The historian Priscus, whose embassy is a course of curious instruction, was accosted in the camp of Attila by a stranger, who saluted him in the Greek language, but whose dress and figure displayed the appearance of a wealthy Scythian. In the siege of Viminacium he had lost, according to his own account, his fortune and liberty. He became the slave of Onegesius, but his faithful services against the Romans and Acatzires had gradually raised him to the rank of the native Huns, to whom he was attached by the domestic pledges of a new wife and several children. The spoils of war had restored and improved his private property. He was admitted to the table of his former lord, and the apostate Greek blessed the hour of his captivity since it had been the introduction to a happy and independent state, which he held by the honorable tenure of military service. This reflection naturally produced a dispute of the advantages and defects of the Roman government, which was severely arraigned by the apostate, and defended by Priscus in a prolix and feeble declamation. The freedman of Onegesius exposed in true and lively colors the vices of a declining empire of which he had so long been the victim: the cruel absurdity of the Roman princes, unable to protect their subjects against the public enemy, but unwilling to trust them with arms for their own defense; the intolerable weight of taxes, rendered still more oppressive by the intricate or arbitrary modes of collection; the obscurity of numerous and contradictory laws; the tedious and expensive forms of judicial proceedings; the partial administration of justice; and the universal corruption, which increased the influence of the rich, and aggravated the misfortune of the poor. A sentiment of patriotic sympathy was at length revived in the breast of the unfortunate exile, and he lamented, with a flood of tears, the guilt or weakness of those magistrates who have perverted the wisest and most salutary institutions.

From Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, London: Wordsworth, 1998 (first published from 1776 to 1788), pp. 633-634.