Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Roman Republic period of the ancient Roman civilization. Ruled by emperors, it had large territorial holdings around the Mediterranean Sea in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus. From the constitutional reforms of Augustus to the military anarchy of the third century, the Empire was a principate ruled from the city of Rome; the Roman Empire was ruled by multiple emperors and divided in a Western Roman Empire, based in Milan and Ravenna, an Eastern Roman Empire, based in Nicomedia and Constantinople. Rome remained the nominal capital of both parts until 476 AD, when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus after capturing Ravenna and the Roman Senate sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople; the fall of the Western Roman Empire to barbarian kings, along with the hellenization of the Eastern Roman Empire into the Byzantine Empire, is conventionally used to mark the end of Ancient Rome and the beginning of the Middle Ages. The previous Republic, which had replaced Rome's monarchy in the 6th century BC, became destabilized in a series of civil wars and political conflict.
In the mid-1st century BC Julius Caesar was appointed as perpetual dictator and assassinated in 44 BC. Civil wars and proscriptions continued, culminating in the victory of Octavian, Caesar's adopted son, over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC; the following year Octavian conquered Ptolemaic Egypt, ending the Hellenistic period that had begun with the conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedon in the 4th century BC. Octavian's power was unassailable and in 27 BC the Roman Senate formally granted him overarching power and the new title Augustus making him the first emperor; the first two centuries of the Empire were a period of unprecedented stability and prosperity known as the Pax Romana. It reached its greatest territorial expanse during the reign of Trajan. A period of increasing trouble and decline began with the reign of Commodus. In the 3rd century, the Empire underwent a crisis that threatened its existence, but was reunified under Aurelian. In an effort to stabilize the Empire, Diocletian set up two different imperial courts in the Greek East and Latin West.
Christians rose to power in the 4th century following the Edict of Milan in 313 and the Edict of Thessalonica in 380. Shortly after, the Migration Period involving large invasions by Germanic peoples and the Huns of Attila led to the decline of the Western Roman Empire. With the fall of Ravenna to the Germanic Herulians and the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD by Odoacer, the Western Roman Empire collapsed and it was formally abolished by emperor Zeno in 480 AD; the Eastern Roman Empire, known in the post-Roman West as the Byzantine Empire, collapsed when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks of Mehmed II in 1453. Due to the Roman Empire's vast extent and long endurance, the institutions and culture of Rome had a profound and lasting influence on the development of language, architecture, philosophy and forms of government in the territory it governed Europe; the Latin language of the Romans evolved into the Romance languages of the medieval and modern world, while Medieval Greek became the language of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Its adoption of Christianity led to the formation of Christendom during the Middle Ages. Greek and Roman art had a profound impact on the late medieval Italian Renaissance, while Rome's republican institutions influenced the political development of republics such as the United States and France; the corpus of Roman law has its descendants in many legal systems of the world today, such as the Napoleonic Code. Rome's architectural tradition served as the basis for Neoclassical architecture. Rome had begun expanding shortly after the founding of the republic in the 6th century BC, though it did not expand outside the Italian peninsula until the 3rd century BC, it was an "empire" long before it had an emperor. The Roman Republic was not a nation-state in the modern sense, but a network of towns left to rule themselves and provinces administered by military commanders, it was ruled, not by annually elected magistrates in conjunction with the senate. For various reasons, the 1st century BC was a time of political and military upheaval, which led to rule by emperors.
