growing angrier and reviling him all the more, Attila shouted that he would have crucified him and given him as food to the birds, if he did not think inflicting this penalty on his shamelessness and on the effrontery of his words would violate sacred diplomatic law. There were, he said, fugitives of their race among the Romans—many of them—whose names, which had been recorded on papyrus, he ordered the secretaries to read out.

When they had gone through <all the> absent men, he ordered Bigilas to depart without a moment’s delay. He would send Eslas with him too, he said, to tell the Romans they should send him all the barbarian fugitives, from the time of Karpileon (the son of Aetius, the Western Roman general), who had lived as a hostage at his court. He would not allow his own subjects to fight against him, although they were incapable of helping anyone who trusted them to protect his land. What city, he asked, or what fortress had they saved, once he himself had begun a siege? He told us to return again after we had repeated his demands about the fugitives and to say whether the Romans wanted to surrender them or undertake war on their behalf. He had earlier told Maximinos to stay, so that he might reply to the emperor’s letter through him, and so he permitted us to present the gifts Maximinos was carrying and to withdraw.

We presented the gifts and retired into our tent, where we reviewed what had been said. Bigilas was amazed how Attila angrily reviled him, even though he seemed gentle and kind to him on his previous embassy. I expressed the fear that some of the barbarians who had feasted with us in Serdica had made Attila hostile to him by reporting that he called the Roman emperor a god but Attila a man. Maximinos thought that was right, since he was <not> a partner in the eunuch’s conspiracy against the barbarian. Bigilas was doubtful and seemed to me at a loss to explain why Attila had reviled him. He thought, as he later told us, that neither the events in Serdica nor the details of the plot had been reported to Attila, because, on the one hand, no one else from the group, he thought, was bold enough to speak with Attila due to the fear that governed them all; on the other hand Edekon, he thought, would keep his silence completely because of his oaths and the uncertainty of the deed, in fear that he himself too, since he was a participant in such plans, would lose his favored status and suffer death as punishment. [Given, Fragmentary History of Priscus, pages 47-55]

What happens next is perhaps even more intriguing. Later, Priscus would meet a former Roman citizen who had been taken captive by the Huns. This man would claim that life as a prisoner among the Huns was superior to life as a Roman. His debate with Priscus on this topic is perhaps the most famous of the surviving fragments of Priscus’s History and well worth reading. I have discussed this debate in a previous post: "Romans are easily killed in war because they rely on others for safety" ~ Priscus and the notion of Romans voluntarily becoming Huns.

"Romans are easily killed in war because they rely on others for safety" ~ Priscus and the notion of Romans voluntarily becoming Huns

The Roman Embassy to Attila by Cecilia Lawrence.
Priscus is one of the men in the background.

Yesterday, an interesting article appeared in the Daily Mail with a slightly revisionist take on Attila and his Huns, carrying the headline: How Roman farmers deserted the Empire's modern charms for the simple life of the cone-headed Huns. A similar article also appeared in the Washington Post yesterday entitled: Ancient Romans depicted Huns as barbarians. Their bones tell a different story.

The premise presented in the article is that some Roman frontier farmers voluntarily gave up their status as Roman citizens to join the Huns because of "a more relaxed lifestyle and tastier diet." The article cites Dr. Susanne Hakenbeck from Cambridge University’s Department of Archaeology who says: "Far from being a clash of cultures, alternating between lifestyles may have been an insurance policy in unstable political times."

I don't doubt that Dr. Hakenbeck's opinion has been simplified for publication in the Daily Mail and WaPo and admittedly, I have not yet read her article in PLOS. But what is not explained in the news articles is that those living in the frontier provinces of Pannonia, Illyricum and Thrace in the 4th through 6th centuries AD were a mish-mash of Romans, Greeks, native Thracians, and various fully and semi-civilized former barbarians including Goths, Alans, Heruls, and others. All of these Germanic tribes were very familiar with the Huns, having been pushed by them out of the central Asian steppe in the mid-4th century AD. Indeed, much of Atilla's patchwork empire was peopled by these subject tribes. Thus, it would not be surprising that a Gothic farmer from Thrace (particularly a young man) might become tired of the settled Roman system with its laws and taxes and opt for the "ravage and relax / plunder and party" system favored by the Huns and, incidentally, by the Gothic tribes living outside of the empire at the time.

