Silverius

Silverius was a sixth-century bishop of Rome and the son of Hormisdas, who himself later became pope and reigned from 514 to 523. The Liber Pontificalis describes Silverius as Campanian by origin; later tradition identifies his birthplace with Frosinone in Latium, the town associated with his father. Hormisdas had been married before receiving holy orders, and Silverius was born while his father was still a layman. The year of Silverius’s birth is not recorded in any surviving reliable source. Almost nothing is known of his youth or education. By the time of his elevation he was serving the Roman Church only as a subdeacon, a comparatively modest rank that made his subsequent election unusual and that later writers treated as evidence of strong secular pressure on the choice of pope.

In the spring of 536 Pope Agapetus I died in Constantinople, where he had been conducting ecclesiastical negotiations with the Emperor Justinian I. The Holy See thus fell vacant at the opening of Justinian’s Gothic War, as imperial armies under Belisarius advanced against the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy. The Ostrogothic king Theodahad, anxious for a pontiff not wholly aligned with Constantinopolitan policy, is reported to have influenced the selection of Silverius, who was consecrated bishop of Rome on 8 June 536. His short pontificate unfolded amid the siege and occupation of Rome and amid the wider conflict between Chalcedonian orthodoxy, which Silverius upheld in continuity with Agapetus, and the miaphysite interests favored at court by the Empress Theodora. Theodora wished to restore Anthimus, the deposed miaphysite patriarch of Constantinople, and found a useful ally in the Roman deacon Vigilius, who had accompanied Agapetus to the East and who, according to the papal biography and to Procopius, promised her his cooperation if raised to the papacy.

After Belisarius entered Rome in December 536, Silverius was accused of treacherous correspondence with the Gothic king Witiges, allegedly offering to open the city to the Goths. Ancient narratives, especially the Liber Pontificalis and Procopius, present the charge as a pretext designed to remove a pope who would not rehabilitate Anthimus. In March 537 Silverius was summoned before Belisarius, stripped of his episcopal insignia, clothed as a monk, and declared deposed. Vigilius was then consecrated in his place. Silverius was first banished to Patara in Lycia. The bishop of Patara, persuaded of the exile’s innocence, appealed to Justinian, who ordered that Silverius be returned to Italy so that his case might be examined. Upon his return he was not restored. According to the Liber Pontificalis he was delivered into the power of Vigilius and sent to the small island of Palmarola (Palmaria) in the Pontine Islands off the coast of Latium.

There he died in 537 under conditions of privation that led the Roman Church to honor him as a martyr. The precise day of death is reported differently in the sources; many modern papal lists give 2 December 537, while the Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 20 June, which remains his feast day. He was buried on Palmarola. His cult took root especially on the neighboring island of Ponza, of which he is the patron saint. The Church has always reckoned him a legitimate pope; Vigilius, whatever the circumstances of his accession, was accepted as his successor. Silverius’s story, preserved chiefly in the Liber Pontificalis and in Procopius, remains one of the clearest illustrations of how the Gothic War and court politics in Constantinople could determine the fate of the Roman see in the mid-sixth century.