extermination against all who opposed or sought to escape from it.  He watched the national passions, the prejudices, the creeds, and the superstitions of the varied nations over which he ruled and of those which he sought to reduce beneath his sway:  all these feelings he had the skill to turn to his own account.  His own warriors believed him to be the inspired favorite of their deities, and followed him with fanatic zeal; his enemies looked on him as the preappointed minister of heaven’s wrath against themselves; and though they believed not in his creed, their own made them tremble before him.

In one of his early campaigns he appeared before his troops with an ancient iron sword in his grasp, which he told them was the god of war whom their ancestors had worshipped.  It is certain that the nomadic tribes of Northern Asia, whom Herodotus described under the name of Scythians, from the earliest times worshipped as their god a bare sword.  That sword-god was supposed, in Attila’s time, to have disappeared from earth; but the Hunnish King now claimed to have received it by special revelation.  It was said that a herdsman, who was tracking in the desert a wounded heifer by the drops of blood, found the mysterious sword standing fixed in the ground, as if it had darted down from heaven.  The herdsman bore it to Attila, who thenceforth was believed by the Huns to wield the Spirit of Death in battle, and their seers prophesied that that sword was to destroy the world.  A Roman, who was on an embassy to the Hunnish camp, recorded in his memoirs Attila’s acquisition of this supernatural weapon, and the immense influence over the minds of the barbaric tribes which its possession gave him.  In the title which he assumed we shall see the skill with which he availed himself of the legends and creeds of other nations as well as of his own.  He designated himself “ATTILA, Descendant of the Great Nimrod.  Nurtured in Engaddi.  By the grace of God, King of the Huns, the Goths, the Danes, and the Medes.  The Dread of the World.”

Herbert states that Attila is represented on an old medallion with a teraph, or a head, on his breast; and the same writer adds:  “We know, from the Hamartigenea of Prudentius, that Nimrod, with a snaky-haired head, was the object of adoration of the heretical followers of Marcion; and the same head was the palladium set up by Antiochus Epiphanes over the gates of Antioch, though it has been called the visage of Charon.  The memory of Nimrod was certainly regarded with mystic veneration by many; and by asserting himself to be the heir of that mighty hunter before the Lord, he vindicated to himself at least the whole Babylonian kingdom.