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 became empress regnant, Leo was a Thracian officer, a colonel of the service, and director of the general Aspar's household. Aspar was an Arian Goth, commander of the troops, who had influence enough to make another man emperor, but not to cancel the double blot of barbarian and heretic in his own person. He made Leo, with the intention to be his master. And Leo ruled for seventeen years with some credit; and presently put Aspar and his son to death, in a treacherous manner, but not without reason. He bore a good personal character, was