This site isn’t about Flavius Aetius, but this anecdote is. He was a capable Roman general during the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the one of the final few leaders able to cobble together the crumbling Empire for a period of time and stave off the onslaught of Attila the Hun.
He was eventually back-stabbed and murdered by Emperor Valentinian III on September 21, 454.
Then [the eunuch] induced Valens’s mystic initiates — “I call the women’s apartments a phalanx of [eunuchs,” said Valens} — who are always the hidden sparks of bad acts, to accuse Aetius of plotting against the emperor so that he might usurp power. They struggled to persuade the emperor. The weight of the primised money was heavy, as it rubbed their innards. They were very clever at weaving plots when money was promised. For the race is insatiable. They always stand agape in view of greed, and everything bad in the palace is attributable to their peevishness. The emperor was persuaded by their sycophancies and, moved to murder Aetius, he killed him in a flash.
Reckoning that his deed was a boon to him, he said to someone capable of guessing riddles: “Did I not perform the killing of Aetius well, my man?” the other replied: “Whether well or not, I do not know> But know that you cut off your right hand with your left.”
The Fragmentary History of Priscus: Attila, the Huns, and the Roman Empire,AD 430-476, Fragment 70, Suda.
Instead of consolodating his own power, Valentenian III was dead the following March at age 35. The Empire he ruled collapse within the next 25 years.
Valentenian didn’t know it, but he was cutting off his right hand with your left. I think about that story a lot.
Steve