"He slew his gallant twin With inexpiable sin,"
deliberately and in compliance with the warnings of supernatural powers. The shedding of a brother's blood was believed to have been the price at which the founder of Rome had purchased from destiny her twelve centuries of existence.
We may imagine, therefore, with what terror in this the twelve hundredth year after the foundation of Rome the inhabitants of the Roman Empire must have heard the tidings that the royal brethren Attila and Bleda had founded a new capital on the Danube, which was designed to rule over the ancient capital on the Tiber; and that Attila, like Romulus, had consecrated the foundations of his new city by murdering his brother; so that for the new cycle of centuries then about to commence, dominion had been bought from the gloomy spirits of destiny in favor of the Hun by a sacrifice of equal awe and value with that which had formerly obtained it for the Roman.
It is to be remembered that not only the pagans but also the Christians of that age knew and believed in these legends and omens, however they might differ as to the nature of the superhuman agency by which such mysteries had been made known to mankind. And we may observe with Herbert, a modern learned dignitary of our Church, how remarkably this augury was fulfilled; for "if to the twelve centuries denoted by the twelve vultures that appeared to Romulus we add, for the six birds that appeared to Remus, six _lustra_ or periods of five years each, by which the Romans were wont to number their time, it brings us precisely to the year 476, in which the Roman Empire was finally extinguished by Odoacer."
An attempt to assassinate Attila, made, or supposed to have been made, at the instigation of Theodoric the Younger, the emperor of Constantinople, drew the Hunnish armies, in 445, upon the Eastern Empire, and delayed for a time the destined blow against Rome. Probably a more important cause of delay was the revolt of some of the Hunnish tribes to the north of the Black Sea against Attila, which broke out about this period, and is cursorily mentioned by the Byzantine writers. Attila quelled this revolt, and having thus consolidated his power, and having punished the presumption of the Eastern Roman Emperor by fearful ravages of his fairest provinces, Attila, in 450 A.D., prepared to set his vast forces in motion for the conquest of Western Europe. He sought unsuccessfully by diplomatic intrigues to detach the king of the Visigoths from his alliance with Rome, and he resolved first to crush the power of Theodoric, and then to advance with overwhelming power to trample out the last sparks of the doomed Roman Empire.