But yet it was not given to Pope Symmachus to put an end to this confusion. He sat during fifteen years and eight months, dying on the 9th July, 514. The schism raised by the Greek emperor was at an end; and seven days after his decease the deacon Hormisdas was elected with the full consent of all. In the meantime the state of the East had gone on from bad to worse. Anastasius, by writing and by oath, had pledged himself at his coronation to maintain the Catholic faith and the Council of Chalcedon. Instead he had persecuted Catholics, banished their bishops, by his falsehood and tyranny sown discord everywhere. At last one of his own generals, Vitalian, rose against him. After a long silence he once more betook himself to the Pope. In January, 518, he wrote to the new Pope, Hormisdas, "that the opinion spread abroad of his goodness led him to apply to his fatherly affection to ask of him the offices which our God and Saviour taught the holy Apostles by mouth, and especially St. Peter, whom He made the strength[94] of His Church". He asked, therefore, "his apostolate by holding a council to become a mediator by whom unity might be restored to the churches," and proposed that a general council should be held at Heraclea, the old metropolis of Thrace. Hormisdas, after maturely considering the whole state of things, sent a legation of five persons to the emperor at Constantinople--the bishops Ennodius of Pavia, Fortunatus of Catania, the priest Venantius, the deacon Vitalis, and the notary Hilarius--with the most detailed instructions how to act. The intent was to test the emperor's sincerity--a foresight which after events completely justified. This instruction is said to be the earliest of the kind which has come down to us. Since nothing can so vividly represent the position of the Holy See as the words used by it on a great occasion at the very moment when it took place, I give a translation of it. In reading this it should be remembered that these are the words of a Pope living in captivity under an Arian and barbaric sovereign, who had taken possession of Italy about twenty years before, and had sought for and accepted the royal title from this very emperor. Further, that with the exception of the Frankish kingdom, in which Clovis had died four years before, all the West was in possession of Arian rulers, who were also of barbaric descent. The Pope speaks in the naked power of his "apostolate". The commission which he gave to his legates was this:[95]