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But if any of the clergy, after this our order, presume to celebrate mass in any holy place in the Roman Church without leave of Pope Symmachus, let him be punished as schismatic."
Here when a great part of the company were highly commanding the land, as abounding with many choice, nay, an infinite variety of all sorts of creatures, Polycrates calling to Symmachus, said to him: But you, sir, being an animal bred between two seas, and brought up among so many which surround your sacred Nicopolis, will not you stand up for Neptune?
Symmachus, the father-in-law of Boethius, a venerable and a saintly man, was barbarously done to death and Pope John and his colleagues were thrown into prison in Ravenna, where the pope died on May 18 of that same year, and one hundred and four days later was followed to the grave by the unhappy Gothic king. Theodoric had utterly failed in everything he had attempted.
That decision was that he who was first ordained, or who had the majority for him, should be recognised as Pope; Symmachus fulfilled both conditions, and his election was acknowledged. Symmachus, in the first year of his pontificate, 499, addressed to the Roman emperor, in his Grecian capital, a renowned letter, termed "his defence" against imperial calumnies.
The præfect Symmachus, who presided in the deliberations of the senate, admonished the minister of his just apprehension, that as soon as the revengeful Moor should prohibit the exportation of corn, the and perhaps the safety, of the capital would be threatened by the hungry rage of a turbulent multitude.
Christianity, he continued, was the one and only true religion; and all the rest etc., etc., etc. Ambrose and his party were fighting towards a definite and positive end; knew what they wanted, and meant to get it. Of course they won. Symmachus and the senate were fighting only for a sentiment about the past, and had no chance at all. And it really did not matter: Rome was doomed anyway.
It was finally burnt down in the fire of Commodus, which destroyed at the same time many important buildings in the Forum. The worship of Vesta was prohibited by Gratianus in the year 382 of our era, and the public maintenance of the Vestal Virgins abandoned, in spite of the protestations of Symmachus and the forlorn hope of the pagan party.
There he loved to sit musing among the cypresses, wondering at the vast bronze pine- cone and the great brass peacocks which Symmachus had brought thither from the ruins of Agrippa's baths, wherein the terrible Crescenzi had fortified themselves during more than a hundred years.
A new senatorial committee presented themselves with a petition drawn up by Symmachus a genuine piece of oratory which Ambrose himself admired, or pretended to admire. This speech made a deep impression when it was read in the Imperial Council. But Ambrose intervened with all his eloquence.
Some of the prisoners were saved from the edge of the sword, to shed their blood in the amphitheatre; and the orator Symmachus complains, that twenty-nine of those desperate savages, by strangling themselves with their own hands, had disappointed the amusement of the public.
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