Embassy of Maximinus to Attila

The embassy of Maximinus was sent by the eastern emperor Theodosius II to Attila in 449.^[1] Its leader knew nothing of its other purpose. The embassy was to carry the gold for a plot to murder Attila. The historian Priscus went with it. He wrote the fullest surviving account of the Huns, from what he saw at Attila’s court.^[2]^[3]

The plot

Attila’s envoy Edeco had come to Constantinople with Orestes, his Roman secretary. They brought demands about the fugitives, the land south of the Danube and the market at Naissus. The eunuch Chrysaphius, the most powerful man at court, persuaded Edeco to promise that he would kill Attila on his return. Edeco was to receive fifty pounds of gold, to be paid later. Theodosius approved the plan with Martialius, the master of the offices. They decided to send the interpreter Bigilas to arrange the payment. With him they sent Maximinus as envoy, a man of high birth and close to the emperor, who was told nothing.^[4] Maximinus carried a letter. It said that Attila was not to invade Roman territory against the treaties, and that seventeen fugitives were being sent, the last the emperor had. Orally he was to say two things. The emperor would not send envoys of higher rank, and Onegesius should come to settle the disputes. Maximinus persuaded Priscus to go with him.^[5]

The journey to the Danube

At Serdica, thirteen days from Constantinople for a fast traveller, the Romans gave a dinner for Edeco and the Huns. The barbarians praised Attila, and the Romans praised their emperor. Bigilas said that it was not right to compare a man and a god, meaning Attila by the man and Theodosius by the god. The Huns grew angry, and the talk was turned. Maximinus gave Edeco and Orestes silk garments and Indian gems.^[6]^[7] The enemy had destroyed Naissus. It was deserted except for a few sick people in the ruins of the churches, and the river bank was full of the bones of men killed in the war.^[6] The commander of the forces in Illyricum, Agintheus, handed over five more fugitives.^[8]

Barbarian ferrymen took the envoys over the Danube in boats hollowed from single trees. The boats had been prepared for a crowd of Huns whom Attila was sending across, as he said, to hunt in Roman territory. In truth he was preparing war over the fugitives.^[9]^[10]

At Attila’s tents

At about the ninth hour they reached Attila’s many tents. Edeco, Orestes, Scottas and other leading men asked the purpose of the embassy. The Romans refused to speak to anyone but Attila. The men came back without Edeco. They recited the Romans’ secret instructions to them and ordered them to leave. Edeco had revealed the plot to Attila, with the sum of gold that was to be sent. Priscus could not tell whether Edeco had agreed with the eunuch only in pretence, or feared that Orestes would report his secret talks in Constantinople.^[11] Priscus went to Scottas, the brother of Onegesius, through the interpreter Rusticius. He won an audience for the envoys with a promise of gifts.^[12]

They found Attila sitting on a wooden seat, his tent surrounded by a ring of guards. When Maximinus wished him and his people well, he answered: “May it be to the Romans as they wish it for me.” He called Bigilas a shameless beast. He said that he would have crucified him and given him to the vultures if he did not respect the rights of envoys. He had his secretaries read out a list of fugitives still among the Romans. He sent Bigilas back with Eslas to demand every fugitive who had come over since the time when Carpilio, the son of Aetius, had been a hostage with him.^[13]^[14] Then Attila forbade the Romans to buy anything but food, so that Bigilas would have no excuse for bringing gold.^[15]

Onegesius was away. Attila had sent him with his eldest son to the Akatziri, whose senior king Kouridachos had called him in against the other kings when Theodosius tried to win them with gifts. Attila had conquered them and meant to make his son their king.^[16]

The journey north

The envoys travelled with Attila towards the north. On the way Attila stopped at a village to marry the daughter of Eskam, “although he had many other wives, the laws of the Scythians permitting it”. The Romans crossed many navigable rivers, in dugouts and on rafts that the barbarians carried on wagons. After the Danube the largest were the Drecon, the Tigas and the Tiphesas. The villages supplied millet instead of grain and medos instead of wine. For the servants they supplied a barley drink that the barbarians called kamos.^[17]^[18] One night a storm overturned their tent and scattered their baggage in a marsh. The village where they took refuge belonged to one of the widows of Bleda. She sent them food and women, as a mark of honour among the Scythians. In return they gave her silver bowls, red skins, Indian pepper and dates.^[19]

