It is indeed fitting that in the courts of all, those who declare the truth should be held in greater esteem than those who, though they aim to gratify in all they say, yet say naught that merits gratitude. Isocrates. Ad Antipatrum. Letter 4. Section 6.
Image: “Le Pape Formose et Étienne VI” by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1870 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In January 897, the exhumed corpse of Pope Formosus is put on trial and found guilty of being unworthy of the pontificate and suffered the old judicial practice of damnatio memoriae. All measures and acts enacted by him were annulled and orders conferred by him were declared invalid. His corpse was dumped into the Tiber, although later retrieved by a monk. After the death of Pope Stephen VI, the body of Formosus was reinterred in St. Peter's Basilica and further corpse trials were banned. However, this was not the end of abuse of the corpse of Formosus. When Pope Sergius III (904-911) assumed the papal robes he reapproved the verdicts against Formosus and had his corpse once again exhumed, tried, found guilty, and this time, beheaded. Again the corpse was eventually reburied with respect and Sergius' decrees about Formosus were subsequently disregarded.
Note: Some time ago I bought the lecture series "Popes and the Papacy: A History" presented by Professor Thomas F.X. Noble from The Great Courses. I've been too busy to listen to it but this intriguing story about Formosus has peaked my interest. I checked the lecture summaries and don't see a direct reference to these Cadaver Synods but maybe they are covered in lecture 6, The Age of Iron summarized as "With the decline of effective Carolingian power in Italy, the papacy sank into depths perhaps unmatched in its long history—a period often referred to by later Protestant writers as the "Pornocracy." That moniker certainly seems to apply to these corpse trials!
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