ng which he suggested. And he had his part as a counsellor,
as well as a bishop, in one most important transaction, which took place in
this interval. The reign of Zeno was disturbed by perpetual insurrections
and perils. In these Theodorick the Goth had been of great service to him,
so that in this year, 484, Zeno had made him consul at Rome. But Theodorick
afterwards thought that Zeno had treated him very ill. He marched upon
Constantinople: Zeno trembled on his throne. Something had to be done. What
was done was to turn Theodorick's longing eyes upon the land possessing
"the hapless dower of beauty".[46] Zeno commissioned him to turn Odoacer
out, and to take his place. In 489, Theodorick led the great mass of his
people into Italy, at the suggestion, and with the warrant of, the man whom
Pope Felix had appealed to as his son, the Roman emperor and Christian
prince. And so, as an emperor and a bishop of Constantinople, a hundred
years before, had led the Gothic nation into the Arian heresy, under the
belief that it was the Christian faith, another emperor of Constantinople
and another bishop turned that Gothic nation upon the Roman mother and the
See of Peter, regardless that they would thereby become temporal subjects
of those who were possessed by the "Arian perfidy". Beside Eudoxius and
Valens in history stand Acacius and Zeno; and beside Alaric, let loose with
his warlike host by the younger sister on the elder in 410, stands
Theodorick, commissioned, in 489, with all his people, to occupy
permanently the birthplace of Roman empire.

The eastern bishops[47] crouched before the emperor's power and his
patriarch's intrigues, who deposed those who were not in his favour, and
tyrannised over the greater number, so that many fled to the West. John
Talaia himself, the expelled patriarch of Alexandria, received the
bishopric of Nola from the Pope, to whom he had appealed. This continued to
be the state of things during five years, from 484 to 489, when Acacius
died, still under sentence of excommunication. One of the greatest bishops
of his time, St. Avitus of Vienna, characterises him with the words,
"Rather a timid lover than a public asserter of the opinion broached by
Eutyches: he praised, indeed, what he had taken from him, but did not
venture to preach it to a people still devout, and therefore unpolluted by
it". Another equally great bishop, Ennodius of Ticinum--that is,
Pavia--says: "He utterly surrendered the glor