Later in the article, Dr. Hakenbeck hypothesizes about the possibility that "citizens at the edge of Rome’s empire were drawn to the Hun lifestyle, just as some nomads took to a more settled way of life." She blames the lack of documentary evidence to support this hypothesis on the "bad press" that the Huns received from their more civilized neighbors. While that sounds dangerously like drawing assumptions from a lack of evidence, in fact, Dr. Hakenbeck cites a tantalizing bit of documentation for this trend. She describes an eye-witness account recorded by the 5th century Roman historian, Priscus, with a Roman citizen who lived among the Huns.

"The merchant was freed, but he was enjoying his life there and didn’t want to go back. The Roman emissary tried to persuade him to go back, but the guy said: ‘Why, I don’t have to pay taxes, and I’ve a nice life.’ The merchant also said of the Huns, ‘they live in inactivity, enjoying what they have got, and not at all, or very little, harassed."

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This anecdote is drawn directly from The Fragmentary History of Priscus, a lost ancient history that has been pieced back together centuries later from long quotations that have come down to us in other sources. But perhaps more intriguing than the above statement from this Roman-turned-Hun is the list of grievances that he launches at Priscus with regard to his former country. If one closes his eyes while reading this, these words from 1,600 years ago sound hauntingly like a condemnation of the modern post-Christian West:

"Romans are easily killed because they rely on others for safety. Because of their tyrants, not everyone carries arms, and those who do bear arms are in still more peril due to the cowardice of generals who undermine war efforts. What happens in peace is even more painful than wartime troubles because of the burdensome tribute [tax] collection and unprincipled men’s abuses, since laws are not established equally. If a criminal belongs to the upper class, he does not pay the penalty for injustice; but if he is poor, with no experience in legal affairs, he awaits his penalty under law—unless he loses his life prior to the decision." [Taken from The Fragmentary History of Priscus, pg. 63]

Also left out of the Daily Mail article is how this fascinating conversation wrapped up. Priscus remonstrated with the Roman-turned-Hun and gives an able defense of the Roman system. The man's response to Priscus's words is surprising:

“In tears he said that the laws [of the Romans] were noble and the Roman constitution good, but the rulers, since they do not think like rulers of old, had corrupted it.” [Taken from The Fragmentary History of Priscus, pg. 65]

The tears make this poor fellow sound very much like a victim of Stockholm Syndrome who, as a former captive of the Huns, is now trying to make the best of a bad situation. Priscus tells us that the man was originally a wealthy merchant, but when his city of Viminakion on the Danube came under the control of the Huns, he was stripped of his possessions and given to one of the Hun chieftains as spoils. So this man, at least, didn't migrate to Atilla's empire of his own volition. He was one of the tens or hundreds of thousands of Roman civilians who were swept up by Hun raiding parties as slaves when the Roman defenses along the Danube collapsed in the mid-5th century. Earlier in his history, Priscus describes the scene of Naissos [modern day Niš in Serbia], a large town in Illyricum that was devastated by the Huns in the invasion of AD 441:

"Arriving near Naissos, we found the city bereft of people because it had been overturned by the enemy, though there were some people in the sacred lodgings who were suffering from diseases. We camped a little upriver in a clearing, since the bank was everywhere covered with the bones of war casualties." [Taken from The Fragmentary History of Priscus, pg. 49]

It should be kept in mind that Naissos was just one of the many cities in the Roman Danuban provinces destroyed by Attila. For a full account of the utter annihilation wrought by Attila and his Huns, read The Fragmentary History of Priscus as translated by John Given -- a truly fascinating ancient document.

I salute Dr. Hakenbeck for calling attention to this intriguing and often neglected period of history.

Roman villa in Gaul sacked by the Huns by Georges Rochegrosse (1910)