Just as Honorius contrived the murder of Stilicho, so did Valentinian
contrive to rid himself of Aetius, and with his own hand, for
Valentinian stabbed him himself in his palace on the Palatine Hill in
Rome, towards the end of 454. Six months, however, had not gone by
when Aetius was avenged and Valentinian lay dead in the Campus Martius
stabbed by two soldiers of barbarian origin. Beside him, dead too, lay
the eunuch Heraclius. This was the vengeance of the friends of Aetius,
and of him who was to be emperor, Petronius Maximus, whose wife
Valentinian had ravished.

With Valentinian III., who had no children, the great line of
Theodosius came to an end both in the East and in the West, for
Pulcheria had died in 453. In Constantinople Marcian continued to rule
till 457, when he was succeeded by Leo I. the Thracian. In Rome he who
had so signally avenged himself, Petronius Maximus, a senator, sixty
years of age, reigned during seventy days in which he was rather a
prisoner than a monarch. During those seventy days, whether moved by
lust or revenge we know not, he attempted to make the widow of
Valentinian his wife. This brought all down, for Eudoxia, without a
friend in the world, followed the fatal example of Honoria and called
in the Vandal to her assistance. And when Genseric was on his way to
answer her from Carthage, the terrified City, by the hands of the
imperial servants and the soldiers, tore the emperor limb from limb
and flung what remained into the Tiber so that even burial was denied
him. But the Vandal came on, and in spite of Leo, as we know, sacked
the City and departed--to lose the mighty booty in the midst of the
sea.

What are we to say of the years which follow, and what are we to say
of those ghostly figures, which hover, always uncertainly and briefly,