after this letter, informs us that the writer of it was his
great-grandfather, and speaks of his appearing in a vision to his aunt
Tarsilla and showing her the habitation of everlasting light. At the time
of writing it, Pope Felix was living under the domination of the Arian
Herule Odoacer. The great Church of Africa was suffering the most terrible
of persecutions under the Arian Vandal Hunneric, the son of his father
Genseric. Arian Visigoth rulers were in possession of Spain and France, of
whom Euric, as we have seen, was described rather as the chief of a sect
than the sovereign of a people. In all the West not a yard of territory was
under rule of a Catholic sovereign. And he whom the Pope addressed, with
the dignity of the Apostolic See in its reverence for the power which is a
delegation of God, as Roman emperor and Christian prince, was in his
private life scandalous, in all his public rule shifty and tyrannical, and
in belief, if he had any, an Eutychean heretic. It may be added, as a fact
of history, that the emperor went before the divine judgment sooner than
the Pope; that during the seven years which intervened between the letter
and his death he utterly disregarded all that the Pope had done and said.
He suffered, or rather made the bishop of Constantinople to be the ruler of
the eastern Church; he maintained heretics in the sees of Alexandria and
Antioch. After this he died in 491, and the last fact recorded of him is
that the empress Ariadne, the daughter of Leo I., who had brought him the
empire with her hand, when he fell into an epileptic fit and was supposed
to be dead, had him buried at once, and placed guards around his tomb, who
were forbidden to allow any approach to it. When the imperial vault was
afterwards entered, Zeno was found to have torn his arm with his teeth. The
empress widow, forty days after the death of Zeno, conferred her hand, and
with it the empire a second time, upon Anastasius, who had been up to that
time a sort of gentleman usher[43] in the imperial service. Anastasius
ruled the eastern empire twenty-seven years, from 491 to 518.

The Pope further sought by a letter[44] to the clergy and people of
Constantinople to remove the scandal caused by the weakness of his legates,
and to explain the grounds upon which he had deposed Acacius. "Though we
know the zeal of your faith, yet we warn all who desire to share in the
Catholic faith to abstain from communion with him, lest, which God