The Latrocinium and the Road to Chalcedon

The violent interlude between the writing of the Tome and its vindication: the Second Council of Ephesus of August 449, presided over by Dioscorus of Alexandria, which rehabilitated Eutyches, refused to let Leo’s Tome be read, and deposed Flavian of Constantinople — who died within days of his deposition from injuries received at or after the council. This file traces Dioscorus’ management of the assembly, the suppression of the Tome, the death of Flavian (with its disputed mechanism pinned to the sources), Leo’s verdict that the gathering was “not a judgment but a den of robbers” (non iudicium sed latrocinium), his appeal for a true council to be held in Italy, and the dynastic reversal — the death of Theodosius II on 28 July 450 and the accession of Marcian and Pulcheria — that overturned everything and opened the road to Chalcedon.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Council Theodosius Summoned

When Eutyches appealed his condemnation, he did not appeal in vain at court. The Emperor Theodosius II, under the influence of his powerful eunuch chamberlain Chrysaphius — Eutyches’ godson — and disinclined toward Flavian, summoned a general council to meet at Ephesus in August 449 to re-examine the whole affair (ACO II.1.1; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, vol. 1, 38–60). The imperial sacra did not entrust the presidency to the patriarch of the capital but to Dioscorus of Alexandria, Cyril’s successor and the most powerful churchman of the East, who came to Ephesus determined to vindicate Eutyches and to reassert the Alexandrian line against Constantinople (Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 29–43). Leo sent legates bearing his Tome, which he intended to be read into the record as Rome’s definitive contribution; the council opened on 8 August 449 with some 130 bishops present (ACO II.1.1; Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–40).

Dioscorus and the Suppression of the Tome

From the opening session Dioscorus controlled the proceedings absolutely. The acts of 448 were read; Eutyches was heard; and the assembly, under firm direction, declared Eutyches orthodox and restored him to his priesthood and his monastery (ACO; the Latrocinium acts survive partly in the Syriac Acts, ed. Perry, The Second Synod of Ephesus, and are re-read within the Chalcedon acta of 451 — Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–130). Crucially for Leo, the Tome was never read. Though the Roman legates pressed for it and though it had been written precisely to govern such a council, Dioscorus refused to allow Leo’s letter onto the floor — a procedural exclusion that Leo would never forgive and that became the central count in his indictment of the whole assembly (Leo, Ep. 44; Ep. 45; trans. Hunt, FOTC 34; cf. Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, 250–262).

Having rehabilitated Eutyches, the council turned on his accusers. Flavian of Constantinople and Eusebius of Dorylaeum, who had condemned Eutyches in 448, were themselves deposed, and with them, in the second session and after, a string of leading Eastern bishops — Domnus of Antioch, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Ibas of Edessa, and others of the Antiochene party (ACO; Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–130; Frend, 29–43). The Roman legate Hilarus (the future pope) is recorded as crying out his single Latin word of protest — Contradicitur, “It is contradicted” — before fleeing the city to carry word to Rome (cf. Wessel, 256). The sessions were marked by intimidation: soldiers and bands of monks, including the militant Syrian archimandrite Barsauma, were present, and bishops signed under duress, some signing blank sheets (ACO, re-read at Chalcedon; Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–130).

The Death of Flavian

The deposition of Flavian was not merely a juridical act; it was accompanied by violence, and Flavian did not survive it. He was sent into exile and died within days of his deposition — the sources place his death on or about 11 August 449, three days after the council’s sentence, at Hypaepa (Epipus) in Lydia on the road into exile, near Sardis (Flavian of Constantinople, traditional acta; cf. Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–60; Frend, 40–43). That he died of injuries connected with the council is the consistent witness of the Chalcedonian tradition: the partisan accounts report that Flavian was set upon — “beaten, kicked, and trampled” — by monks of Dioscorus’ party led by Barsauma, and that he succumbed to the resulting injuries on the journey (so the testimony preserved in the later acta and in the hagiographical tradition; cf. Frend, 40–43).

The exact mechanism of his death is disputed, and honesty requires flagging it. [Disputed: the Chalcedonian acta and hagiography report that Flavian was physically assaulted — beaten and kicked by Dioscorus’ monks — and died of those injuries (testimony preserved in ACO II and the later acta; Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 40–43); but Flavian’s own surviving letter of protest speaks only of soldiers with drawn swords and does not itself describe a beating, and the impartiality of the witnesses who blamed Dioscorus is questioned, so that historians treat the fact of his death from the council’s violence as secure while regarding the precise manner — and the extent of Dioscorus’ personal responsibility — as uncertain (cf. Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, vol. 1, 38–60).] What is not in dispute is that Flavian died, swiftly and as a direct consequence of the council, and that Chalcedon two years later honoured him as a martyr and reversed his deposition (ACO II.1.1; Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–60). His death gave the Eastern resistance to Ephesus II its decisive moral weight.