After seven more days they met an embassy of the western Romans. It consisted of the count Romulus, Promotus, governor of Noricum, and the officer Romanus. With them came Constantius, an Italian whom Aetius had sent to Attila as secretary, and Tatulus, the father of Orestes. They had come about golden vessels from the church of Sirmium. During the siege of that city a Gaulish secretary of Attila and Bleda, also named Constantius, had received them from the bishop and pawned them with Silvanus, a banker at Rome. Attila and Bleda had crucified that Constantius for suspected treason. Attila now demanded Silvanus as a thief of his property.^[20]^[21]

Attila’s residence

The envoys came at last to a very large village. Attila’s houses there were built of logs and planed boards inside a wooden enclosure with towers, made for ornament rather than defence. Onegesius’s house stood next to it. Near it stood the stone bath that a captive from Sirmium had built for him.^[22]^[21] Rows of girls came to meet Attila as he rode in. They walked under long white linen sheets and sang Scythian songs. Onegesius’s wife brought him food and wine, which he ate on horseback from a silver table held up by his men.^[22]^[23] Some scholars place the residence beyond the Tisza, in the Hungarian plain. The rivers Priscus names do not allow a closer identification.^[24]

Outside the gate of Onegesius, a man in Scythian dress with his head shaved round greeted Priscus in Greek. He was a Greek merchant of Viminacium, captured when the city fell. He had won his freedom by fighting for Onegesius against the Romans and the Akatziri, and he considered his new life better than his old. Life under the Romans, he said, was ruined by taxes, by laws that did not bind the powerful, and by having to pay to obtain justice. Priscus answered with a long defence of the Roman order. The Greek wept and said that the laws were good, but the officials were ruining the state.^[25]^[26] At the court, Priscus noted, the subjects spoke their own languages and also either Hunnic or Gothic, or Latin if they dealt with the Romans. Hardly anyone spoke Greek except captives from Thrace and the Illyrian coast.^[27]^[23]

Onegesius refused to come to Constantinople. He would not betray his master or prefer wealth among the Romans to slavery with Attila.^[28] Priscus brought gifts to Attila’s wife Kreka, whom he found among her maids embroidering cloths. He also saw Attila come out of his house with a grave face, rolling his eyes, to judge the disputes of those who came to him.^[29]^[30]

The western envoys on Attila’s power

While Priscus waited, the western envoy Romulus spoke of Attila. No one who had ever ruled in Scythia or elsewhere had achieved so much in so short a time. Attila ruled all Scythia and the islands of the Ocean. He exacted tribute from the Romans, and he was thinking of attacking the Persians. The road was known. Once, in a famine, the Huns under Basich and Kursich, leaders of the royal Scythians, had crossed a desert and a marsh and the mountains into Media. They had come back, pursued by a Persian army and with little booty, past a place where flame burns out of a rock by the sea.^[31] Constantiolus, a man from the part of Pannonia subject to Attila, feared that Attila would come back from Persia as master, not friend. For now Attila was content with the title of a Roman general and its pay. But he already said that the emperor’s generals were his slaves, while his own were the equals of emperors. His power would grow, as God had shown by bringing to light the sword of Mars.^[32]

Attila then named the envoys he would accept: Nomus, Anatolius or Senator, and no others. If the Romans refused, he would settle the disputes by arms.^[33]

The banquets

At the ninth hour Attila invited the Romans to a banquet. The cup-bearers handed them a cup at the threshold, as was the custom, to pray before sitting down. Attila lay on a couch in the middle of the hall. Onegesius sat on a chair to his right, the first place of honour. The Romans sat on the left, below the Hun noble Berichus. Attila’s eldest son sat on his father’s couch, far down at its end, his eyes on the ground out of respect. Each guest in turn rose and drank to Attila. Attila drank to each of them in the order of their seats.^[34]^[35]

