Grumbling about immigrants is nothing new. The Romans, despite having spent their entire history marching into other people's countries and taking them over, were forever moaning about how foreign rivers, as the poet Juvenal put it, "kept flowing into the Tiber".

By the late fourth and fifth centuries, however, as the immigration controls that had long regulated the frontiers of the empire began to collapse, the traditional Roman attitude towards barbarians was transformed from contempt into one of mounting dread and horror.t

The most feared were the Huns. "Making their destructive way amid the pillage and slaughter of those who live around them," as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus put it, they battened with a lethal relish on to the disintegrating empire.

Leading them to a brief but dazzling peak of greatness was the most notorious barbarian of them all, a warlord damned by his enemies as the "Scourge of God", and who to this day remains a byword for rapacious ferocity: Attila.

Christopher Kelly, in his learned, fluent and often witty study of the great Hunnish leader, is too nuanced a historian to buy into the notion of his subject as merely a mindless thug; but nor does he go to the opposite extreme, and cast Attila as a misunderstood man of peace.

"Even for the most sympathetic," he freely acknowledges, "it is difficult not to be desensitised by the dull repetition of stories of the Huns' ruthlessness."

In opposition to what over the past few decades has become academic orthodoxy - that Roman Europe did not expire amid anarchy and despoliation but rather was "transformed" - Kelly restores to the Huns their more traditional role of brutal predators.

Their empire was, he states flatly, "a parasitic state". Attila's enthusiasm for Roman titles and gewgaws was no more the index of a benign multiculturalism than a mugger's taste for stealing Rolexes might be reckoned the expression of his desire for social justice.

Yet the Romans, too, had lost none of their domineering instincts: certainly, they were no less keen on world rule than their ancestors had been. For Kelly, as for a number of recent authors, the death-knell of the empire's integrity was sounded in 378, at the battle of Adrianople. It was a calamitous defeat on the doorstep of Constantinople which saw 20,000 men wiped out in a single afternoon.

From that moment on, with their frontiers irreparably perforated, the Romans were always playing catch-up - and it is a mark of the ruthlessness and desperation with which they raged against the dying of the light that the eastern half of the empire should ultimately have been preserved from utter ruin.

Kelly is ideally qualified to write this account: in a more academic incarnation he has written extensively on the functioning of imperial power in late antiquity. No surprise, then, that the true focus of his book should not be the Huns but the chanceries of Ravenna and Constantinople. Destructive and brutal Attila certainly was - had he not been, against the Romans, he would hardly have survived for long.

Indeed, the underhand quality of the manoeuvring against him, not to mention his own calculated countermoves, means the story of his engagement with the decaying empire can often be a wearying one. All the more a relief, then, that Kelly should prove himself such an accessible and entertaining guide.

The centrepiece of his account, and the showcase for his exploration of the many paradoxes that haunted imperial relations with Attila, is one of the great set pieces of late antiquity: an embassy from Constantinople which doubled as an assassination plot.

The eyewitness account of the journey written by Priscus of Panium, an East Roman bureaucrat, gives the historian a precious touch of colour amid the murk of the age - and Kelly is not the man to let it go to waste.

His retelling of Priscus's narrative displays an almost novelistic eye. We pass riverbanks "still littered with the bones of the slain"; sit down at a Hunnish feast in a hut "dimly lit by pine torches"; watch the after-dinner entertainment, "a madman whose unintelligible ravings provoked much laughter".

Most fascinatingly, we are given - for the first time - an intimate portrait of Attila himself: not a savage, but frugal and subtle, and all the more terrifying for it.

The moral that Priscus implicitly draws is, as Kelly points out, a sophisticated and disturbing one: "It is always reassuring to think of our enemies as godless barbarians. It is troubling to learn that they might be more like us than we would ever care to admit."


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