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Rh adherents, he seized the great "Cæsarean" church, and was there consecrated by two bishops whom Proterius and his synod had deposed. Meanwhile the patriarch was sitting in his palace with his clergy. A few days later Timothy was expelled from the city by the civil authorities. This enraged the mob, who rose in riot on Easter Tuesday, hunted Proterius into his baptistery, and there murdered him. After hanging up his body for a time, they dragged it through the streets and then hacked it to pieces. Some of them, reduced to the level of the lowest savages, devoured the entrails. The remains were burnt and the ashes scattered to the winds. The clergy of the orthodox party were now expelled from their churches and their places filled by men whom Timothy appointed. Fourteen of the deposed bishops, who had been driven, as they said in their account of these proceedings, to "a life more full of fear than that of hares or frogs," travelled to Constantinople to lay their complaint before the new emperor, Leo Timothy also sent a deputation to represent his side of the case. Unwilling to bear the onus of a decision, Leo consulted the bishops of the various provinces, all of whom but one, Amphilochius of Side, condemned Timothy, and, with the exception of Amphilochius of Side, also accepted the council of Chalcedon. Timothy was described as "a tyrant and a man of blood," "a homicide, a slayer of his father," one who "became not a shepherd of Christ's sheep, but an intolerable wolf," and more to the same effect, though some added the qualifying clause, "if the statements of the exiles were true."

The subsequent career of this unscrupulous schemer is highly significant. In spite of the condemnation by the bishops, and although the pope wrote to the emperor urging the deposition of such a character, the influence of his friends at court delayed this action on the part of the government for two years. Even then Timothy