In the meantime, events were transpiring at Rome which were destined to call Arnold from his retreat, and produce him again on the great stage of the world in a part more important than ever. These were the attempts of the Romans to restore their ancient republic on the ruins of the papal government. These attempts were not peculiar to the 12th century, but had been made in preceding ages, invariably to no other purpose than anarchy to the city, and scandal to the world. Indeed, there seems always to have been a party at Rome whose adherents, more pagan than Christian in their hearts, perversely mistook the destiny of the city; and far from viewing its new spiritual empire as nobler than its old material one, held the former as something meanly inferior to the latter; wholly blind to the fact that the senate and emperors had been merely types of the hierarchy and the popes, and that in these, and not in those, God had decreed, from the time of Romulus himself, the true power and majesty of Rome should eventually reside. This party then,--who viewed the pope as the Jews viewed our Saviour, whom they would not accept as their Messias, but reviled him as an impostor because he possessed no worldly-power; this party it was that, at the end of the 8th century, treated Leo III. with such impious cruelty in their first recorded attempt to overthrow the papal government; that in the 10th century not only dethroned, but imprisoned and murdered, by the hands of the consul Crescentius, Benedict VI., and plunged the state into such disorders as to render necessary the bloody but just intervention of Otho III. Emperor of Germany, who delivered the Holy See from the oppression and indignities which overwhelmed it. About the middle of the 12th century, the example of the cities of Lombardy, roused to their struggle for freedom to a great degree by the eloquence of Arnold of Brescia, again awoke the republican faction at Rome; where other elements of lawlessness unhappily existed in the papal schism which then raged, and in which the anti-pope Anacletus drove from the Holy See Innocent II., the lawful pope. On the death of Anacletus and the return of Innocent, the sentence of the council, above mentioned, against Arnold of Brescia, still more embittered the revolutionary spirits of the city, worked up to wild enthusiasm by the temporary presence of that arch-demagogue on the spot to defend his cause. At last the pope's conduct to the citizens of Tivoli burst the storm of rebellion over his head.