Anatolius of Constantinople

ANATOLIUS, an´´ɑ̄-tō´li-us, OF CONSTANTINOPLE: Patriarch of Constantinople; d. 458. He belonged to the Alexandrian school, was apocrisiarius at Constantinople of Dioscurus of Alexandria, and succeeded Flavian as patriarch after the “Robber Synod” of Ephesus (449). It was a time of conflict, and Anatolius was more than once accused of heresy, ambition, and injustice. At the Council of Chalcedon (451) he succeeded in having reaffirmed a canon of the second general council (Constantinople, 381) which placed Constantinople on an equal footing with Rome. He crowned the emperor Leo I. in 457, which is said by Gibbon (chap. xxxvi.) to be the first instance of the performance of such a ceremony by an ecclesiastic. Anatolius is identified by John Mason Neale (Hymns of the Eastern Church, London, 1862) with the author of the hymns (in Neale’s translation) Fierce was the wild billow, and The day is past and over. Others think that Anatolius the hymn-writer lived at a later time.

Bibliography: DCB, i. 111; Julian, Hymnology, pp. 63, 1140.