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Updated: May 28, 2025
And he sent Basiliscus together with his children and his wife into Cappadocia in the winter season, commanding that they should be destitute of food and clothes and every kind of care. And there, being hard pressed by both cold and hunger, they took refuge in one another's arms, and embracing their loved ones, perished. And this punishment overtook Basiliscus for the policy he had pursued.
He lasted, however, but a short time; Zeno was able to return, and occupied the throne again during fourteen years, from 477 to 491. These two men, Zeno and Basiliscus, criminal in their private lives, in their public lives adventurers, who gained the throne by the worst Byzantine arts, opened the line of the theologising emperors.
And sending envoys to Basiliscus, he begged him to defer the war for the space of five days, in order that in the meantime he might take counsel and do those things which were especially desired by the emperor. They say, too, that he sent also a great amount of gold without the knowledge of the army of Basiliscus and thus purchased this armistice.
But the children of this world have worldly policy, foxly craft, lion-like cruelty, power to do hurt, more than either aspis or basiliscus, engendering and doing all things fraudulently, deceitfully, guilefully: which as Nimrods and such sturdy and stout hunters, being full of simulation and dissimulation before the Lord, deceive the children of light, and cumber them easily.
By the conspiracy of the malecontents, Zeno was recalled from exile; the armies, the capital, the person, of Basiliscus, were betrayed; and his whole family was condemned to the long agony of cold and hunger by the inhuman conqueror, who wanted courage to encounter or to forgive his enemies. The haughty spirit of Verina was still incapable of submission or repose.
They submitted themselves to subscribe an imperial statement of doctrine and to permit its imposition on others. This was a use of despotism in the eastern Church introduced by the insurgent Basiliscus, carried out first by Zeno and then by Anastasius, tending to the ruin both of doctrine and discipline.
Basiliscus and Zeno were not only heretical themselves, but they were assuming in their own persons the right of the secular power to dictate to the Church her own belief. And the Pope had become their subject while he was locally subject to the dominion of a northern commander of mercenaries, himself a Herule and an Arian. In his own Rome the Pope lived and breathed on sufferance.
As soon as she sounded a revolt in the ears of Zeno, he fled with precipitation into the mountains of Isauria, and her brother Basiliscus, already infamous by his African expedition, was unanimously proclaimed by the servile senate. But the reign of the usurper was short and turbulent.
Basiliscus in his short dominion of twenty months had formally recalled from exile the notorious heretic Timotheus Ailouros, and put him in the patriarchal see of Alexandria, as likewise Peter the Fuller in the see of Antioch. This Timotheus had moved Basiliscus to the strong act of despotically overriding the faith by issuing an edict upon doctrine.
For it so fell out that they lived only a short time after attaining the office, and as a result of this accomplished nothing worthy of mention. Such was the course of events in the West. And Zeno, perceiving this, collected an army and came against him. And Basiliscus sent an army under the general Harmatus in order to array himself against Zeno.
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