“Not a Judgment but a Den of Robbers”

When the news reached Rome, Leo’s response was unequivocal. He declared the council’s acts null and void — it had excluded his Tome, condemned the orthodox, and absolved a heretic — and he refused it any standing as a council of the Church (Leo, Ep. 44; Ep. 45; trans. Hunt, FOTC 34). It is to this assembly that he gave the name by which history knows it. Writing to the Empress Pulcheria in 451, Leo branded the gathering “non iudicium sed latrocinium” — “not a judgment but a den of robbers” (Leo, Ep. 95, to Pulcheria, 20 July 451; PL 54; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12). The Latin latrocinium — a band of brigands, a robbery — stuck, and the Second Council of Ephesus has been called the Latrocinium or “Robber Synod” ever since. The coinage was not mere invective: it was a juridical judgment, asserting that an assembly which abandoned due process and excluded the voice of the Apostolic See had forfeited the name of a council altogether.

Leo’s Appeal for a True Council

Leo did not merely condemn; he demanded redress. Through the latter half of 449 and into 450 he pressed for a new, genuinely general council to undo the work of Ephesus, and he was insistent that it be held in Italy, on Western ground and under conditions Rome could trust, where the Tome would be read and the deposed bishops restored (Leo, Ep. 44; Ep. 54; Ep. 69–70; trans. Hunt, FOTC 34; cf. Wessel, 262–270). He enlisted the Western imperial court — the Emperor Valentinian III, his mother Galla Placidia, and his wife Licinia Eudoxia wrote to Theodosius II on Leo’s behalf — and he kept up a stream of letters to Constantinople (Leo, Ep. 55–58; trans. Hunt, FOTC 34). But Theodosius II, committed to Dioscorus and to the settlement of 449, refused: as long as he lived, the verdict of the Robber Synod stood, and the council Leo wanted could not be called.

The Dynastic Reversal and the Road to Chalcedon

The deadlock was broken not by argument but by an accident of the saddle. On 28 July 450 the Emperor Theodosius II died after a fall from his horse, leaving no son (cf. Frend, 43–46; Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–60). The throne passed to his sister Pulcheria, the formidable Augusta who had long opposed Chrysaphius and Eutyches, and to the soldier Marcian, whom she married and who became emperor — a regime decisively committed to the dyophysite cause and to Rome’s position. The reversal was swift and total. Chrysaphius was executed; Eutyches was banished; the body of Flavian was brought back to Constantinople and buried with honour among the patriarchs; and the deposed bishops were restored (Frend, 43–46; Price and Gaddis, vol. 1, 38–60).

Marcian and Pulcheria now moved to summon the general council that Leo had demanded — though, to Leo’s disappointment, they would hold it in the East, at Nicaea and then Chalcedon, under imperial supervision, rather than in Italy (Leo, Ep. 89–90; trans. Hunt, FOTC 34). Leo would have preferred no new council at all, holding that the Tome had already settled the question and that the East need only subscribe it; but he accepted the summons, and his legates carried the Tome east once more — this time to be read, scrutinized, and acclaimed. The Robber Synod had suppressed Leo’s letter and killed the patriarch who had asked for it; the Council of Chalcedon of 451 would vindicate both (see The Council and the Tome). The road from the latrocinium to the fourth Ecumenical Council ran, improbably, through an emperor’s fatal fall.

See Also

References

  • Leo the Great, Letters (esp. Ep. 44, 45, 54, 55–58, 69–70, 89–90, and Ep. 95 to Pulcheria with the non iudicium sed latrocinium verdict), PL 54; trans. Edmund Hunt, St. Leo the Great: Letters, Fathers of the Church 34 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1957); Ep. 95 also trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 12.
  • Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum (ACO), ed. Eduard Schwartz, tom. II; the acts of the 448 Home Synod and of Ephesus II (449) are re-read within the Chalcedon acta.
  • The Second Synod of Ephesus, the Syriac Acts, ed. and trans. S. G. F. Perry (Dartford, 1881) — the partial Syriac record of the Latrocinium.
  • Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 3 vols., Translated Texts for Historians 45 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), esp. vol. 1, 38–130.
  • W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
  • Susan Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2008).