The consuls' military power rested in the Roman legal concept of imperium, which means "command". Successful consuls were given the honorary title imperator, this is the origin of the word emperor since this title was always bestowed to the early emperors upon their accession. Rome suffered a long series of internal conflicts and civil wars from the late second century BC onward, while extending its power beyond Italy; this was the period of the Crisis of the Roman Republic. Towards the end of this era, in 44 BC, Julius Caesar was perpetual dictator before being assassinated; the faction of his assassins was driven from Rome and defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC by an army led by Mark Antony and Caesar's adopted son Octavian. Antony and Octavian's division of the Roman world between themselves did not last and Octavian's forces defeated those of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, ending the Final War of the Roman Republic. In 27 BC the Senate and People of Rome made Octavian princeps ("first citi
Liber Pontificalis
The Liber Pontificalis is a book of biographies of popes from Saint Peter until the 15th century. The original publication of the Liber Pontificalis stopped with Pope Adrian II or Pope Stephen V, but it was supplemented in a different style until Pope Eugene IV and Pope Pius II. Although quoted uncritically from the 8th to 18th century, the Liber Pontificalis has undergone intense modern scholarly scrutiny; the work of the French priest Louis Duchesne, of others has highlighted some of the underlying redactional motivations of different sections, though such interests are so disparate and varied as to render improbable one popularizer's claim that it is an "unofficial instrument of pontifical propaganda."The title Liber Pontificalis goes back to the 12th century, although it only became current in the 15th century, the canonical title of the work since the edition of Duchesne in the 19th century. In the earliest extant manuscripts it is referred to as Liber episcopalis in quo continentur acta beatorum pontificum Urbis Romae and the Gesta or Chronica pontificum.
During the Middle Ages, Saint Jerome was considered the author of all the biographies up until those of Pope Damasus I, based on an apocryphal letter between Saint Jerome and Pope Damasus published as a preface to the Medieval manuscripts. The attribution originated with Rabanus Maurus and is repeated by Martin of Opava, who extended the work into the 13th century. Other sources attribute the early work to Hegesippus and Irenaeus, having been continued by Eusebius of Caesarea. In the 16th century, Onofrio Panvinio attributed the biographies after Damasus until Pope Nicholas I to Anastasius Bibliothecarius; the modern interpretation, following that of Louis Duchesne, is that the Liber Pontificalis was and unsystematically compiled, that the authorship is impossible to determine, with a few exceptions. Duchesne and others have viewed the beginning of the Liber Pontificalis up until the biographies of Pope Felix III as the work of a single author, a contemporary of Pope Anastasius II, relying on Catalogus Liberianus, which in turn draws from the papal catalogue of Hippolytus of Rome, the Leonine Catalogue, no longer extant.
Most scholars believe the Liber Pontificalis was first compiled in the 6th century. Because of the use of the vestiarium, the records of the papal treasury, some have hypothesized that the author of the early Liber Pontificalis was a clerk of the papal treasury. Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire summarised the scholarly consensus as being that the Liber Pontificalis was composed by "apostolic librarians and notaries of the viiith and ixth centuries" with only the most recent portion being composed by Anastasius. Duchesne and others believe that the author of the first addition to the Liber Pontificalis was a contemporary of Pope Silverius, that the author of another addition was a contemporary of Pope Conon, with popes being added individually and during their reigns or shortly after their deaths; the Liber Pontificalis only contained the names of the bishops of Rome and the durations of their pontificates. As enlarged in the 6th century, each biography consists of: the birth name of the pope and that of his father, place of birth, profession before elevation, length of pontificate, historical notes of varying thoroughness, major theological pronouncements and decrees, administrative milestones, date of death, place of burial, the duration of the ensuing sede vacante.
Pope Adrian II is the last pope for which there are extant manuscripts of the original Liber Pontificalis: the biographies of Pope John VIII, Pope Marinus I, Pope Adrian III are missing and the biography of Pope Stephen V is incomplete. From Stephen V through the 10th and 11th centuries, the historical notes are abbreviated with only the pope's origin and reign duration, it was only in the 12th century that the Liber Pontificalis was systematically continued, although papal biographies exist in the interim period in other sources. Duchesne refers to the 12th century work by Petrus Guillermi in 1142 at the monastery of St. Gilles as the Liber Pontificalis of Petrus Guillermi. Guillermi's version is copied from other works with small additions or excisions from the papal biographies of Pandulf, nephew of Hugo of Alatri, which in turn was copied verbatim from the original Liber Pontificalis from other sources until Pope Honorius II, with contemporary information from Pope Paschal II to Pope Urban II.
