BELISARIUS. – Celebrated Byzantine strategist, born c. 500, died in 565. Having been entrusted with the task of driving the Ostrogoths out of Italy, he quickly conquered Sicily and the southern part of the peninsula as far as Naples, and occupied Rome, placing it in a state of defense.
During the siege of Rome by Vitiges, Belisarius, though hesitating and not without reluctance (L. Duchesne, L'Église au VIe siècle, pp. 151–54), consented in March 537 to depose Pope Silverius, who was accused of intending to surrender the city to the Goths. He had Silverius stripped of his priestly vestments and clothed in a monastic habit. Furthermore, he had the Roman clergy elect as Pope the deacon Vigilius (q.v.), who had previously been an apocrisarius in Constantinople and was loyal to the empress. According to the unanimous testimony of the Liber pontificalis (ed. L. Duchesne, I, pp. 291–393), Procopius (Anecdota, 1), and the deacon Liberatus of Carthage (Breviarium, 20), the deposition of Silverius was a revenge of Theodora, who thus sought—though in vain—to secure from a less hostile pope the reinstatement of Antimus, who had been deposed by Pope Agatho, on the patriarchal throne of Constantinople, in order to advance her own pro-Monophysite agenda.
Moreover, while Belisarius was in Rome, he made substantial gifts to the churches, such as the particular cross of 100 pounds of gold, on which all his victories were inscribed, destined for the tomb of St. Peter; he founded a monastery on the Via Flaminia and a xenodochium for pilgrims on the Via Lata (Lib. pontif., ed. L. Duchesne, I, pp. 142 and 296).
Later, Belisarius acted as an intermediary between the empress and Pope Vigilius, both after the violence suffered by the latter in the church of St. Peter in Constantinople, since he did not approve of the "Profession of Faith of Justinian," and to bring Vigilius back to Constantinople, who, to escape the untenable situation created for him by the emperor, had taken refuge in Chalcedon, and again on 1 May 553, when he informed the Pope that Justinian would never accept a certain proposal of his regarding the Fifth Ecumenical Council, which was about to be inaugurated (5 May).
BELISARIUS. – Together with a certain *Liberatus*, he is presented as the author of two acrostic and telestic poems (q.V. CELESTIO) compiled from the verses of Sedulius, each celebrating *Sedulius antistes* every sixteen lines. They are dated to about the year 500, and their authors are called *scholastici*. Cf. *Anthologia latina*, ed. A. Riese, Leipzig 1906, nos. 492 and 493.