The guests ate from silver dishes and drank from gold and silver cups. Attila ate only meat, from a wooden platter, and drank from a wooden cup. His dress was plain. Neither his sword, nor the fastenings of his shoes, nor his horse’s bridle were adorned with gold or stones, as the other Scythians’ were.^[36]^[35] When the torches were lit, two Scythians stood before Attila and sang songs they had made of his victories and his deeds in war. The old men wept. A madman made everyone laugh, and then the Moorish jester Zercon did, in a mixture of Latin, Hunnic and Gothic. Attila’s face did not change, except when his young son Ernas came in. Then he looked at him gently and drew him by the cheek. A guest who knew Latin told Priscus that seers had foretold that Attila’s race would fall and be restored by this boy.^[37]^[38]

On the next day Onegesius held a council of the leading men on Attila’s decisions. He had the letters to the emperor drawn up by his secretaries, among them Rusticius, a captive from Upper Moesia. Kreka invited the Romans to dinner at the house of Adamis, her steward. Every Hun present gave them a full cup. He embraced and kissed them and took the cup back.^[39] At a second banquet Attila’s paternal uncle Oebarsius sat on his couch. Attila asked that the emperor give his secretary Constantius the rich wife he had promised him, for Constantius had promised Attila money if he got her.^[40]

The return

After three more days the envoys were dismissed with gifts. Attila sent the noble Berichus, lord of many villages, back with them as his envoy. On the way they saw a Roman spy crucified and two slaves who had killed their masters hung up on timbers.^[41] Berichus was friendly while they crossed Scythia. After the Danube he turned hostile and took back the horse he had given Maximinus. In Constantinople he accused Maximinus of having spoken with contempt of the generals Areobindus and Aspar.^[42]

On the road the envoys met Bigilas going north. When he reached Attila he was seized with the gold he was bringing for Edeco. Attila called him a foul beast and threatened to have his son killed by the sword. Bigilas confessed everything that he, Edeco, the eunuch and the emperor had planned. Attila kept him in chains until his son brought fifty more pounds of gold for his release.^[43] He sent Orestes to Constantinople with the purse round his neck, to ask the eunuch before the emperor whether he recognised it. He also demanded Chrysaphius for punishment.^[44] The quarrel was settled in 450 by the embassy of Anatolius and Nomus.^[45]

Date and value

Priscus gives no year, only the days of the journey. The edition of his fragments and one English account date the embassy to 448.^[46]^[7] Two modern accounts date it to 449. One of them places it in the autumn of that year, because the settlement by Anatolius and Nomus must fall in the spring of 450.^[1]^[47]

Jordanes quotes Priscus on the crossing of the rivers and the wooden walls of Attila’s village.^[48] In one judgement, the history of the Huns would be lost without the fragments of Priscus. Other writers give isolated facts, and Priscus alone gives a history.^[3]

References

^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 124
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 7–8, p. 76–95
^ a b Thompson 1948, p. 12
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 7–8, p. 76–78
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 77–78
^ a b Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 78
^ a b Bury 1923, p. 279
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 78–79
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 79
^ Bury 1923, p. 279–280
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 79–80
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 80–81
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 81
^ Bury 1923, p. 280–281
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 82
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 82–83
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 83
^ Bury 1923, p. 281
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 84
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 84–85
^ a b Bury 1923, p. 282
^ a b Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 85
^ a b Bury 1923, p. 283
^ Thompson 1948, p. 221–222
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 86–88
^ Bury 1923, p. 283–285
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 86
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 88
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 89
^ Bury 1923, p. 285–286
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 89–90
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 90–91
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 91
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 91–92
^ a b Bury 1923, p. 287
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 92
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 92–93
^ Bury 1923, p. 287–288
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 93
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 93–94
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 94
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 94–95
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 95
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 12, p. 96–97
^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 13–14, p. 97–98
^ Müller 1851, p. 77
^ Thompson 1948, p. 219–221
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 178–179, p. 101

Sources

Priscus
Jordanes (after Priscus and Ammianus Marcellinus)

Literature

Karl Müller (ed.), Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, Bd. IV (darin: Menandri Protectoris fragmenta, griechisch mit lateinischer Übersetzung) (1851)
J. B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire from the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian, vol. I (1923)
Charles Christopher Mierow, The Gothic History of Jordanes in English Version, with an Introduction and a Commentary (1915)
Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973)
E. A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (1948)