Zeno

Zeno ruled the eastern Roman Empire for seventeen years, was driven from the throne once, and outlasted the western empire entirely. He was an Isaurian, from the mountains of southern Asia Minor, born with a name the Greeks rendered as Tarasicodissa, and Isaurians were regarded by Constantinople as barbarians who happened to live inside the frontier. He was brought in by the emperor Leo I as a counterweight to Aspar, the Alan general who had made three emperors and controlled the army. Zeno married Leo's daughter Ariadne, took a Greek name, and helped arrange Aspar's murder in 471. His grandson Leo II succeeded in 474 as a child and made his father co-emperor before dying within months. The reign was almost entirely a matter of surviving conspiracies. Basiliscus, the dowager empress's brother, drove him out in 475 and lost the throne within twenty months by alienating the church and the capital; Zeno came back and starved him and his family to death in a cistern. Two further Isaurian generals revolted. He is the emperor to whom Odoacer sent the western imperial regalia in 476, having deposed Romulus Augustulus — an act that made Zeno the sole Roman emperor, which he had no capacity to act on. He solved the Ostrogothic problem by sending Theodoric to take Italy from Odoacer, which removed both from his own territory. His Henotikon of 482, a compromise on the nature of Christ, produced a thirty-five-year schism with Rome. He died in 491. He was reportedly buried alive during an epileptic seizure, which is probably a story told by people who disliked him.

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