Duchesne attributes all biographies from Pope Gregory VII to Urban II to Pandulf, while earlier historians like Giesebrecht and Watterich attributed the biographies of Gregory VII, Victor III, Urban II to Petrus Pisanus, the subsequent biographies to Pandulf. These biographies until those of Pope Martin IV are extant only as revised by Petrus Guillermi in the manuscripts of the monastery of
Chronography of 354
The Chronography of 354 known as the Calendar of 354, was a 4th-century illuminated manuscript, produced in 354 AD for a wealthy Roman Christian named Valentinus by the calligrapher and illuminator Furius Dionysius Filocalus. It is the earliest dated codex. None of the original has survived; the term Calendar of Filocalus is sometimes used to describe the whole collection, sometimes just the sixth part, the Calendar itself. Other versions of the names are used; the text and illustrations are available online. Amongst other significant information, the work contains the earliest reference to the celebration of Christmas as an annual holiday or feast, on December 25, although unique historical dates had been mentioned much earlier, notably December 25, 3 or 4 BC by Hippolytus of Rome during 202–211; the original volume has not survived, but it is thought that it still existed in Carolingian times, by the 8th–9th centuries. A number of copies were made at that time and without illustrations, which in turn were copied at the Renaissance.
The most complete and faithful copies of the illustrations are the pen drawings in a 17th-century manuscript from the Barberini collection. This was copied, under the supervision of the great antiquary Nicholas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, from a Carolingian copy, a Codex Luxemburgensis, itself lost in the 17th century; these drawings, although they are twice removed from the originals, show the variety of sources that the earliest illuminators used as models for manuscript illustration, including metalwork and floor mosaics. The Roman originals were fully painted miniatures. Various partial copies or adaptations survive from the Carolingian renaissance and Renaissance periods. Botticelli adapted a figure of the city of Treberis who grasps a bound barbarian by the hair for his painting, traditionally called Pallas and the Centaur; the Vatican Barberini manuscript, made in 1620 for Peiresc, who had the Carolingian Codex Luxemburgensis on long-term loan, is the most faithful. After Peiresc's death in 1637 the manuscript disappeared.
However some folios had been lost from the Codex Luxemburgensis before Peiresc received it, other copies have some of these. The suggestion of Carl Nordenfalk that the Codex Luxemburgensis copied by Peiresc was the Roman original has not been accepted. Peiresc himself thought the manuscript was seven or eight hundred years old when he had it, though Mabillon had not yet published his De re diplomatica, the first systematic work of paleography, most scholars, following Meyer Schapiro, believe Peiresc would have been able to make a correct judgement on its age. For a full list of manuscripts with copies after the originals, see the external link. Furius Dionysius Filocalus was the leading scribe or calligrapher of the period, also executed the original miniatures, his name is on the dedication page. He was a Christian, living in a moment that lay on the cusp between a pagan and a Christian Roman Empire; the Chronography, like all Roman calendars, is as much an almanac as a calendar. It includes the important Liberian Catalogue, a list of Popes, the Calendar of Filocalus or Philocalus known as the Philocalian Calendar, from which copies of eleven miniatures survive.
Among other information, it contains the earliest reference to Christmas and the dates of Roman Games, with their number of chariot-races. The contents are as follows. All surviving miniatures are full-page combined with some text in various ways: Part 1: title page and dedication - 1 miniature Part 2: images of the personifications of the cities of Rome, Alexandria and Trier - 4 miniatures Part 3: images of the emperors and the birthdays of the Caesars - 2 miniatures Part 4: images of the seven planets with a calendar of the hours - 5 surviving miniatures. Copies of the emblematic drawings appear in a Carolingian text that portrays Mercury and Venus in heliocentric orbits. Part 5: the signs of the Zodiac – no miniatures surviving in this manuscript. Ian. d. Ven. luna xv." – "When these were consuls, Lord Jesus Christ was born 8 days before the kalends of January on the day of Venus Moon 15" – is a historical reference Part 9: the dates of Easter from AD 312 to 411 Part 10: list of the prefects of the city of Rome from 254 to 354 AD Part 11: commemoration dates of past popes from AD 255 to 352 Part 12: commemoration dates of the martyrs Line 1: "VIII kal.
