und upon the now sole imperial
throne that child's father Zeno. He was husband of the princess Ariadne,
daughter of Leo I.,[25] a man of whom the Byzantine historians give us a
most frightful picture. Without tact and understanding, vicious, moreover,
and tyrannical, he oppressed during the two years from 474 to 476 his
people, sorely tried by the incursions of barbarous hordes. He also
favoured, all but openly, the Monophysites, specially Peter Fullo, the
heretical patriarch of Antioch. After two years a revolution deprived him
of the throne, and exalted to it the equally vicious Basiliscus--the man
whose treachery as an eastern general had ruined the success of the great
expedition against Genseric, in which East and West had joined under
Anthemius. Basiliscus still more openly favoured heresy. He lasted,
however, but a short time; Zeno was able to return, and occupied the throne
again during fourteen years, from 477 to 491. These two men, Zeno and
Basiliscus, criminal in their private lives, in their public lives
adventurers, who gained the throne by the worst Byzantine arts, opened the
line of the theologising emperors. Basiliscus, during the short time he
occupied the eastern throne, issued, at the prompting of a heretic whom he
had pushed into the see of St. Athanasius--and it is the first example
known in history--a formal decree upon faith, the so-called Encyclikon, in
which only the Nicene, Constantinopolitan, and Ephesine Councils were
accepted, but the fourth, that of Chalcedon, condemned. So low was the
eastern Church already fallen that not the Eutycheans only, but five
hundred Catholic bishops subscribed this Encyclikon, and a Council at
Ephesus praised it as divine and apostolical.

Basiliscus, termed by Pope Gelasius the tyrant and heretic, was swept away.
But his example was followed in 482 by Zeno, who issued his Henotikon,
drawn up it was supposed by Acacius of Constantinople,[26] addressed to the
clergy and people of Alexandria. Many of the eastern bishops, through fear
of Zeno and his bishop Acacius, submitted to this imperial decree; many
contended for the truth even to death against it. These two deeds, the
Encyclikon of Basiliscus and the Henotikon of Zeno, are to be marked for
ever as the first instances of the temporal sovereign infringing the
independence of the Church in spiritual matters, which to that time even
the emperors in Constantine's city had respected.

Simplicius sat in the Roman c