Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/219

 On the Martyrdom and Commemorations of St Hippolytus. 209 whatever that his name was Hippolytus. That Hippolytus ap- pears at all in the later form of the legend is due solely to the notoriety of the fact that he was Bishop of Portus, and to the desire to connect so eminent a saint with St Aurea's name. (2) The connection of the name of Hippolytus with that of Pontianus, Bp. of Rome, next but one in succession to Callistus. The Depositio of A. D. 354, the Liber Pontificalis, the Hiero- nymian Marty rology 45, and Leonian Sacramentary, mention the 13th of August as the Natale of Pontianus in the ccemetery of Callistus, as well as that of Hippolytus on the Tivoli Road. The first of these also informs us that Pontianus Episcopus and Yp- politus Presbyter were transported to Sardinia, the Insula Nociva, in A.D. 235, and that the former was " In eadem insula discinctus" stripped of his dignity, on S l iiii. Kl. Oct. et loco ejus ordinatus est Antheros xi. Kl. Dec. cons, ss." From this passage Dollinger and Bunsen have alike inferred that the Hippolytus commemorated in one part of Rome on the same day as Pontianus on another, is the same Hippolytus as was banished with him to Sardinia: that therefore the Hippolytus of the Ides of August was not the Lau- rentian, but a presbyter so called. But there is no proof of it except Dr D.'s " Ich zweifle nicht." If it were so they must have fallen together, and probably in Sardinia, and their bones have been brought to Rome together, and strangest of all, after such long companionship in life and death, they must have been laid in their shrines on the self-same day on opposite sides of the city, and finally the great Doctor must have been robbed of his shrine and of his feast-day to make room for a saint of far less note than himself. Such a string of assumptions can never hold. The proofs which we have that Hippolytus fell at Portus make it nearly certain that like Callistus, his great antagonist, he did not find a grave in the Baleful Isle, but in his own city, and there was commemorated on Aug. 23 : and that Pontianus, when- ever he fell, was laid by a simple coincidence, unnoticed at the time, in the ccemetery of his predecessor Callistus on the same day that was observed in memory of Laurence's Warder and Convert, Aug. 13. 45 Dollinger (p. 33) quotes as if they sue occidentalis Martyrologium of Fioren- were distinct authorities the Hiero- tini; whereas the former is only a less nymian catalogue in D'Achery's Spici- perfect copy of the latter. legium,Yo. IV. and the Vetustius Eccle- Vol. I. June, 1854. 14