Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/202

 192 Journal of Philology. But again in our own day the long sleep is broken. A true spirit of reverence for the great father awakes in England and in Protestant Germany, while those his old idolaters of France and Rome are labouring to brand him with the stigma of heresy, or to ascribe his great treatise to some heretic or half-heterodox Father 11. So far we have pursued the posthumous story of Hippolytus as commonly reported and accepted ; his Roman Festival of the Ides of August, without hesitation, by Chev. Bunsen ; the rest as linked to the later celebration of that festival. We must now return, and exercise upon it a little criticism. There can be no doubt that the martyr adored in France upon the Ides of August, who was supposed to rest within the wild-horse reliquary, was the same with him who in the crypt of the Ager Veranus near S. Lorenzo's fuori le rnura was adored upon the same day as having died the self-same death. Who then was this saint ? Prudentius tells us that at Portus he was the head of the church Christicolis esse caput populis that when a presbyter he had embraced the schism of Novatus, (Novatian), Qui quondam schisma Novati Presbyter attigerat who recanted his error in the hour of death, was torn to pieces by wild-horses at Portus, was carried to Rome, and buried by devout men on the Tivoli Road. Modern critics naturally consider the manner of death to be mythical, and indeed it is far more like a poet's or a painter's than a prefect's deed, to tear an old Christian with horses, whether because of his own unluckily suggestive name, or be- cause of the tale of his namesake. In the next place Bunsen has worked out, and Dr Wordsworth at more length, both the falsity of the imputation of Novatian - ism, and the origin of that account. Hippolytus had been dead twenty years before the rise of Novatian. But he had been noted for his opposition to, and his strong invectives against, two successive Roman bishops. Callistus had extended church-com- munion to the most flagrant and unrepentant sinners, and drew many into his own congregation by the offer of indulgences and re-baptism. Hippolytus, in his zeal against such profana- 11 M. l'Abbe Freppel, to Hippo pope than Novatian. M. l'Abbe Cruice lytus lapsed into Novatianism ; Dollin- to Tertullian : some Romanist reviewers ger to Hippolytus as an earlier Anti- to Origen.