On the death of the Emperor Marcian, the Alexandrians, taking advantage of the absence of the military prefect Dionysius, who was then fighting against the Nubades in Upper Egypt, renewed their attack upon the Bishop Proterius, and deposed him from his office.  To fill his place they made choice of a monk named Timotheus AElurus, who held the Jacobite faith, and, having among them two deposed bishops, they got them to ordain him Bishop of Alexandria, and then led him by force of arms into the great church which had formerly been called Caesar’s temple.  Upon hearing of the rebellion, the prefect returned in haste to Alexandria; but his approach was only the signal for greater violence, and the enraged people murdered Proterius in the baptistery, and hung up his body at the Tetrapylon in mockery.  This was not a rebellion of the mob.  Timotheus was supported by the men of chief rank in the city; the Honorati who had borne state offices, the Politici who had borne civic offices, and the Navicularii, or contractors for the freight of the Egyptian tribute, were all opposed to the emperor’s claim to appoint the officer whose duties were much more those of prefect of the city than patriarch of Egypt.  With such an opposition as this, the emperor would do nothing without the greatest caution, for he was in danger of losing Egypt altogether.  But so much were the minds of all men then engrossed in ecclesiastical matters that this political struggle wholly took the form of a dispute in controversial divinity, and the emperor wrote a letter to the chief bishops in Christendom to ask their advice in his difficulty.  These theologians were too busily engaged in their controversies to take any notice of the danger of Egypt’s revolting from the empire and joining the Persians; so they strongly advised Leo not to depart from the decrees of the council of Chalcedon, or to acknowledge as Bishop of Alexandria a man who denied the two natures of Christ.  Accordingly, the emperor again risked breaking the slender ties by which he held Egypt; he banished the popular bishop, and forced the Alexandrians to receive in his place one who held the Chalcedonian faith.

On the death of Leo, he was succeeded by his grandson, Leo the Younger, who died in 473, after a reign of one year, and was succeeded by his father Zeno, the son-in-law of the elder Leo.  Zeno gave himself up at once to debauchery and vice, while the empire was harassed on all sides by the barbarians, and the provinces were roused into rebellion by the cruelty of the prefects.  The rebels at last found a head in Basilicus, the brother-in-law of Leo.  He declared himself of the Jacobite faith, which was the faith of the barbarian enemies, of the barbarian troops, and of the barbarian allies of the empire, and, proclaiming himself emperor, made himself master of Constantinople without a battle, and drove Zeno into banishment in the third year of his reign.