The Dark Ages Collection. David Hume

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СКАЧАТЬ asked for the opinion of the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, and Jerusalem, and other leading dignitaries of the Church.58 They condemned the conduct of Timothy and he was banished to the Chersonese.59 At Antioch, the part of Timothy was played by Peter the Fuller, who during the reign of Leo was twice raised to the Patriarchal throne and twice ejected.60

      When Basiliscus ascended the throne, the Monophysite cause looked bright for a few months. Peter and Timothy were reinstated, and Basiliscus issued an Encyclical letter61 in which he condemned the Council of Chalcedon and the Tome of Leo. But this declaration raised a storm in Constantinople which he was unable to resist. The monks were up in arms, and the Patriarch Acacius,62 who was not a man of extreme views, found himself forced to oppose the Emperor’s policy. Basiliscus hastened to retract, and he issued another letter, which was known as the anti-encyclical. But the settlement of the ecclesiastical struggle did not lie with him. Zeno returned, and a new policy was devised for restoring peace to the Church. His chief advisers here were Acacius and Peter Mongus, who had been the right-hand man of Timothy Aelurus. The policy was to ignore the Council of Chalcedon, but not to affirm anything contrary to its doctrine; and the hope was that the Monophysites and their antagonists would agree to differ, and would recognise that a common recognition of the great Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople was a sufficient bond of communion.

      The Henotikon, a letter addressed by the Emperor to the Church of Egypt, embodied this policy (A.D. 481). It anathematises both Nestorius and Eutyches; declares the truth, and asserts the sufficiency, of the doctrine of Nicaea and Constantinople; and anathematises any who teach divergent doctrine “at Chalcedon or elsewhere.” As the document was intended to conciliate all parties, it was a blunder to mention Chalcedon; for this betrayed that the theological leanings of those who framed it were not favourable to the Chalcedonian dogma. The Monophysites gladly accepted it;63 interpreting it as giving them full liberty to denounce Chalcedon and the Tome of Pope Leo.

      It is to be noted that Basiliscus by his Encyclical and Zeno by his Henotikon asserted the right of the Emperor to dictate to the Church and pronounce on questions of theological doctrine. They virtually assumed the functions of an Ecumenical Council. This was a claim which the see of Rome was not ready to admit except for itself. After the interchange of angry letters between Pope Simplicius and Acacius, a synod was held at Rome,64 and Acacius and Peter Mongus, who was now Patriarch of Alexandria, were excommunicated.65

      The general result of the Henotikon was to reconcile moderate Monophysites in Egypt and Syria, and to secure a certain measure of ecclesiastical peace in the East for thirty years66 at the cost of a schism with the West. But the extreme Monophysites were not reconciled to the policy of Acacius and Peter.

      § 4. The Rise of Odovacar and his Rule in Italy (A.D. 473-489)

      After the death of Olybrius, Leo was sole Roman Emperor for more than four months, and the Burgundian Gundobad, who had succeeded his uncle Ricimer as Master of Soldiers, directed the conduct of affairs in Italy. On March 5, A.D. 473, Glycerius, Count of the Domestics, was proclaimed Emperor at Ravenna “by the advice of Gundobad,”67 just as Severus had been proclaimed in the same city by the advice of Ricimer. Of this Augustus, whose reign was to be brief, one important public act is recorded. Italy was threatened by an invasion of Ostrogoths who, under the leadership of Widemir, began to move from Pannonia, but the diplomacy of Glycerius averted the storm, so that it fell on Gaul.

      The election of Glycerius was not approved at Constantinople, and Leo selected another as the successor of Anthemius.68 His choice was Julius Nepos, husband of the niece of the Empress, and military governor of Dalmatia, where he had succeeded his uncle, count Marcellinus.69 We do not hear that any resistance was offered to Nepos, who arrived in Italy, probably escorted by eastern troops; and it was not long before Gundobad, whether perforce or voluntarily, retired to Burgundy where, in the following year, he succeeded his father as one of the Burgundian kings.70 Glycerius was deposed, and at Portus, the town at the mouth of the Tiber, he was ordained bishop of Salona.71 Nepos was proclaimed Emperor and ruled at Rome (June 24, A.D. 474). Once more two Augusti reigned in unison.

      To the vacant post of Master of Soldiers, which carried with it almost as a matter of course the title of Patrician, Orestes was appointed. This was that Orestes who had been the secretary of Attila, and he had married the daughter of a certain count Romulus. Possessing the confidence of the German troops he determined to raise his son to the Imperial throne.

      We are told that Nepos, driven from Rome, went to Ravenna and, fearing the coming of Orestes, crossed over to Salona. This was on August 28, A.D. 475. The same year that saw the flight of Zeno from Constantinople saw the flight of Nepos from Ravenna. At Salona he lived for five years, and his Imperial authority was still recognised in the East and in Gaul. But in Italy the Caesar Julius was succeeded by the Caesar Augustulus, for so the young Romulus was mockingly nicknamed, whom his father Orestes invested with the Imperial insignia on October 31. These names, Julius, Augustulus, Romulus, in the pages of the chroniclers, meet us like ghosts re-arisen from past days of Roman history.72

      It is important to remember that the position of Romulus was not constitutional inasmuch as he had not been recognised by the Emperor at Constantinople, in whose eyes Nepos was still the Augustus of the West. For twelve months Orestes ruled Italy in the name of his son. His fall was brought about by a mutiny of the troops. The army, which the Master of Soldiers commanded, seems to have consisted under Ricimer and his successors almost exclusively of East Germans, chiefly Heruls, also Rugians and Scirians. According to the usual custom,73 they were quartered on the Italians. But they were weary of this life. They desired to have roof-trees and lands of their own, and they petitioned Orestes to reward them for their services, by granting them lands and settling them permanently in Italy on the same principle on which various German peoples had been settled in other provinces. They did not demand the exceptionally large concession of two-thirds of the soil which had been granted by Honorius to the Visigoths; they asked for the only grant of one-third which had been assigned, for instance, to the Burgundians. But such a settlement in Italy was a very different thing from settlement in Gaul or Spain, and Orestes, notwithstanding his long association with Germans and Huns, was sufficiently Roman to be determined to keep the soil of Italy inviolate. He rejected the demand. The discontented soldiers found a leader in the Scirian Odovacar, one of the chief officers of Orestes.74 Ticinum to which Orestes retired was easily taken, and the Patrician was slain at Placentia (August 28, A.D. 476). “Entering Ravenna, Odovacar deposed Augustulus but granted him his life, pitying his infancy and because he was comely, and he gave him an income of six thousand solidi and sent him to live in Campania with his relatives.”75

      The soldiers had proclaimed Odovacar king.76 But it was not as king over a mixed host of various German nationalities that Odovacar thought he could maintain his position in Italy. The movement which had raised him had no national significance, and if he retained the royal title of an East German potentate, it was as a successor of Ricimer, Gundobar, and Orestes that he hoped to govern the Italians. In other words, he had no idea of detaching Italy from the Empire, as Africa and much of Gaul and Spain had come to be detached. The legal position was to continue as before.77 But the system of Ricimer was to be abandoned. There were be no more puppet Emperors in the West; Italy was to be under the sovranty of the Emperor at Constantinople, and its actual government was to be in the hands of Odovacar, who as Master of Soldiers was to be a minister of the Emperor, while he happened at the same time to be king of the East Germans who formed the army.

      With this purpose in view Odovacar made the deposition of Romulus take the form of an abdication, and induced the Roman Senate to endorse formally the permanent institution of a state of things which had repeatedly existed in the days of Ricimer. A deputation of senators, in the name of Romulus, was sent СКАЧАТЬ