Book Review: Readings

The Night Attila Died: Solving the Murder of Attila the Hun

by Michael A. Babcock

Berkley, 324 pp., $23.95

Here are the facts. We have a dead male, approximately 47 years of age, who once led a ruthless gang of killers. We have no body, no crime scene, no grave, no forensic evidence, but we believe he was short and stocky, had a darkish complexion, and his head was large in proportion to his body. How did he die? Allegedly of natural causes. The only guy who says he knew about it heard it secondhand and is also dead; he was a government agent, and his original story is lost. The only person who had a copy of the first guy's story was a government sympathizer and belonged to a rival gang.

Could the man have died from "unnatural" causes? Well, yes, there was plenty of motive: He killed many innocent people and committed extortion against the government as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. The dead, stocky fellow is Attila the Hun, and the natural cause of death was a nosebleed on his wedding night in the year AD453. The dead government agent is Priscus, and, as an employee of the Roman Empire, he was hardly an objective storyteller. The government sympathizer from the rival gang is Jordanes of the Goths, who quoted the Priscus story in his own book, The Origin and Deeds of the Goths (more commonly known as Getica), which was published in AD551.

In The Night Attila Died, author Michael Babcock brings together all of these details and more information that has been overlooked by historians for centuries. A specialist in philology, which involves the study of ancient texts, Babcock presents a well-documented, 17-point explanation about why the Attila nosebleed story has more holes in it than a 5-lb. block of Swiss cheese. What makes The Night Attila Died a good and relevant read in this "information age" is the fact that to this day people in positions of power all over the world are shaping history as they see fit – even here, in the United States, where some would like to move Charles Darwin's Origin of Species to the fiction section. By the time you finish this book, you'll probably conclude the nosebleed story is as much a fairy tale as "Cinderella" or "Rumpelstiltskin" (both of these stories were by the Brothers Grimm, who were also philologists). It's always a good idea to question everything you assumed was true just because it was written in a book.