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Leo I › Who Was
Definition and Origins
Leo I was emperor of the Byzantine Empire from 457 to 474 CE. He was also known as “Leo the Butcher” ( Makelles ) for the assassination of his patron and rival Aspar. Although his reign was lacklustre and included a serious defeat to the Vandals, he founded the Leonid dynasty, which ruled from Constantinople until 518 CE.
SUCCESSION
Leo acquired the throne not by inheritance but because he was selected by the gifted general who pulled the strings of Byzantine politics at that time, Aspar the Alan. The general had already been manipulating Leo's predecessor, Marcian (r. 450-457 CE), whom he had similarly promoted to emperor. Aspar, although the most powerful man at court, could not himself become emperor because of his barbarian background and unorthodox religious views. Consequently, the general did the next best thing and acquired himself not one but two successive puppet emperors.
LEO I WAS THE FIRST BYZANTINE EMPEROR TO BE CROWNED BY THE PATRIARCH (BISHOP) OF CONSTANTINOPLE.
Leo, formerly a soldier and then steward of Aspar's household, became emperor aged 56 on 7 February 457 CE and was the first Byzantine emperor to be crowned by the Patriarch (bishop) of Constantinople, in this case, Anatolios. Previously the legions lifting the emperor on their shields in the Hippodrome of Constantinople had sufficed, but from now on there would also be a bit of pomp and ceremony from the Church, too. It was a significant development which moved Byzantium one step further away from its Roman heritage and reinforced the role of the emperor as a Christian monarch; it would also influence most subsequent coronations in Western Europe right up to that of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 CE.
LEO & THE ISAURIANS
Aspar, as it turned out, had made a very poor choice in his puppet. Leo might have been getting on a bit, and he had no male heir to complicate matters of succession, but the emperor proved a lot more ambitious than his patron had hoped for. Leo was fully aware of Aspar's stranglehold on power and so he sought to undermine the general's strength at source: the army, and especially the Germans who dominated at least half of it. The emperor promoted as many Isaurians as he could to counterbalance the German faction and to try and win the army's loyalty to his own side. These wild tribesmen from Isauria in central and southern Asia Minor enjoyed a fearsome reputation as warriors, and in 466 CE, Leo even went so far as to give his daughter Ariadne as a wife for their chief Tarasicodissa, who would take the more Byzantine-friendly reign name of Zeno.Even better, Zeno was soon able to show that Aspar's son was guilty of treason and remove a little sparkle from the general's hitherto glittering reputation.
Byzantine Empire c. 460 CE
Aspar, however, did not sit idle while his power base was eroded from beneath him and he enlisted the help of the influential court figure Basiliscus, brother of Leo's wife Verina. The historian JJ Norwich gives the following description of these unlikely bedfellows:
The two could scarcely have been more different. Aspar was without culture; as a convinced Arian, he came near to denying the godhead of Christ; as a leader of men he was the finest general of his time. Basiliscus was a Hellenized, well-educated Roman; a fanatical monophysite, for whom Christ was divine rather than human; and a man totally unfitted for any sort of command. They were flung together, however, by their common hatred of the Isaurians. (51)
THE VANDALS DISASTER
There erupted a power struggle but not before Leo sent Basiliscus on a campaign against the Vandal king Genseric in 468 CE. The Vandals had still gone unpunished for their sacking of Rome in 455 CE, and Genseric was intent on persecuting orthodox Christians - two good reasons for Leo to gain some prestige in attacking the barbarians in North Africa. The state coffers were emptied and tons of gold invested in both the army and navy. Unfortunately for the Byzantines, Basiliscus proved inept and, despite a huge armada and an army of 100,000 men, he still managed to fail in his mission. Tricked by the Vandal king into delaying his attack, Basiliscus' fleet was caught napping and destroyed by enemy fireships off the coast of Mercurion.The commander fled back to a hot reception in Constantinople where he was forced to seek sanctuary in the Church of Hagia Sophia while a baying mob screamed for his head. Only his sister's pleas saved Basiliscus from execution for incompetence.Instead, Leo exiled the commander to Thrace, but he would return to trouble Byzantine politics sooner rather than later.
Colossus of Barletta
The army's defeat to the Vandals did not do Aspar any good either, as he was considered by many to be its commander-in-chief. Largely thanks to Isaurian support, the wrestle for power finally ended in Leo's favour with the deaths of Aspar and his son Ardabourios in 471 CE. Leo was considered the assassin of the pair who had been lured to the palace and dealt with by the court eunuchs. Thereafter, Leo was given the unflattering epithet of “the Butcher” ( Makelles ) by his opponents. Still, in comparison to many of his predecessors (and his successors), Leo's reign was a relatively calm one, free from the constant intrigue and literal backstabbing that seemed to plague the Byzantine court.
DEATH & SUCCESSORS
When Leo died of dysentery on 3 February 474 CE, Zeno took the Byzantine throne, sharing it for form's sake with his young son Leo II. However, the very next year, and following the death of Leo II, Zeno was overthrown by his mother-in-law Verina and her brother Basiliscus. Zeno, however, regained his throne with help from Daniel the Stylite, the Pillar Saint, and would rule until 491 CE.
