Here's St. Ignatius, from the Epistle to the Magnesians:
Chapter 3. Honour your youthful bishopThis is what I'm talking about. Ignatius doesn't give us any ground for believing that a council of elders was running the show. He makes the presbytery subject to the bishop. Kruger (the author) acknowledges this...he just thinks it's unique to St. Ignatius.Now it becomes you also not to treat your bishop too familiarly on account of his youth, but to yield him all reverence, having respect to the power of God the Father, as I have known even holy presbyters do, not judging rashly, from the manifest youthful appearance, but as being themselves prudent in God, submitting to him, or rather not to him, but to the Father of Jesus Christ, the bishop of us all. It is therefore fitting that you should, after no hypocritical fashion, obey, in honour of Him who has willed us [so to do], since he that does not so deceives not [by such conduct] the bishop that is visible, but seeks to mock Him that is invisible. And all such conduct has reference not to man, but to God, who knows all secrets.
In Orthodoxy, the bishop is pretty much a monarch in his diocese/metropolis, but as even the unlamented Archbishop Spyridin discovered, in the end it is the People of God who decide whether or not a hierarch is “Worthy” or “Unworthy”. Of course, the various Synods can also deal with an errant bishop/metropolitan/patriarch, but the real ultimate authority is the Laos tou Theou.
As for +Ignatius, I think you’ve got it right. For +Ignatius, the totality of The Church, the complete Church if you will, is found in a single diocese as defined. This is not to say that The Church is not universal, catholic. Clearly it is. But that worldwide Church is no “more Church”, a more complete Church, than a single diocese. This is, as I understand it, different from the Latin understanding.