If New Rome held the second rank because the Fathers gave the first rank to Old Rome, in that it was the capital, what was the position of New Rome and its bishop when Old Rome had ceased in fact to be a capital at all? At that moment--thirty years after St. Leo had confirmed the greatest of eastern councils and been greeted by it as the head of the Christian faith--the Rome in which he sat had been reduced to a mere municipal rank, and its bishop, with all its people, lived under what was simply a military government commanded by a foreign adventurer. Odoacer at Ravenna was master of the lives and liberties of the Romans, including the Pope. Acacius had had this spectacle for some years before him, when Pope Felix, succeeding Pope Simplicius, called him to account for entirely reversing the conduct which he had pursued at the time when Basiliscus had usurped the empire. Then he defended the Council of Chalcedon and its doctrine; then he denounced to the Pope Peter the Stammerer as a heretic and a man of bad life, and had called for his condemnation and obtained it. He had now taken upon himself not even to ask from the Pope this man's absolution, but to absolve himself the very heretic he had caused to be condemned, and to put him into the see of Alexandria, with the rejection of the bishop legitimately elected, and approved at Rome, and to compose for the emperor a doctrinal decree, which he subscribed himself first as the first of the patriarchs, and was compelling all other bishops to sign under pain of deprivation; when, behold, St. Leo's third successor called him to account in exactly the same terms as St. Leo would have used, and required him to meet at Rome the accusation brought against him by John Talaia, a duly elected patriarch of Alexandria, just as St. Julius, a hundred and forty years before, had invited the accusing bishops at Antioch to meet St. Athanasius before his tribunal. He who resided in a state only second to the emperor in the real capital of the empire to go to a city living in durance under the northern barbarians, and submit to the judgment of one whose own tribunal was in captivity to such masters! But, on the other hand, Pope Felix spoke to the emperor as none but popes have ever spoken. He called him his son, but he required from him filial obedience. Above all he spoke in one character, and in one alone--as the heir of that St. Peter whom the voice of the Lord had set over His Church; he spoke from Rome, not because it was or had been capital of the empire, but because it was St. Peter's See, and precisely because he succeeded St. Peter in his apostolate.