Parmenides › Who Was
Definition and Origins
Parmenides (c. 485 BCE) of Elea was a Greek philosopher from the colony of Elea in southern Italy. He is known as the founder of the Eleatic School of philosophy which taught a strict Monistic view of reality. Philosophical Monism is the belief that all of the sensible world is of one, basic, substance and being, un-created and indestructible. According to the ancient writer Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 CE), Parmenides was a student of Xenophanes of Colophon (who some claim as the founder of the Eleatic School) but left his master's discipline to pursue his own vision. Even so, the stamp of Xenophanes' teachings can be seen in the work of Parmenides in that both assert that the things in life which one thinks one understands may be quite different than they seem to be, especially regarding an understanding of the gods. Xenophon 's insistence on a single deity, who in no way resembled human beings, seems to have been the basis for Parmenides' claim of a single substance comprising all of reality. Parmenides was a younger contemporary of Heraclitus who claimed that all things are constantly in motion and change (that the basic `stuff' of life is change itself). Parmenides' thought could not be further removed from that of Heraclitus in that Parmenides claimed nothing moved, change was an impossibility, and that human sense perception could not be relied upon for an apprehension of Truth.
THE PHILOSOPHER OF CHANGELESS BEING
According to Parmenides, “There is a way which is and a way which is not” (a way of fact, or truth, and a way of opinion about things) and one must come to an understanding of the way “which is” to understand the nature of life. Known as the Philosopher of Changeless Being, Parmenides' insistance on an eternal, single Truth and his repudiation of relativism and mutability would greatly influence the young philosopher Plato and, through him, Aristotle (though the latter would interpret Parmenides' Truth quite differently than his master did). Plato devoted a dialogue to the man, the Parmenides, in which Parmenides and his student, Zeno, come to Athens and instruct a young Socrates in philosophical wisdom. This is quite an homage to the thought of Parmenides in that, in most dialogues, Plato presents Socrates as the wise questioner who needs no instruction from anyone. While Parmenides was an older contemporary of Socrates, it is doubtful the two men ever met and Plato's dialogue is considered an idealized account of the philosopher (though accurate in portraying his philosophy).
DEFENCE BY ZENO
Zeno of Elea was Parmenides' most famous student and wrote forty paradoxes in defense of Parmenides' claim that change – and even motion – were illusions which one must disregard in order to know the nature of oneself and that of the universe.Zeno's work was intended to clarify and defend Parmenides' statements, such as, "There is not, nor will there be, anything other than what is since indeed Destiny has fettered it to remain whole and immovable. Therefore those things which mortals have established, believing them to be true, will be mere names: "'coming into being and passing away,' 'being and not being,' 'change of place'..."(Robinson, 116). In other words, Parmenides argues that we may think the world we live in is comprised of multiples but, in reality, it is One. Nothing is capable of inherently changing in any significant fashion because the very substance of reality is unchangeable and 'nothingness' cannot be comprehended.
NOTHING CAN COME FROM NOTHING
Even so, it seems that Parmenides' ideas themselves were hard to comprehend for his listeners, necessitating Zeno's mathematical paradoxes. Parmenides' main point, however, was simply that nothing could come from nothing and that `being' must have always existed. He writes:
There is left but this single path to tell thee of: namely, that being is. And on this path there are many proofs that being is without beginning and indestructible; it is universal, existing alone, immovable and without end; nor ever was it nor will it be, since it now is, all together, one, and continuous. For what generating of it wilt thou seek out?From what did it grow, and how? I will not permit thee to say or to think that it came from not-being; for it is impossible to think or to say that not-being is. What would then have stirred it into activity that it should arise from not-being later rather than earlier? So it is necessary that being either is absolutely or is not. Nor will the force of the argument permit that anything spring from being except being itself. Therefore justice does not slacken her fetters to permit generation or destruction, but holds being firm. (Fairbanks, 93)
Parmenides of Elea
BEING & NOT BEING
Simply put, his argument is that since 'something' cannot come from 'nothing' then 'something' must have always existed in order to produce the sensible world. This world we perceive, then, is of one substance - that same substance from which it came - and we who inhabit it share in this same unity of substance. Therefore, if it should appear that a person is born from `nowhere' or that one dies and goes somewhere else, both of these perceptions must be wrong since that which is now can never have been 'not' nor can it ever 'not be'. In this, Parmenides may be developing ideas from the earlier philosopher Pythagoras (c. 571-c.497 BCE) who claimed the soul is immortal and returns to the sensible world repeatedly through reincarnation. If so, however, Parmenides very radically departed from Pythagorean thought which allows that there is plurality present in our reality. To Parmenides, and his disciples of the Eleatic School, such a claim would be evidence of belief in the senses which, they insisted, could never be trusted to reveal the truth. The Eleatic principle that all is one, and unchanging, exerted considerable influence on later philosophers and schools of thought. Besides Plato (who, in addition to the dialogue Parmenides also addressed Eleatic concepts in his dialogues of the Sophist and the Statesman ) the famous Sophist Gorgias employed Eleatic reasoning and principles in his work as Aristotle would also do later, principally in his Metaphysics.
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