mild emperor declined to have any
communication with the patriarch.

The next year a new synod was held, and the action of the Synod of the
Oak was confirmed. The emperor ratified the sentence, and Chrysostom
quietly yielded to the inevitable and retired from the city. As soon as
the people heard of the occurrence, another uproar followed, which
resulted in the conflagration of Saint Sophia and other buildings and in
the persecution of many adherents of the exiled patriarch. Olympias and
many others were condemned to exile. "Among those who anticipated the
sentence by flight was an old maid named Nicarete, who deserves mention
as a curious figure of the time. She was a philanthropist who devoted
her means to works of charity, and who always went about with a chest of
drugs, which she used to dispose of gratuitously, and which rumor said
were always effectual."

Meanwhile, Chrysostom was transported to a remote town among the ridges
of Mount Taurus, in Lesser Armenia. He suffered many hardships, but he
was sustained by the sympathy of his friends, especially Olympias, with
whom he corresponded, and who never told him of the persecutions she
herself underwent in his behalf. Her own last years, however, were
darkened by her afflictions, and Chrysostom tried to lighten her
melancholy by his letters of consolation. Her saintly life cast a halo
about her memory after she passed away, and a legend was current in
later times that her encoffined body had, by her own directions, been
cast into the sea at Nicomedia, whence it was borne to Constantinople,
and thence to Brochthi, where it reposed in the Church of Saint Thomas.

Chrysostom's last years were perhaps his most useful ones, being spent
in regulating by letter the affairs of the churches. The Pope at Rome
never ratified his condemnation, and he was universally beloved as one
subjected to unjust persecution. Owing to his undiminished prominence in
all Church affairs, the ruthless empress pursued him in his exile, and
an order was despatched for him to be transported to Pityus, a desolate
place on the south-eastern coast of the Euxine; but on the way thither
he expired from exhaustion, in the sixtieth year of his age. He was the
last of the patriarchs to stand out against the corruption and the
frivolity of the court, and henceforth the archbishops were but
subservient adherents of the emperor and the empress.

His innocence and merit were acknowledged by the succeeding