About the same time Julian addressed a letter to Rufus, bishop of Thessalonica (410–431), on his own behalf and that of 18 fellow-recusants. Rufus was vicarius of the Roman see in Illyricum and just then in serious collision with Atticus the patriarch of Constantinople. As Atticus was a strenuous opponent of the Pelagians, Julian and his brethren perhaps thought Rufus might be persuaded to favour them. Zosimus died on 26 December 418 and was succeeded by Boniface I on 10 April 419. The letter of Julian to Rufus, with another to the clergy of Rome which he denied to be his, were answered by Augustine in his "Contra Duas Epistolas Pelagianorum". Julian avows an earnest desire to gain the aid of the Oriental bishops against the "profanity of Manicheans," for so he styles the Catholics; accuses Zosimus of tergiversation and the Roman clergy of having been unduly influenced in their condemnation of the Pelagians; charges both with various heresies; and protests that by their means the subscriptions of nearly all the Western bishops had been uncanonically extorted to a dogma which he characterizes as "non minus stultum quam impium". Garnier assigns the letter to Rufus and the two to Zosimus to 418 CE.