Ian. natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae" – "Eighth day before the kalends of January Birth of Christ in Bethlehem Judea" – is the oldest reference to Jesus' birth as an annual feast day Part 13: bishops of Rome, the Liberian Catalogue Part 14: The 14 regions of the City Part 15: Chronicle of the Bible Part 16: Chronicle of the City of Rome Weitzmann, Kurt. Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination. New York: George Braziller, 1977. Salzm
Four Marks of the Church
The Four Marks of the Church known as the Attributes of the Church, is a term describing four distinctive adjectives—"one, holy and apostolic"—of traditional Christian ecclesiology as expressed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed completed at the First Council of Constantinople in AD 381: " in one, holy and apostolic Church." This ecumenical creed is today recited in the liturgy of the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Church of the East, the Moravian Church, the Lutheran Churches, the Methodist Churches, the Presbyterian Churches, the Anglican Communion and by members of many Reformed Churches. While many doctrines, based on both tradition and different interpretations of the Bible, distinguish one denomination from another explaining why there are so many different ones, the Four Marks, when defined the same way, represent a summary of what many clerical authorities have considered to be the most important affirmations of the Christian faith.
The ideas behind the Four Marks have been in the Christian Church since early Christianity. Allusions to them can be found in the writings of 2nd century early Church Father and bishop Ignatius of Antioch, they were not established in doctrine until the First Council of Constantinople in 381 as an antidote to certain heresies that had crept into the Church in its early history. There the Council elaborated on the Nicene Creed, established by the First Council of Nicea 56 years before by adding to the end a section that included the affirmation: " in one, holy and apostolic Church." The phrase has remained in versions of the Nicene Creed to this day. In some languages, for example, the Latin "catholica" was substituted by "Christian" before the Reformation, though this was an anomaly and continues in use by some Protestant churches today. Hence, "holy catholic" becomes "holy Christian."Roman Catholics believe the description "one, holy and apostolic Church" to be applicable only to the Roman Catholic Church.
They hold that "Christ established here on earth only one Church" and they believe in "the full identity of the Church of Christ with the Catholic Church". While "there are numerous elements of sanctification and of truth which are found outside her structure", these, "as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, impel towards Catholic Unity"; the eastern Churches not in full communion with the Catholic Church thereby "lack something in their condition as particular Churches". The communities born out of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation "do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of Orders, are, deprived of a constituent element of the Church."The Eastern Orthodox Church, in disagreement with the Roman Catholic, regards itself as the historical and organic continuation of the original Church founded by Christ and his apostles. The Oriental Orthodox Church disagrees with both and claims to be the historical and organic continuation of the original Church founded by Christ and his apostles, the "One, Holy and Apostolic" Church of the ancient Christian creeds and the only Church that has always kept the true Christology and faith declared by the first three councils, Nicaea and Ephesus affirmed by the Church Fathers and the Holy Tradition.
The Augsburg Confession found within the Book of Concord, a compendium of belief of the Lutheran Churches, teaches that "the faith as confessed by Luther and his followers is nothing new, but the true catholic faith, that their churches represent the true catholic or universal church." When the Lutherans presented the Augsburg Confession to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor in 1530, they believe to have "showed that each article of faith and practice was true first of all to Holy Scripture, also to the teaching of the church fathers and the councils." As such, the Lutheran Churches traditionally hold. "There is one body and one Spirit just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, over all and through all and in all." This list in the Pauline letters of factors making Christians one body, one church, is doubtless not meant to be exhaustive, says Francis Aloysius Sullivan, but it affirms the oneness of the body, the church, through what Christians have in common, what they have communion in.
Elsewhere, Paul the Apostle says: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus". This statement was about Christians as individuals, but it applied to them as groups, as local churches, whether composed of Jewish or Gentile Christians. In 1 Cor. 15:9, Paul spoke of himself as having persecuted "the church of God", not just the local church in Jerusalem but the same church that he addresses at the beginning of that letter as "the church of God, in Corinth". In the same letter, he tells Christians: "You are the body of Christ and individually members of it", declares that, "just as the body is one and has many members, all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ"; the word holy means set apart for a special purpose for God. Christians understand the holiness of the universal Church to derive from Christ's holiness; the word "catholic" is derived from the Greek adjective καθολικός, meaning "general", "universal".
