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Updated: May 31, 2025
Clergy and senators sent in a new memorial to the king Theodorick, in favour of the anti-pope Laurentius, who returned to Rome in 502; and it was four years, during which several councils were held, before the schism was finally composed. Theodorick then commanded that all the churches in Rome should be given up to Pope Symmachus, and he alone be recognised as its bishop.
How distinctly, and with what unfaltering conviction, the Pope of 494, then locally a subject of Theodorick the Arian, set forth to the emperor at Constantinople the universal authority of the Holy See, grounded on what he calls the Apostle's glorious confession, on which followed the Divine Word creating his office, is apparent through the whole of this magnificent letter.
The difficulty of the times was such that, instead of holding a synod of bishops at Rome to determine which election was valid, the two candidates, Symmachus and Laurentius, went to Ravenna, and submitted that point to the decision of the king Theodorick, Arian as he was.
In these Theodorick the Goth had been of great service to him, so that in this year, 484, Zeno had made him consul at Rome. But Theodorick afterwards thought that Zeno had treated him very ill. He marched upon Constantinople: Zeno trembled on his throne. Something had to be done.
Pope Hormisdas had been succeeded in 523 by Pope John I. Compelled by the king Theodorick to undertake an embassy to the emperor Justin, received at Byzantium with the highest honour as first Bishop of the Church, being also the first Pope who had visited the eastern capital, and crowned with gifts for the churches at Rome, he returned only to die in the dungeon of the Arian prince at Ravenna, in 526.
As Theodorick had offered his prayers at the tomb of the Apostles, so Totila went from the Lateran to St. Peter's. What a change had the forty-six years brought about. To the miserable remnant of the senate Totila upbraided the ingratitude which had been shown for Gothic benefits under Theodorick.
But this very time was also that in which the heresy whose leading doctrine was denial of the Godhead of the Church's founder came from a threatening of supremacy to an end. In Theodorick Arianism seemed to be enthroned for predominance in all the West.
Theodorick, the hermit of Engaddi, had, in that character, been the correspondent of popes and councils; to whom his letters, full of eloquent fervour, had described the miseries imposed by the unbelievers upon the Latin Christians in the Holy Land, in colours scarce inferior to those employed at the Council of Clermont by the Hermit Peter, when he preached the first Crusade.
He took two of the noblest Romans, Boethius and Cassiodorus, for his friends and counsellors, and in the letters of the latter, from about the year 500 to the end of Theodorick's reign, we possess most valuable information as to the way in which Theodorick governed. Odoacer would seem likewise, during the years of his government until he was shut up in Ravenna, to have followed a like policy.
Again, others have pointed to the feats of Theodorick, the king of the Eastern Goths; or to the fate of Siegbert, the king of the Austrasian Franks, who was murdered at the instigation of Fredegunda; or to the powerful Frankish family of the Pipins, from whom Karl the Great hailed, by way of trying to explain some parts of the Siegfried story.
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