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Venice was no "crowd of poor fishermen," as it has been sometimes described, who were gradually drawn to wider ventures and a larger commerce. The port of Aquileia had long been the emporium of a trade which reached northwards to the Danube and eastward to Byzantium. What the Roman merchants of Venetia had been at Aquileia they remained at Grado.
Under Augustus, Arles was already a large market for wines, both Greek and Italian; during the same period, there passed through Aquileia and Leibach considerable trade in Italian wine with the Danube regions.
Both parties tried the resources of intrigue; but while Constantius won over the Frank Silvanus from the Western camp, the envoys of Magnentius, who sounded Athanasius, gained nothing from the wary Greek. Both armies well sustained the honour of the Roman name, and it was only after a frightful slaughter that the usurper was thrown back on Aquileia.
Had he lived in a less enlightened age, tradition and poetry might well have described him as one of those monstrous giants, whose supernatural power was constantly exerted for the destruction of mankind. It is easier to conceive than to describe the universal joy of the Roman world on the fall of the tyrant, the news of which is said to have been carried in four days from Aquileia to Rome.
Irritated rather than humbled, as some beast of prey, by this mishap, he turned to Italy. Crossing the Alps, he laid siege to Aquileia, at that time one of the richest, most populous, and strongest of the cities on the Hadriatic coast. He took it, sacked it, and so utterly destroyed it, that the succeeding generation could scarcely trace its ruins.
The two great campanili, of Grado which we are nearing, and of Aquileia passing into the distance behind us, each with its cluster of low buildings around, are prominent against the horizon showing dark against the fine cumulus clouds, which are heaped in sharply defined masses against the blue of the upper sky and rise in threatening billows like exhalations from some vast cauldron, soon to fade away innocuously in the late afternoon.
An instance of this may be found in the Gallic marshes surrounding Altino, Ravenna, Aquileia, and other towns in places of the kind, close by marshes. They are marvellously healthy, for the reasons which I have given. But marshes that are stagnant and have no outlets either by rivers or ditches, like the Pomptine marshes, merely putrefy as they stand, emitting heavy, unhealthy vapours.
Remember Aquileia! Suddenly, as she looked from group to group among the departing people, her eyes became arrested by one object; she instantly stepped forwards, then abruptly restrained herself and moved back where the crowd was still thick, gazing fixedly ever in the same direction.
His march, perhaps from Thessalonica, through the warlike and hostile country of Pannonia, as far as the foot of the Julian Alps; his passage of those mountains, which were strongly guarded by troops and intrenchments; the siege of Aquileia, and the conquest of the provinces of Istria and Venetia, appear to have employed a considerable time.
But of his four legions three were stationed far off at Aquileia; although he called out in haste the militia of the Transalpine province, it seemed scarcely possible with so small a force to hinder the innumerable Celtic host from crossing the Rhone, between its exit from the Leman lake at Geneva and the point of its breaking through the mountains, over a distance of more than fourteen miles.
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