The body of
Theodoric, pierced with honorable wounds, was discovered under a heap of
the slain; his subjects bewailed the death of their king and father; but
their tears were mingled with songs and acclamations, and his funeral
rites were performed in the face of a vanquished enemy.
The Goths, clashing their arms, elevated on a buckler his eldest son
Torismund, to whom they justly ascribed the glory of their success; and
the new King accepted the obligation of revenge as a sacred portion of
his paternal inheritance. Yet the Goths themselves were astonished by
the fierce and undaunted aspect of their formidable antagonist; and
their historian has compared Attila to a lion encompassed in his den and
threatening his hunters with redoubled fury. The kings and nations who
might have deserted his standard in the hour of distress were made
sensible that the displeasure of their monarch was the most imminent and
inevitable danger. All his instruments of martial music incessantly
sounded a loud and animating strain of defiance; and the foremost troops
who advanced to the assault were checked or destroyed by showers of
arrows from every side of the intrenchments.
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