To him Xenocrates of Chalcedon dedicated his four books on the art of governing; and it is specially mentioned that he bestowed great care on the education of his brother’s children. One of them, Troas, he married; Olympias, the other niece, was married to Philip II. of Macedon and became the mother of Alexander the Great. On the death of Arymbas, Alexander the brother of Olympias, was put on the throne by Philip and married his daughter Cleopatra. Alexander assumed the new title of king of Epirus, and raised the reputation of his country abroad. Asked by the Tarentines for aid against the Samnites and Lucanians, he made a descent at Paestum in 332 B.C., and reduced several cities of the Lucani and Bruttii; but in a second attack he was surrounded, defeated and slain near Pandosia in Bruttium.
Aeacides, the son of Arymbas II., succeeded Alexander. He espoused the cause of Olympias against Cassander, but was dethroned by his own soldiers, and had hardly regained his position when he fell in battle (313 B.C.) against Philip, brother of Cassander. He had, by his wife Phthia, a son, the celebrated Pyrrhus, and two daughters, Deidamia and Troas, of whom the former married Demetrius Poliorcetes. His brother Alcetas, who succeeded him, continued unsuccessfully the war with Cassander; he was put to death by his rebellious subjects in 295 B.C., and was succeeded by Pyrrhus (q.v.), who for six years fought against the Romans in south Italy and Sicily, and gave to Epirus a momentary importance which it never again possessed.
Alexander, his son, who succeeded in 272 B.C., attempted to seize Macedonia, and defeated Antigonus Gonatas, but was himself shortly afterwards driven from his kingdom by Demetrius. He recovered it, however, and spent the rest of his days in peace. Two other insignificant reigns brought the family of Pyrrhus to its close, and Epirus was thenceforward governed by a magistrate, elected annually in a general assembly of the nation held at Passaron. Having imprudently espoused the cause of Perseus (q.v.) in his ill-fated war against the Romans, 168 B.C., it was exposed to the fury of the conquerors, who destroyed, it is said, seventy towns, and carried into slavery 150,000 of the inhabitants. From this blow it never recovered. At the dissolution of the Achaean League (q.v.), 146 B.C., it became part of the province of Macedonia, receiving the name Epirus Vetus, to distinguish it from Epirus Nova, which lay to the east.
On the division of the empire it fell to the East, and so remained until the taking of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204, when Michel Angelus Comnenus seized Aetolia and Epirus. On the death of Michel in 1216, these countries fell into the hands of his brother Theodore. Thomas, the last of the direct line, was murdered in 1318 by his nephew Thomas, lord of Zante and Cephalonia, and his dominions were dismembered. Not long after, Epirus was overrun by the Samians and Albanians, and the confusion which had been growing since the division of the empire was worse confounded still. Charles II. Tocco, lord of Cephalonia and Zante, obtained the recognition of his title of Despot of Epirus from the emperor Manuel Comnenus in the beginning of the 15th century; but his family was deprived of their possession in 1431 by Murad (Amurath) II. In 1443, Scanderbeg, king of Albania, made himself master of a considerable part of Epirus; but on his death it fell into the power of the Venetians. From these it passed again to the Turks, under whose dominion it still remains. For modern history see Albania.
