Attila the Hun used to boast that where his horse had trod, the grass never grew again. Curiously enough, this closely echoes a comment by Lemmy, when he formed Motörhead. “We’re the kind of band that, if we moved in next door, your lawn would die.” However, while Lemmy and his leather-clad cohorts no doubt left a certain amount of untidiness behind them in hotel bedrooms on their various European tours – unmade beds, brimming ashtrays, empty cans of Special Brew and so forth – it could hardly compare with that of Attila, Scourge of God. Even 16 centuries later, his name continues to haunt the western imagination. Have you heard of Aquileia? In Roman times, it was one of the greatest cities in Italy. After Attila’s visit, you would barely know where it had stood – no more than a heap of stones, a terrible testament to his awesome destructiveness. Would he have treated Rome the same way, had he captured it? The consequences for western civilisation are barely imaginable. It might simply have come to an end.
As it was, much of the world was well and truly pitched into the Dark Ages: the only time in our history, so far, when history itself seems to have juddered to a halt, then collapsed backwards into myth. One moment, circa AD400, you have vast cities populated by elegant women and fussy bureaucrats, with street lighting, mains drainage, traffic regulations. By AD500, at least in Britain, the slate is wiped so clean, we hardly know what was going on. Mead halls in dark forests, horned warriors in bearskins, sorcery and sacrifice, Arthur and Beowulf, legends and ghosts – who knows? History is mute, and the irresponsible imagination rushes in to fill the gaps.
So many grand historical stories lose their lustre on closer examination. Agincourt was just a big mud wrestle between about 25 men, Wellington won his victory at Waterloo using mostly Dutch and Germans, Catherine the Great didn’t really die having sex with a horse, and so on. All very dry and disappointing. With Attila, however, the history lives up to the myth. This truly was an apocalyptic period that decided the fate of the world, populated by characters of Shakespearian ambition, passion, hubris and vengefulness.
With such richness to draw on, the surprise isn’t that there is a new television movie, but that there haven’t been far more. Hollywood’s last stab was Sign of the Pagan, back in 1954, with Jack Palance – Slavic high cheekbones, sardonic smile, biceps of steel – not at all bad as Attila. In Gareth Edwards’s version for the BBC, Rory McCann has a beefy presence in the title role, but ideally he should look Turkish-Mongolian. Tommy Lee Jones (Anglo-Cherokee) would be okay, if 20 years younger, or Charles Bronson (Lithuanian-Tatar), if still alive. But Edwards’s mini-film obviously didn’t have the budget of a Gladiator or a Lord of the Rings, and it’s an ingenious effort on a shoestring.
The history is solidly reliable, and the epic geographical scale of the story, from the limitless steppes of Scythia (Ukraine, more or less) to the high passes of the Carpathians, the mighty land walls of Constantinople to the “vasty fields of France”, are conjured credibly enough using only bits of Bulgaria, some of whose stunning but little-known scenery looks like “Monument Valley in a forest”, Edwards says. He added some techno-wizardry, working mostly in his bedroom. “My desk is right next to my bed. That was the cheapest bit to do.”
Compressing an entire century into an hour of screen time – and the most eventfully apocalyptic of all centuries, too, the 20th notwithstanding – obviously means leaving stuff out. CGI can work miracles with battle scenes, less so with plot and characterisation. The movie also rather underplays culture and religion, pressed for time as it is, and perhaps mindful of a modern audience. Yet when Attila and Aëtius finally faced each other at the titanic battle of the Catalaunian Fields, in eastern Gaul, AD451, with every nation from the Volga to the Atlantic under arms, what really took place was a battle between classical, Christian civilisation and its permanent obliteration. And, in the final act of this tragedy, both sides lost – mutually assured destruction. Attila’s furious assault on the West was brought to a bloody halt. He briefly invaded Italy the following year, visiting his vindictiveness on Aquileia and going slightly mad in the Palace of the Caesars, in Milan, but his power was broken. For the Romans, too, this was the last battle. After that, the western legions are heard of no more, wiped out to a man. Rome never fought again.
Yet out of the carnage were born the Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe. Rome was the mother who died in childbirth, you might say; and, like it or not, we are all her children. No civilisation is perfect, and Rome certainly wasn’t. But the alternative – the triumph of Attila – would have been so much worse. As it was, in AD476, the last emperor, a curly-haired boy called Romulus Augustulus (the irony of that name), was quietly deposed by the Gothic warlord Odoacer, who then declared himself king of Italy. The empire was at an end. Ancient prophecy had said Rome would endure 12 centuries plus six lustra, or 30 years. And Rome was founded in 753BC.
Never again would the emperor stand beneath his yellow parasol on the steps of the Capitoline to greet the legions returning south in triumph down the Flaminian Way. Never again would the sunlight dance on the bronze helmets of the cavalry as their horses champed on the Field of Mars, nor senators gossip and plot in the vast Baths of Caracalla, lounging over the chessboard or strolling among the shops and libraries and sculpture gardens of that 33-acre palace of water. Never again would the great grain ships ply their way from Libya and Egypt, nor the harbour at Ostia resound with the cries of merchants and traders from halfway around the world, bringing copper and tin from Britain, glass and leather from the Levant, gems and spices from Ceylon. Never again would a quarter of a million Romans roar in the Circus Maximus as the chariots raced and swerved around the spina. Rome’s astonishing apartment blocks, such as the Insula of Felicula, supposedly towering 16 storeys high beside the Pantheon, fell into rubble again, and Europe was once more a landscape of log cabins, overgrown roads and passing war bands playing crude games with handfuls of coloured mosaic in the ruins of fallen villas.
The barbarians, and Attila supreme among them, had done their work. But, as it turned out, Rome was a world that was both lost and won. Any visitor to Washington will know how overwhelmingly Roman it feels at times. The city they boastfully hailed with “ Ave, Roma Immortalis!” turned out to be just that: immortal. Of the Huns – their language, their gods, even the meaning of the name Attila – hardly a shred remains.
Attila the Hun is on BBC1 on Wednesday at 9pm;
