Book I, besides being harmless, it had possibly by that time

become too firmly connected with the name of Origen for its attribution to this other sufferer in the Maxirriinian persecution to be disturbed in later times.
It only remains to see how this theory fits in with the remarks of Photius given above. It is fairly evident that Photius is speaking from recollection only, and that the words do not suggest that he had Hippolytus' actual work before him when writing, while he throughout speaks of it in the past tense as one might speak of a document which has long since perished, although some memory of its contents have been preserved. If this were so, we might be prepared to take Photius' description as not necessarily accurate in every detail j yet, as we have it, it is almost a perfect description of our text. The 32 heresies, as we have shown above, appear in our text as in Photius' docu- ment. Our text contains not only the large excerpts from Irenaeus which we might expect from Photius' account of its inception, but also the " refutations " which do not appear in the Adversus Omnes Hareses. It extends " up to," as Photius says, Noetus and the Noetians, and although it does not contain any mention of Dositheus or the Dositheans, this may have been given in the part which has
1 Cf. Salmon in D.C.B.} s.v. "Hippolytus Romanus,"
INTRODUCTION 23
been cut out of Book X.1 If that were the case, or if Photius has made any mistake in the matter, as one might easily do when we consider that all the early heresiologies begin with Jewish and Samaritan sects, the only real discrepancy between our text and Photius' description of Hippolytus' work is in the matter of length. But it is by no means certain that Photius ever saw the whole work put together, and it is plain that he had never seen or had forgotten the first four books dealing with the philosophers, the mysteries and the charlatans. Without these, and without the summary, Books V to IX do not work out to more than 70,000 words in all, and this might well seem a mere " booklet " to a man then engaged in the compilation of his huge Bibliotheca. Whether, then, Hippolytus did or did not reduce to writing the exposition of heresies which he made in his youth, it seems probable that all certain trace of this exposition is lost. It is certainly not to be recognized in pseudo-Tertullian's Adversus Omnes Htereses, and the work of Hippolytus recorded by Photius was probably a copy of our text in a more or less complete form.
5. The Style of the Work
Photius' remark that Hippolytus did not keep to the Attic style is an understatement of the case with regard to our text. Jacobi, its first critic, was so struck by the number of " Latinisms " that he found in it as to conjecture that it is nothing but a Greek translation of a Latin original.2 This is so unlikely as to be well-nigh impossible if Hippo- lytus were indeed the author; and no motive for such translation can be imagined unless it were made at a fairly late period. In that case, we should expect to find it full of words and expressions used only in Byzantine times when the Greek language had become debased by Slav and Oriental admixtures. This, however, is not the case with our text, and only one distinctly Byzantine phrase has
1 Hippolytus' denial of the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Ilehrews probably appeared in some work other than our text. Or it may have been cut out by the scribe as offensive to orthodoxy.
2 A flagrant case is to be found in p. 81 Cr. where n (P) has, accord- ing to Schneidevvin, been written for R, a mistake that could only be made by one used to Roman letters. Cf. Serpens and serviens, p. 487 Cr.
24 PHILOSOPHUMENA
rewarded a careful search.1 On the other hand neologisms are not rare, especially in Book X,2 and everything goes to show the truth of Cruice's remark that the author was evidently not a trained writer. This is by no means incon- sistent with the theory that the whole work is by Hippolytus, and is the more probable if we conclude that it was origin- ally spoken instead of written.
This is confirmed when we look into the construction of the author's sentences. They are drawn out by a succession of relative clauses to an extent very rare among even late Greek writers, more than one sentence covering 20 or 30 lines of the printed page without a full stop, while the usual rules as to the place and order of the words are often neglected. Another peculiarity of style is the constant piling up of several similes or tropes where only one would suffice, which is very distinctly marked in the passages whenever the author is speaking for long in his own person and without quoting the words of another. In all these we seem to be listening to the words of a fluent but rather laborious orator. Thus in Book I he compares the joy that he expects to find in his work to that of an athlete gaining the crown, of a merchant selling his goods after a long voyage, of a husbandsman with his hardly won crops, and of a despised prophet seeing his predictions fulfilled.3 So in Book V, after mentioning a book by Orpheus called Bacchica otherwise unknown, he goes on to speak of " the mystic rite of Celeus and Triptolemus and Demeter and Core and Dionysus in Eleusis,'' 4 when any practised writer would have said the Eleusinian mysteries simply. A similar piling up of imagery is found in Book VIII, where he speaks of the seed of the fig-tree as " a refuge for the terror-stricken, a shelter for the naked, a veil for modesty, and the sought-for produce to which the Lord came in search of fruit three times and found none."5 But it is naturally in the phrases of the pastoral address with which