Acacius did not receive the papal judgment against him, but sought to suppress it. A monk ventured to attach to his mantle as he went to Mass the sentence of excommunication. It cost him his life, and brought heavy persecutions on his brethren. Acacius met the Pope with open defiance, and removed his name from the diptychs.[45] He rested on the emperor Zeno's support, who did everything at his bidding. Every arm of deceit and of violence he used equally. The monks, called, from their never intermitted worship, the Sleepless, in close connection with Rome, suffered severely. So Acacius passed the remaining five years of his life, dying in the autumn of 489. His excommunication by the Pope caused a schism between the East and West which lasted thirty-five years, from 484 to 519. He met that supreme act of authority by the counter act of removing the Pope's name from the diptychs. This invites us to consider the position which he assumed. From the year 482 (that is, four years after Zeno had recovered the empire), Acacius appears in possession of full influence over the emperor. The position of the bishop at Constantinople was, in itself, one of immense dignity. He was undoubtedly the second person in the imperial city, surrounded with a pomp and deference only yielding to that accorded to the emperor, but in some respects superior to it. He was regarded as sacrosanct: all the respect which the Church received in the minds of the good was centred in his person. And as he had risen to all this dignity in virtue of Constantinople being the capital, there was a special connection between the capital and its bishop, which led it to sympathise with every accession of power which he received. There can be no doubt that the right acquired by that bishop over the great sees of Ephesus, Caesarea in Pontus, and Heraclea in Thrace was extremely popular at Constantinople; and that when he proceeded further to show his hand over the patriarchate of Antioch--as, for instance, in nominating one of its archbishops at Tyre, as the Pope reproached him--the capital was still better pleased. Most of all when, breaking through all the regulations which the Nicene Council had consecrated by its approval,--which, however, it had not created, but found in immemorial subsistence,--he ventured to ordain at Constantinople a patriarch of Antioch. Thus Stephen II., patriarch of Antioch, had been murdered in 479 by the fanatical Monophysites, in the baptistry of the Barlaam Church, and his mangled body thrown into the Orontes. The incensed emperor punished the criminals, and charged his patriarch Acacius to consecrate a new bishop for Antioch. Acacius seized the favourable opportunity, after the example of Anatolius, to advance himself, and appointed Stephen III. Emperor and patriarch both applied to Pope Simplicius to excuse this violation of the rights of the Syrian bishops, alleging the pressure of circumstances, and promising that the example should not occur again.