Authorities.—Nauze, “Rech. hist. sur les peuples qui s’établirent en Épire,” in Mém. de l’Acad. des Inscr. (1729); Pouqueville, Voyage en Morée, &c, en Albanie (Paris, 1805); Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania, &c. (2 vols., London, 1813); Wolfe, “Observations on the Gulf of Arta” in Journ. Royal Geog. Soc., 1834; W. M. Leake, Travels in Northern Greece (London, 1835): Merleker, Darstellung des Landes und der Bewohner von Epeiros (Königsberg, 1841); J. H. Skene, “Remarkable Localities on the Coast of Epirus,” in Journ. Roy. Geog. Soc., 1848; Bowen, Mount Athos, Thessaly and Epirus (London, 1852); von Hahn, Albanesische Studien (Jena, 1854); Bursian, Geog. von Griechenland (vol. i., Leipzig, 1862); Schäfli, “Versuch einer Klimatologie des Thales von Jannina,” Neue Denkschr. d. allgem. schweizer. Ges. f. Naturw. xix. (Zürich, 1862); Major R. Stuart, “On Phys. Geogr. and Natural Resources of Epirus,” in Journ. R.G.S., 1869; Guido Cora, in Cosmos; Dumont, “Souvenirs de l’Adriatique, de l’Épire, &c.” in Rev. des deux mondes (Paris, 1872); de Gubernatis, “L’Epiro,” Bull. Soc. Geogr. Ital. viii. (Rome, 1872); Dozon, “Excursion en Albanie,” Bull. Soc. Geogr., 6th series; Karapanos, Dodone et ses ruines (Paris, 1878); von Heldreich, “Ein Beitrag zur Flora von Epirus,” Verh. Bot. Vereins Brandenburg (Berlin, 1880); Kiepert, “Zur Ethnographie von Epirus,” Ges. Erdk. xvii. (Berlin, 1879); Zompolides, “Das Land und die Bewohner von Epirus,” Ausland (Berlin, 1880); A. Philippson, Thessalien und Epirus (Berlin, 1897). (J. L. M.)
EPISCOPACY (from Late Lat. episcopatus, the office of a
bishop, episcopus), the general term technically applied to that
system of church organization in which the chief ecclesiastical
authority within a defined district, or diocese, is vested in a bishop.
As such it is distinguished on the one hand from Presbyterianism,
government by elders, and Congregationalism, in which the
individual church or community of worshippers is autonomous,
and on the other from Papalism. The origin and development
of episcopacy in the Christian Church, and the functions and
attributes of bishops in the various churches, are dealt with
elsewhere (see Church History and Bishop). Under the
present heading it is proposed only to discuss briefly the various
types of episcopacy actually existing, and the different principles
that they represent.
The deepest line of cleavage is naturally between the view that episcopacy is a divinely ordained institution essential to the effective existence of a church as a channel of grace, and the view that it is merely a convenient form of church order, evolved as the result of a variety of historical causes, and not necessary to the proper constitution of a church. The first of these views is closely connected with the doctrine of the Apostolical Succession. According to this, Christ committed to his apostles certain powers of order and jurisdiction in the Church, among others that of transmitting these powers to others through “the laying on of hands”; and this power, whatever obscurity may surround the practice of the primitive Church (see Apostle, ad fin.) was very early confined to the order of bishops, who by virtue of a special consecration became the successors of the apostles in the function of handing on the powers and graces of the ministry.[1] A valid episcopate, then, is one derived in an unbroken series of “layings on of hands” by bishops from the time of the apostles (see Order, Holy). This is the Catholic view, common to all the ancient Churches whether of the West or East, and it is one that necessarily excludes from the union of Christendom all those Christian communities which possess no such apostolically derived ministry.
Apart altogether, however, from the question of orders, episcopacy represents a very special conception of the Christian Church. In the fully developed episcopal system the bishop sums up in his own person the collective powers of the Church in his diocese, not by delegation of these powers from below, but by divinely bestowed authority from above. “Ecclesia est in episcopo,” wrote St Cyprian (Cyp. iv. Ep. 9); the bishop, as the successor of the apostles, is the centre of unity in his diocese, the unity of the Church as a whole is maintained by the intercommunion of the bishops, who for this purpose represent their dioceses. The bishops, individually and collectively, are thus the essential ties of Catholic unity; they alone, as the depositories of the apostolic traditions, establish the norm of Catholic orthodoxy in the general councils of the Church. This high theory of episcopacy which, if certain of the Ignatian letters be genuine, has a very early origin, has, of course, fallen upon evil days. The power of the collective episcopate to maintain Catholic unity was disproved long before it was overshadowed by the centralized authority of Rome; before the Reformation, its last efforts to assert its supremacy in the Western Church, at the councils of Basel and Constance, had broken down; and the religious revolution of the 16th century left it largely discredited and exposed to a double attack, by the papal monarchy on the one hand and the democratic Presbyterian model on the other. Within the Roman Catholic Church the high doctrine of episcopacy continued to be maintained by the Gallicans and Febronians (see Gallicanism and Febronianism) as against the claims
- ↑ See Bishop C. Gore, The Church and the Ministry (1887).