It is associated with the Greek adverb καθόλου, meaning "according to the whole", "entirely", or "in general", a combination of the preposition κατά meaning "according to" and the adjective ὅ
Western Roman Empire
In historiography, the Western Roman Empire refers to the western provinces of the Roman Empire at any time during which they were administered by a separate independent Imperial court. The terms Western Roman Empire and Eastern Roman Empire are modern descriptions that describe political entities that were de facto independent; the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476, the Western imperial court was formally dissolved in 480. The Eastern imperial court survived until 1453. Though the Empire had seen periods with more than one Emperor ruling jointly before, the view that it was impossible for a single emperor to govern the entire Empire was institutionalised to reforms to Roman law by emperor Diocletian following the disastrous civil wars and disintegrations of the Crisis of the Third Century, he introduced the system of the tetrarchy in 286, with two separate senior emperors titled Augustus, one in the East and one in the West, each with an appointed Caesar. Though the tetrarchic system would collapse in a matter of years, the East–West administrative division would endure in one form or another over the coming centuries.
As such, the Western Roman Empire would exist intermittently in several periods between the 3rd and 5th centuries. Some emperors, such as Constantine I and Theodosius I, governed as the sole Augustus across the Roman Empire. On the death of Theodosius I in 395, he divided the empire between his two sons, with Honorius as his successor in the West, governing from Mediolanum, Arcadius as his successor in the East, governing from Constantinople. In 476, after the Battle of Ravenna, the Roman Army in the West suffered defeat at the hands of Odoacer and his Germanic foederati. Odoacer became the first King of Italy. In 480, following the assassination of the previous Western emperor Julius Nepos, the Eastern emperor Zeno dissolved the Western court and proclaimed himself the sole emperor of the Roman Empire; the date of 476 was popularized by the 18th century British historian Edward Gibbon as a demarcating event for the end of the Western Empire and is sometimes used to mark the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.
Odoacer's Italy, other barbarian kingdoms, would maintain a pretence of Roman continuity through the continued use of the old Roman administrative systems and nominal subservience to the Eastern Roman court. In the 6th century, emperor Justinian I re-imposed direct Imperial rule on large parts of the former Western Roman Empire, including the prosperous regions of North Africa, the ancient Roman heartland of Italy and parts of Hispania. Political instability in the Eastern heartlands, combined with foreign invasions and religious differences, made efforts to retain control of these territories difficult and they were lost for good. Though the Eastern Empire retained territories in the south of Italy until the eleventh century, the influence that the Empire had over Western Europe had diminished significantly; the papal coronation of the Frankish King Charlemagne as Roman Emperor in 800 marked a new imperial line that would evolve into the Holy Roman Empire, which presented a revival of the Imperial title in Western Europe but was in no meaningful sense an extension of Roman traditions or institutions.
The Great Schism of 1054 between the churches of Rome and Constantinople further diminished any authority the Emperor in Constantinople could hope to exert in the west. As the Roman Republic expanded, it reached a point where the central government in Rome could not rule the distant provinces. Communications and transportation were problematic given the vast extent of the Empire. News of invasion, natural disasters, or epidemic outbreak was carried by ship or mounted postal service requiring much time to reach Rome and for Rome's orders to be returned and acted upon. Therefore, provincial governors had de facto autonomy in the name of the Roman Republic. Governors had several duties, including the command of armies, handling the taxes of the province and serving as the province's chief judges. Prior to the establishment of the Empire, the territories of the Roman Republic had been divided in 43 BC among the members of the Second Triumvirate: Mark Antony and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. Antony received the provinces in the East: Achaea and Epirus, Bithynia and Asia, Syria and Cyrenaica.
These lands had been conquered by Alexander the Great. The whole region the major cities, had been assimilated into Greek culture, Greek serving as the lingua franca. Octavian obtained the Roman provinces of the West: Italia, Gallia Belgica, Hispania; these lands included Greek and Carthaginian colonies in the coastal areas, though Celtic tribes such as Gauls and Celtiberians were culturally dominant. Lepidus received the minor province of Africa. Octavian soon took Africa while adding Sicilia to his holdings. Upon the defeat of Mark Antony, a victorious Octavian controlled a united Roman Em
Pope Damasus I
Pope Damasus I was Bishop of Rome, from October 366 to his death in 384. He presided over the Council of Rome of 382 that determined the canon or official list of Sacred Scripture, he spoke out against major heresies in the church and encouraged production of the Vulgate Bible with his support for St. Jerome, he helped reconcile the relations between the Church of Rome and the Church of Antioch, encouraged the veneration of martyrs. As well as various prose letters and other pieces Damasus was the author of Latin verse. Alan Cameron describes his epitaph for a young girl called Projecta as "a tissue of tags and clichés shakily strung together and squeezed into the meter". Damasus has been described as "the first society Pope", was a member of a group of Iberian Christians related to each other, who were close to the Iberian Theodosius I. A number of images of "DAMAS" in gold glass cups represent him and seem to be the first contemporary images of a pope to survive, though there is no real attempt at a likeness.
