It would appear also that in Gregory's time--a hundred years after Pope Gelasius had put the bishop of the imperial city in remembrance that he had been a suffragan to Heraclea--the legislation of Justinian had succeeded in inducing the Roman See to acknowledge that bishop as a patriarch. His actual power had gone far beyond. There can be no doubt that, while the Pope had become legally the subject of the eastern emperor, the bishop of Constantinople had become in fact the emperor's ecclesiastical minister in subjugating the eastern episcopate. The Nicene episcopal hierarchy subsisted indeed in name. To the Alexandrian and Antiochene patriarchs two had been added--one at Jerusalem, the other at Constantinople. But the last was so predominant--as the interpreter of the emperor's will--that he stood at the head of the bishops in all the realm ruled from Constantinople over against the Pope as the head of the western bishops in many various lands. The bishops were in Justinian's legislation everywhere great imperial officers, holding a large civil jurisdiction, especially charged with an inspection of the manner in which civil governors performed their own proper functions; most of all, the patriarchs and the Pope. But that episcopal autonomy--if we may so call it--under the presidence of the three Petrine patriarchs, which was in full life and vigour at the Nicene Council, which St. Gregory still recognised in his letter to Eulogius, was greatly impaired. While barbaric inundation had swept over the West, the struggles of the Nestorian and Eutychean heresies, especially in the two great cities of Alexandria and Antioch, had disturbed the hierarchy and divided the people which the master at Constantinople could hardly control. That state of the East which St. Basil deplored in burning words--which almost defied every effort of the great Theodosius to restore it to order--had gone on for more than two hundred years. The Greek subtlety was not pervaded by the charity of Christ, and they carried on their disputes over that adorable mystery of His Person in which the secret of redeeming power is seated, with a spirit of party and savage persecution which portended the rise of one who would deny that mystery altogether, and reduce to a terrible servitude those who had so abused their liberty as Christians and offered such a scandal to the religion of unity which they professed.