cceeded to their thrones. All which
would only tend to increase the power and popularity of the bishop of
Constantinople in his own see.

Acacius had now been eleven years bishop. He had gained at once the emperor
Leo; he had appeared to defend the Council of Chalcedon when Basiliscus
attacked it; he had further gained mastery over Zeno; but, more than all
this, he had seen Rome sink into what to eastern eyes must have seemed an
abyss. St. Leo had compelled Anatolius to give up the canons he so much
prized; since then northern barbarians had twice sacked Rome, and
Ricimer's most cruel host of adventurers had reaped whatever the Vandal
Genseric had left. If there was a degradation yet to be endured it would be
that a Herule soldier of fortune should compel a Roman senate to send back
the robes of empire to Constantinople, and be content to live under a
Patricius, sprung from one of the innumerable Teuton hordes, and sanctioned
by the emperor of the East; and Acacius would not forget that in the
councils of that emperor he was himself chief.

If New Rome held the second rank because the Fathers gave the first rank to
Old Rome, in that it was the capital, what was the position of New Rome and
its bishop when Old Rome had ceased in fact to be a capital at all? At that
moment--thirty years after St. Leo had confirmed the greatest of eastern
councils and been greeted by it as the head of the Christian faith--the
Rome in which he sat had been reduced to a mere municipal rank, and its
bishop, with all its people, lived under what was simply a military
government commanded by a foreign adventurer. Odoacer at Ravenna was master
of the lives and liberties of the Romans, including the Pope.

Acacius had had this spectacle for some years before him, when Pope Felix,
succeeding Pope Simplicius, called him to account for entirely reversing
the conduct which he had pursued at the time when Basiliscus had usurped
the empire. Then he defended the Council of Chalcedon and its doctrine;
then he denounced to the Pope Peter the Stammerer as a heretic and a man of
bad life, and had called for his condemnation and obtained it. He had now
taken upon himself not even to ask from the Pope this man's absolution, but
to absolve himself the very heretic he had caused to be condemned, and to
put him into the see of Alexandria, with the rejection of the bishop
legitimately elected, and approved at Rome, and to compose for the emperor
a doctrinal decr