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Updated: May 13, 2025
Anastasius was able to disturb Pope Symmachus during the first half of his pontificate by fostering a schism among his clergy, with the result that he brought out the recognition of the Pope's privilege not to be judged by his inferiors.
He solicited the royal title in 496 by an embassy to Anastasius, and the result of that embassy was that the chief man in it, Faustus, patrician and senator, when he returned to Rome, contrived to raise a schism in the clergy itself against Pope Symmachus. This schism was the greatest difficulty which the Pope in all this period encountered.
The liberty of suffrages, which he affected to allow, was destroyed by the hopes and fears that his presence inspired; and the arbitrary exile of Symmachus was a recent admonition, that it might be dangerous to oppose the wishes of the monarch.
The pagan Symmachus appointing to an important post a future Catholic bishop there is matter for surprise in that! But Symmachus, who had been Proconsul at Carthage, protected the Africans in Rome. Furthermore, it is likely that the Manichees represented their candidate to him as a man hostile to Catholics. Now in this year, A.D. 384, the Prefect had just begun an open struggle with the Catholics.
The breast of Symmachus was animated by the warmest zeal for the cause of expiring Paganism; and his religious antagonists lamented the abuse of his genius, and the inefficacy of his moral virtues. The orator, whose petition is extant to the emperor Valentinian, was conscious of the difficulty and danger of the office which he had assumed.
In the Chalde, Cappadocians, in Symmachus, Medes, and in the French, those of Gamed. Theodotian of old, and Tremillius of late, have retained the Textuary word; and so have the Italian, Low Dutch, and English Translators, that is, the Men of Arvad were upon thy Walls round about, and the Gammadims were in thy Towers.
From being a merciful sovereign, he exhibited an awful vengeance. It was in these transactions that Boethius, the philosopher, and Symmachus, the senator, fell victims to his wrath. The pope John himself was thrown into prison, and there miserably died.
Howell, in his epistle to the nobility of England before his French and English Dictionary, takes notice, "that both in France, and in other nations, the word thou was used in speaking of one, but by succession of time, when the Roman commonwealth grew into an empire, the courtiers began to magnify the emperor, as being furnished with power to confer dignities and offices, using the word you, yea, and deifying him with more remarkable titles, concerning which matter we read in the epistles of Symmachus to the emperors Theodosius and Valentinian, where he useth these forms of speaking, Vestra Æternitas, vestrum numen, vestra serenitas, vestra Clementia, that is, your, and not thy eternity, godhead, serenity, clemency.
The emperor of Constantinople was very wroth at the frustration of his plan to get influence over the Pope by the appointment of Laurentius, and reproached Pope Symmachus with moving the Roman senate against him. The Pope replied:
This was Rusticiana, the daughter of Symmachus, the widow of Boethius. When Basil looked at her, and thought of the anguish through which her life had passed in that gloomy evening of the reign of Theodoric, he felt himself for a moment at one with those who rejected and scorned the Gothic dominion.
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