forbid,
they fall into like penalty."

Acacius did not receive the papal judgment against him, but sought to
suppress it. A monk ventured to attach to his mantle as he went to Mass the
sentence of excommunication. It cost him his life, and brought heavy
persecutions on his brethren. Acacius met the Pope with open defiance, and
removed his name from the diptychs.[45] He rested on the emperor Zeno's
support, who did everything at his bidding. Every arm of deceit and of
violence he used equally. The monks, called, from their never intermitted
worship, the Sleepless, in close connection with Rome, suffered severely.
So Acacius passed the remaining five years of his life, dying in the autumn
of 489.

His excommunication by the Pope caused a schism between the East and West
which lasted thirty-five years, from 484 to 519. He met that supreme act of
authority by the counter act of removing the Pope's name from the diptychs.
This invites us to consider the position which he assumed.

From the year 482 (that is, four years after Zeno had recovered the
empire), Acacius appears in possession of full influence over the emperor.
The position of the bishop at Constantinople was, in itself, one of immense
dignity. He was undoubtedly the second person in the imperial city,
surrounded with a pomp and deference only yielding to that accorded to the
emperor, but in some respects superior to it. He was regarded as
sacrosanct: all the respect which the Church received in the minds of the
good was centred in his person. And as he had risen to all this dignity in
virtue of Constantinople being the capital, there was a special connection
between the capital and its bishop, which led it to sympathise with every
accession of power which he received. There can be no doubt that the right
acquired by that bishop over the great sees of Ephesus, Caesarea in Pontus,
and Heraclea in Thrace was extremely popular at Constantinople; and that
when he proceeded further to show his hand over the patriarchate of
Antioch--as, for instance, in nominating one of its archbishops at Tyre, as
the Pope reproached him--the capital was still better pleased. Most of all
when, breaking through all the regulations which the Nicene Council had
consecrated by its approval,--which, however, it had not created, but
found in immemorial subsistence,--he ventured to ordain at Constantinople a
patriarch of Antioch. Thus Stephen II., patriarch of Antioch, had been
murdered in