AETIUS, the last great Roman general and savior of western Europe from being Hun: b. Durostorum on the Danube (now Silistria), c. 390 A.D. ; murdered toward the end of 454. He was son of a distinguished com mander Gaudentius (probably barbarian) ; in military service while a boy, and given to Alaric as a hostage after Pollentia in 403, remaining three years; later a hostage to the Huns; and gaining close intimacy with both races, of mixed results. After Honorius' death he supported the secretary Joannes against the Empress-regent Placidia, and brought an army of 60,000 Huns to his aid; but, Joannes having just been de feated and slain, the Huns were bribed to go home, and Akins was made Count of Italy and commander of the army, and became the chief adviser and prop of Placidia and her children. His main rival was Boniface, Count of Africa, at Carthage; and the accepted story is that by a base double intrigue he drove him into revolt and calling the from Spain into Africa ; that on discovering the fraud Boni face fought in Italy first a slight battle and then a duel with Aetius, was mortally wounded, and in dying counseled his wife to marry no one but his rival. It is very suspicious ; but any way the Vandals overran North Africa ; Boniface was killed; Aetius in 432 had to flee to the Huns, came back the next year with an army of them, was reinstated, and for the next 17 years was the ruling spirit in the Western Empire, battling in Gaul with Visigoths, Bur gundians and Franks, upholding by combined soldiership and policy the declining state, with a vigor and genius which made him the ope great man of the Roman world in foreign eyes. In 450 the great Hunnish invasion under Attila (q.v.) came rolling down into Gaul with a
volume it seemed impossible to stay, and the success of which might have blighted western Europe as their kinsmen the Turks have blighted the eastern portion. Aetius by his di plomatic skill and knowledge of how to play on the barbarians induced Theodoric the Visigoth to league with him, followed Attila into the Seine valley, and on 20 Sept. 451 checked his progress in the mighty battle of Chalons (q.v.) ; the empire's last victory, and one of the world's turning-points. Attila's death not long after broke up the Hunnish coalition and delivered the empire from it ; but it was also Aetius' death sentence, and with his the empire's. Va lentinian III, Placidia's son, hated Aetius' power and had only submitted to it from fear of Attila ; and, feeling now secure, seized the occasion of a visit of Aetius to Rome, to arrange the marriage of his son with Valen • tinian's daughter, and stabbed him with his own hand. The sack of Rome by the Vandals shortly followed; and 22 years after Aetius' murder the last of a succession of puppet emperors was pulled down by the barbarian Odoacer.
AtTIUS, a Roman theologian of the 4th century surnamed °the Atheist' d. Constanti nople 367. He was founder of the Anomcean Arian sect, named after him the Aetians, who held that the Homousian doctrine of the be gotten son as God is self-contradictory, since the nature of God is eternal and unbegotten. He was banished from Alexandria by Constan tius in 356, but was called to Constantinople by Julian in 361 and made a bishop.