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Updated: June 10, 2025
A philosopher may pity and forgive the infirmities of female nature, from which he receives no real injury: but contemptible is the husband who feels, and yet endures, his own infamy in that of his wife. Antonina pursued her son with implacable hatred; and the gallant Photius was exposed to her secret persecutions in the camp beyond the Tigris.
One of those who accompanied Photius to Ephesus, Theodosius by name, although he had attained the rank of senator, was deprived of all his property, and imprisoned by Theodora in an underground dungeon, where she kept him fastened to a kind of manger by a rope round his neck, which was so short that it was always quite tense and never slack.
Both Emperor and Patriarch appealed from Constantinople to Pope Nicholas I; but when that masterful bishop decided against the new patriarch, Photius used his learning to summarise in eight articles the differences between east and west. Of these, two concerned such important matters as the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Ghost and the practice of clerical celibacy.
Photius was more resolved to punish, and less prompt to pardon: he flew to Ephesus; extorted from a trusty eunuch of his another the full confession of her guilt; arrested Theodosius and his treasures in the church of St. John the Apostle, and concealed his captives, whose execution was only delayed, in a secure and sequestered fortress of Cilicia.
Meanwhile, Theodosius refused to return to Italy, where Belisarius and Antonina were then staying, unless Photius were sent out of the way; for Photius was naturally disposed to show his spite against anyone who supplanted him in another's good graces; but he was quite right in feeling jealous of Theodosius, because he himself, although Antonina's son, was quite neglected, whereas the other was exceedingly powerful and had amassed great riches.
See Riffel, p. 624. Riffel, p. 625. Ibid., pp. 629-35. See St. Riffel, p. 635. Mansi, xii. 1130. Riffel, 562. Photius, p. 155. Photius, 173. "The banner of the Church is ever flying! Less than a storm avails not to unfold The Cross emblazoned there in massive gold: Away with doubts and sadness, tears and sighing! It is by faith, by patience, and by dying That we must conquer, as our sires of old."
Fired by ambition, Photius now threw off all concealments. He summoned the bishops of his own party, laid various charges against the Roman Church, and in his inconsiderate rage ended by anathematising the holy Father.
A council was held at Rome, in A.D. 862, in which the pontiff excommunicated Photius and his adherents. It was answered by one at Constantinople, in A.D. 866, wherein Nicholas was pronounced unworthy of his office and outside the pale of Christian communion.
There were undoubtedly scholars to whom the whole Greek literature, from Homer to Photius, was familiar: but such scholars were to be found almost exclusively among the clergy resident at the Universities, and even at the Universities were few, and were not fully appreciated. At Cambridge it was not thought by any means necessary that a divine should be able to read the Gospels in the original.
The events of the philosopher's studious life were probably not many nor remarkable; but we should have been glad if this work had been preserved, which told, as Simplicius says, what kind of man Epictetus was. Upton thinks that this work is only another name for the Discourses, and that Photius has made the mistake of taking the Conversations to be a different work from the Discourses.
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