The life of St Eustathius of Antioch
At that council he stood among the most outspoken opponents of Arius's teaching, and for years afterward kept up a running literary defense of the Nicene faith, going so far as to bar any priest sympathetic to Arianism from serving in his own diocese. That firmness cost him dearly: the Arian party he had opposed convened its own synod at Antioch and had him accused, through witnesses later shown to have been suborned, of an unrelated heresy he had never actually held. The judgment against him broke the Church's own rule that no bishop could be condemned without at least two credible witnesses, and the emperor Constantine, misled by the charge, banished him to Thrace, where he died still in exile in the late 330s.
His own people at Antioch would not accept his removal and went on gathering apart from the bishop who replaced him, a resistance that helped set off the long Meletian Schism dividing the Antiochene church for generations afterward.
He is remembered as a steadfast early defender of Nicene orthodoxy, condemned by the very heresy he had spent his episcopate opposing.
