n, died Pope St. Leo. First of his line to bear
the name of Great, who twice saved his city, and once, by the express
avowal of a successor, the Church herself, Leo carried his crown of thorns
one-and-twenty years, and has left no plaint to posterity of the calamities
witnessed by him in that long pontificate. Majorian was the fourth
sovereign whom in six years and a half he had seen to perish by violence. A
man with so keen an intellectual vision, so wise a measure of men and
things, must have fathomed to its full extent the depth of moral corruption
in the midst of which the Church he presided over fought for existence.
This among his own people. But who likewise can have felt, as he did, the
overmastering flood of northern tribes--_vis consili expers_--which had
descended on the empire in his own lifetime. As a boy he must have known
the great Theodosius ruling by force of mind that warlike but savage host
of Teuton mercenaries. In his one life, Visigoth and Ostrogoth, Vandal and
Herule, Frank and Aleman, Burgundian and Sueve, instead of serving Rome as
soldiers in the hand of one greater than themselves, had become masters of
a perishing world's mistress; and the successor of Peter was no longer safe
in the Roman palace which the first of Christian emperors had bestowed upon
the Church's chief bishop. Instead of Constantine and Theodosius, Leo had
witnessed Arcadius and Honorius; instead of emperors the ablest men of
their day, who could be twelve hours in the saddle at need, emperors who
fed chickens or listened to the counsel of eunuchs in their palace. Even
this was not enough. He had seen Stilicho and Aetius in turn support their
feeble sovereigns, and in turn assassinated for that support; and the depth
of all ignominy in a Valentinian closing the twelve hundred years of Rome
with the crime of a dastard, followed by Genseric, who was again to be
overtopped by Ricimer, while world and Church barely escape from Attila's
uncouth savagery. But Leo in his letters written in the midst of such
calamities, in his sermons spoken from St. Peter's chair, speaks as if he
were addressing a prostrate world with the inward vision of a seer to whom
the triumph of the heavenly Jerusalem is clearly revealed, while he
proclaims the work of the City of God on earth with equal assurance.

Hilarus in that same November, 461, succeeded to the apostolic chair.
Hilarus was that undaunted Roman deacon and legate who with difficulty
saved