ANASTASIUS II

born , Rome died Nov. 19, 498, Rome pope from Nov. 24, 496, to 498. In notifying the Byzantine emperor Anastasius I of his accession, Anastasius expressed a conciliatory attitude toward the late patriarch Acacius of Constantinople, who had been deposed and excommunicated in 484 by Pope St. Felix III. The Acacian Schism resulted from this act. The pope's reception of the Byzantine deacon Photinus, sent to Rome by a supporter of Acacius, was followed by a schism at Rome and the charge that the pope desired to rehabilitate Acacius. Anastasius died in the midst of the controversy. A confused tradition blamed Anastasius for being led by Photinus into heretical opinions concerning the divinity of Jesus Christ. Dante (Inferno XI, 8) placed him among the heretics in the sixth circle of hell. original name Artemis (d. 721), Byzantine emperor from 713 to 715. He was chosen to take the throne after an army coup deposed Philippicus, whose secretary he had been. Anastasius reversed the ecclesiastical policies of Philippicus and tried to reform the army before he, too, was deposed. Assuring Pope Constantine of his orthodoxy, Anastasius withdrew Philippicus' monothelite decrees, which had imposed the heretical doctrine of a single will of Christ. Militarily, he fortified Constantinople, selected the island of Rhodes as a Byzantine naval base, and sent the Isaurian Leo, the future emperor Leo III, to defend Syria against the Arabs. In the meantime, troops in the Opsikian province rebelled and proclaimed as emperor Theodosius, a local tax collector, who was seated (715) in Constantinople after a six-month civil war. Anastasius fled and became a monk in Thessalonica in 716. Failing in an attempt to regain his throne in 720, he was executed by Theodosius' successor, Leo III.