"Damas" appears including a Florus who may be Projecta's father. It has been suggested that Damasus or another of the group commissioned and distributed these to friends or supporters, as part of a programme "insistently inserting his episcopal presence in the Christian landscape", he is recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church. His life coincided with the rise of Emperor Constantine I and the reunion and re-division of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, associated with the legitimization of Christianity and its adoption as the official religion of the Roman state in 380; the reign of Gratian, which coincided with Damasus' papacy, forms an important epoch in ecclesiastical history, since during that period, Catholic Christianity for the first time became dominant throughout the empire. Under the influence of Ambrose, Gratian prohibited pagan worship at Rome, refused to wear the insignia of the pontifex maximus as unbefitting a Christian, removed the Altar of Victory from the Senate at Rome and confiscated its revenues, despite protests from the pagan members of the Senate.
Emperor Gratian forbade legacies of real property to the Vestals and abolished other privileges belonging to them and to the pontiffs. Pope Damasus I was born in Rome around 305. Damasus' parents were Antonius, who became a priest at the Church of St. Lawrence in Rome, his wife Laurentia. Both parents come from the region of Lusitania. Damasus began his ecclesiastical career as a deacon in his father's church, where he went on to serve as a priest; this became the basilica of Saint Lawrence outside the Walls in Rome. During Damasus' early years, Constantine I rose to rule the Western Roman Empire; as emperor, he issued the Edict of Milan, which granted religious freedom to Christians in all parts of the Roman Empire. A crisis precipitated by the rejection of religious freedom by Licinius, Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, in favor of paganism resulted in a civil war in 324 that placed Constantine in control of a reunited Empire; this led to the establishment of Christian religious supremacy in Constantinople and led to a See in that city which sought to rival the authority of the Roman See.
Damasus was most in his twenties at the time. When Pope Liberius was banished by Emperor Constantius II to Berea in 354, Damasus was archdeacon of the Roman church and followed Liberius into exile, though he returned to Rome. During the period before Liberius' return, Damasus had a great share in the government of the church. In the early Church, bishops were customarily elected by the people of the diocese. While this simple method worked well in a small community of Christians unified by persecution, as the congregation grew in size, the acclamation of a new bishop was fraught with division, rival claimants and a certain class hostility between patrician and plebeian candidates unsettled some episcopal elections. At the same time, 4th-century emperors expected each new pope-elect to be presented to them for approval, which sometimes led to state domination of the Church's internal affairs. Following the death of Pope Liberius on 24 September 366, Damasus succeeded to the Papacy amidst factional violence.
The deacons and laity, supported Liberius' deacon Ursinus. The upper-class former partisans of Felix, who had ruled during Liberius' exile, supported the election of Damasus; the two were elected simultaneously. J. N. D. Kelly states that Damasus hired a gang of thugs that stormed the Julian Basilica, carrying out a three-day massacre of the Ursinians. Thomas Shahan says details of this scandalous conflict are related in the prejudiced "Libellus Precum", a petition to the civil authority on the part of Faustinus and Marcellinus, two anti-Damasan presbyters; such was the violence and bloodshed that the two prefects of the city were called in to restore order, after a first setback, when they were driven to the suburbs and a massacre of 137 was perpetrated in the basilica of Sicininus, the prefects banished Ursinus to Gaul. There was further violence which continued after Ursinus was exiled again. Another ancient narrative of events, the "Gesta", provides more detail, it describes Ursinus as being the valid successor to Liberius, Damasus as following a heretical interloper, Felix.
This account records that an armed force instigated by Damas
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Marcellus (popes)". Encyclopædia Britannica. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 685.
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the 
