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OF THE KOMAN EMPIKE 117 apostate, Justus was his name, again deceived and betrayed his unsusj^ecting brethren, and a new conformity to the acts of St. Paul may be found in the conversion of Simeon : Hke the apostle, he embraced the doctrine which he had been sent to persecute, renounced his honours and fortunes, and acquired among the Paulicians the fame of a missionary and a martyr. They were not ambitious of martyrdom,^^ but, in a calamitous period of one hundred and fifty years, their patience sustained whatever zeal could inflict ; and power was insufficient to eradicate the obstinate vegetation of fanaticism and reason. From the blood and aslies of the first victims, a succession of teachers and congregations repeatedly arose ; amidst their foreign hostilities, they found leisure for domestic quarrels ; they preached, they disputed, they suffered ; and the virtues, the apparent virtues, of Sergius, in arsergiuaof pilgrimage of thirty-three years, are reluctantly confessed by *^*^ the orthodox historians. ^'^ The native cruelty of Justinian the Second was stimulated by a pious cause ; and he vainly hoped to extinguish, in a single conflagration, the name and memory of the Paulicians. By their primitive simplicity, their abhorrence of popular superstition, the Iconoclast princes might have been reconciled to some erroneous doctrines ; but they themselves were exposed to the calumnies of the monks, and they chose to be the tyrants, lest they should be accused as the accomplices, of the Manichgeans. Such a reproach has sullied the clemency of Nicephorus, who relaxed in their favour the severity of the penal statutes, nor will his character sustain the honour of a more liberal motive. The feeble Michael the First, the rigid Leo the Armenian, were foremost in the race of persecution ; but the prize must doubtless be adjudged to the sanguinary i^It should seem that the Paulicians allowed themselves some latitude of equivocation and mental reservation ; till the Catholics discovered the pressing questions, which reduced them to the alternative of apostacy or martyrdom (Petr. .Sicul. p. 760). ^The persecution is told by Petrus Siculus (p. 579-763) with satisfaction and pleasantry. Justus y^j/f? persolvit. Simeon was not tiVo? but k^tos [cp. Petrus, c. 27, p. 1281, ed. Migne] (the pronunciation of the two vowels must have been nearly the same), a great whale that drowned the mariners who mistook him for an island. See likewise Cedrenus (p. 432-435 [i. 766 Si/q., ed. B.]). [Sergius seems to have lived about the end of the eighth and beginning of the ninth century ; but there are some difficulties and confusions in the chronology. Cp. Tcr- Mkrttschian, Die Paulikianer, p. 17 sqq. There seems no reason to question the date assigned to the founder Sylvanus by George Monachus, viz. , the reigns of Constans II. and Constantine IV. And in that case there is no reason why Gegnasius, the third head of the Paulician Church, should not have lived under Leo III. (see Photius, p. 53, ap. Migne, P. G. 102; Petrus Sic, p. 1284, ih. 104). The chronology holds together.]