us in his see.

The changes, indeed, wrought in a few years were immense. St. Leo himself
outlived both Pulcheria and Marcian; and on the death of the latter saw the
imperial succession, which had been in some sense hereditary since the
election of Valentinian I., in 364, pass to a new man. As this is the first
occasion on which the succession to the Byzantine throne comes into our
review, it may be well to consider what sort of thing it was. I suppose the
Caesarean succession even from the first is a hard thing to bring under any
definition. Since Claudius was discovered quaking for fear behind a
curtain, and dragged out to sit upon the throne which his nephew Caius had
hastily vacated, after having been welcomed to it four years before with
universal acclamation, it would be difficult to say what made a man emperor
of the Romans. So much I seem to see in that terrible line, that the
descent from father to son was hardly ever blessed, and that those who were
adopted by an emperor no way related to them succeeded the best. The
children of the very greatest emperors--of a Marcus Aurelius, a
Constantine, a Theodosius--have only brought shame on their parents and
ruin on their empire. Again, if the youth of a Nero or a Caracalla ended in
utter ignominy, the youth of an Alexander Severus produced the fairest of
reigns, while it ended in his murder by an usurper. But strange and
anomalous as the Caesarean succession appears, that of the Byzantine
sovereigns, from the disappearance of the Theodosian race to the last
Constantine who dies on the ramparts of the city made by the first, shows a
great deterioration.[29] There was no acknowledged principle of succession.
Arbitrary force determined it. One robber followed another upon the throne;
so that the eastern despot seemed to imitate that ghastly rule, in the
wood by Nemi, "of the priest who slew the slayer and shall himself be
slain". If the army named one man to the throne, the fleet named another.
If intrigue and shameless deceit gained it in one case, murder succeeded in
another. Relationship or connection by marriage with the last possessor
helped but rarely. This frequent and irregular change, and the personal
badness of most sovereigns, caused endless confusion to the realm. This is
the staple of the thousand years in which the election of the emperor Leo
I., in 457, stands at the head. On the death of Marcian, following that of
Pulcheria, in whose person a woman first b