posed to the caprice of the court. Among his predecessors, and even in the see of Rome, Ignatius might have found examples of men who preferred to renounce a dignity they could no longer exercise with profit to the Church, rather than to excite by useless opposition disturbances which always injure it. He did not see fit to imitate these examples, and refused to renounce his dignity in spite of the entreaties of several bishops.
The court could not yield. It convoked the clergy, who chose Photius for their Patriarch.
Photius was nephew of the Patriarch Tarasius, and belonged to the imperial family. His portrait is thus drawn by Fleury:[1]
"The genius of Photius was even above his birth. He had a great mind carefully cultivated. His wealth enabled him readily to find books of all descriptions; and his desire of glory led him to pass whole nights in reading. He thus became the most learned man not only of his own but of preceding ages. He was versed in grammar, poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, medicine, and all the secular sciences; but he had not neglected ecclesiastical lore, and when he came to office, he made himself thoroughly acquainted with it."
In a work latterly composed by the court of Rome, they have been obliged to say of Photius:[2] "His vast erudition, his insinuating temper, at once supple and firm, and his capacity in political affairs, even his sweet expression of face, his noble and attractive manners, made him conspicuous among his contemporaries."
But we ought first to have traced the character of Photius after those writers who are not suspected of partiality to him. Truth also demands that we should state what documents have served as the basis of all
