Empire. This was the cultivated and brilliant Athenian beauty, Irene, who was only twenty-eight years of age when she became a widow. Of Greek blood, she found in her own people the sympathy and support she wanted in order to maintain her independence against her late husband's family and racial connections. The iconoclastic emperors were of Asiatic origin—Isaurian and Armenian; the chief supporters of image worship were found among the Greeks. It was good policy therefore for Irene to favour the icons. She was a woman of illimitable ambition, an ambition that smothered the instincts of motherhood. Discovering a conspiracy against her power instigated by her brother-in-law, Cæsar Nicephorus, she forced Leo's five brothers into the priesthood and compelled them to officiate at the high altar of St. Sophia during the Christmas ceremonies. Meanwhile Irene was actively engaged in the restoration of image worship. With this end in view she was just as Erastian as the iconoclastic emperors had been. It was all government action and forcible interference with ecclesiastical affairs. Irene deposed the patriarch Paul who was an Iconoclast, and nominated for the head of the Greek Church Tarasius, a man of high reputation for learning and character, but a civilian, the secretary of the imperial cabinet. The assembly of citizens to whom the empress proposed her candidate elected him by acclamation. He was a popular personage and the empress's policy was also popular. But had the case been otherwise resistance to the court would have been regarded as preposterous. Tarasius was reluctant to take office, and he refused to do so till his election had been confirmed by a council—consisting, of course, of image worshippers. The newly appointed patriarch then revived the intercourse between Constantinople and the other patriarchates which had been broken off during the dominance of the iconoclastic emperors. Thus the schism was brought to an end, and the Roman Pope Hadrian wrote a joyful letter at the return of the empire to the fold of orthodoxy, in the course of which he defended the practice of image worship by an appeal to Scripture, quoting, among
