Timotheus (18), commonly called Aelurus, a Monophysite intruder
into the see of Alexandria. He had been at first a monk, then a presbyter under
Dioscorus, and soon after the deposition of the latter at the council of Chalcedon had come into collision with his successor . Deposed from office and banished into Libya (Mansi, Concil. vii. 617), he awaited, as his opponents afterwards said, the death of the emperor Marcian (ib. 525, 532). When that occurred in Jan. 457, he returned to Alexandria, and practised the artifice which apparently procured him the epithet αἴλουρος, "cat." "Creeping" at night to the cells of certain ignorant monks, he called to each by name, and on being asked who he was, replied, "I am an angel, sent to warn you to break off communion with Proterius, and to choose Timotheus as bishop" (Theod. Lect. i. 1). Collecting a band of turbulent men, he took possession, in the latter part of Lent, of the great "Caesarean" church, and was there lawlessly consecrated by only two bishops, whom Proterius and the Egyptian synod had deposed, and who, like himself, had been sentenced to exile. Thus, without the countenance of a single legitimate prelate (see Mansi, vii. 585) "he enthroned himself," as 14 Egyptian bishops express it in their memorials to the emperor Leo I. and to Anatolius of Constantinople (ib. 526, 533), while the real