History shows several emperors of the East excommunicated by preceding popes: Arcadius, by Innocent I; Anastasius, by Saint Symmachus; and Leo the Isaurian, by Gregory II and Gregory III.

His great abilities were seen and admired; so that when the people of Milan sent to Symmachus, the prefect of the city, to procure for them an able teacher of rhetoric, he sent Augustine,a providential thing, since in the second capital of Italy he heard the great Ambrose preach; he found one Christian whom he respected, whom he admired,and him he sought.

Sua cuique civitati (Laeli) religio sit, nostra nobis, Tully thought fit every city should be free in this behalf, adore their own Custodes et Topicos Deos, tutelar and local gods, as Symmachus calls them.

Why was Theodoric, the King of the Goths, so suspicious, and so affrighted with a fish head alone, but that he had murdered Symmachus, and Boethius his son-in-law, those worthy Romans?

When, therefore, they of Milan had sent to Rome to the prefect of the city, to furnish them with a rhetoric reader for their city, I made application that Symmachus, then prefect of the city, would try me by setting me some subject for oration, and so send me.

This is probably the animal to which Aurelius Symmachus, a Roman consul in Britain, referred when, writing to his brother in Ireland in A.D. 391, he acknowledged the receipt of seven Irish hounds.

These sombre, tortuous, gamy verses, crammed with terms of ordinary speech, with words diverted from their primitive meaning, claimed and interested him even more than the soft and already green style of the historians, Ammianus Marcellinus and Aurelius Victorus, Symmachus the letter writer, and Macrobius the grammarian and compiler.