Damasus, after Liberius, had received the priesthood by succession in the city of Rome. A certain Ursinus, a deacon of that same Church, not bearing him being preferred to himself, broke out into such madness that, having persuaded a certain quite unskilled and rustic bishop, and gathered a band of turbulent and seditious men, he extorted in the Basilica which is called Sicininum that he be made bishop, with the laws and order and tradition perverted. From this deed so great a sedition—nay rather, so great wars—arose, with the peoples defending the one or the other side, that the places of prayer were filled with human blood. And this affair, through the faction of Maximinus, a savage man and Prefect, was turned to the malice against a good and innocent priest, so that the case was carried even to the tortures of the clergy.