Some critics and commentators accuse Dante of confounding Pope Anastasius with the Emperor of that name. It is however highly probable that Dante knew best whom he meant. Both were accused of heresy, though the heresy of the Pope seems to have been of a mild type. A few years previous to his time, namely, in the year 484, Pope Felix III and Acacius, Bishop of Constantinople, mutually excommunicated each other. When Anastasius II became Pope in 496, “he dared,” says Milman, History of Latin Christianity , I 349, “to doubt the damnation of a bishop excommunicated by the See of Rome: ‘Felix and Acacius are now both before a higher tribunal; leave them to that unerring judgment.’ He would have the name of Acacius passed over in silence, quietly dropped, rather than publicly expunged from the diptychs. This degenerate successor of St.