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Updated: June 5, 2025
The Roman senate, at the bidding of a Herule commander of mercenaries, has sent back even the symbols of imperial rank to the eastern emperor; and in return Zeno has graciously made Odoacer patricius of Rome, with the power of king, until Theodorick was ready to be rewarded with the possession of Italy for services rendered to the eastern monarch, with the purpose likewise of diverting his attention from Nova Roma.
As Ennodius well says, 'Another's honour made him remember his own origin, and fear the very legions which obeyed him for that obedience is suspected which serves the unworthy. Rome was only nominally under Zeno's dominion; and it mattered little to him whether Herule or Gothic adventurer called himself his representative. Then was held a grand function.
Twenty years succeed in which emperors are enthroned and pass like shadows, until the Herule general Odoacer, commanding for the time the Teuton mercenaries, deposes the last imperial phantom, Romulus Augustulus, and rules Rome and Italy with the title of Patricius. The western emperor is suppressed.
One wound, indeed, had been inflicted upon it by the Herule Odoacer, when in occupation of the sovereign power which he held over Italy, in name, by delegation of the emperor Zeno, in fact, as head of the foreign mercenaries, he had claimed a right to confirm the election of the Pope when chosen.
The tremendous charge of the Gothic knights is stopped by showers of Hun and Herule arrows, and they roll back again and again in disorder on the foot: but in spite of the far superior numbers of the Romans, it is not till nightfall that Narses orders a general advance of his line.
It is to him that, in the long contest which we are following, the four Popes, Gelasius, Anastasius, Symmachus, and Hormisdas, have to direct their letters, their exhortations, and their admonitions. During the whole of this time, from 493, when the conflict between Odoacer and Theodorick is terminated, they will have exchanged the local rule of the Arian Herule for that of the Arian Ostrogoth.
Thus, when the boy Romulus Augustus was deposed at Rome, and power fell into the hands of the Herule Odoacer, Pope Simplicius, directing his gaze over Africa, Spain, France, Illyricum, and Britain, would see a number of new-born governments, ruled by northern invaders, who from the beginning of the century had been in constant collision with each other, perpetually changing their frontiers.
The confirmation of the Pope's election remained with the emperor. This permanent fetter came upon the Popes from the interference of Odoacer the Herule in 484. After Justinian's death, the Romans sent an embassy to his successor complaining that their lot had been more endurable under the dominion of barbarians than under the Greeks.
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.
The pontificate of his ancestor in the third degree, Pope Felix III., might be called heroic, in that, while under the domination of the Arian Herule, Odoacer, he resisted the meddling with the received doctrine of the Church by the emperor Zeno, guided by the larger mind and treacherous fraud of Acacius, the bishop of Constantinople, who ruled its emperor.
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