The Statue.

        On this road, and probably near his grave, a statue of Hippolytus, or what was left of it, was found in 1551, and while the head and upper part of the body were gone, the marble chair proved of great importance, because a list of the works of Hippolytus was carved on the back of it. Upon it were also carved the tables for calculating the date of Easter, but as these proved erroneous by as much as three days, as early as 237, the statue can hardly be of later date than that year and was probably made and set up in 236 or 237. The schism in the church as evidently healed before the death of Hippolytus.

        A hundred years ago the works of Hippolytus had almost entirely disappeared, but a series of discoveries has gone far to remedy this. One of his most notable works was his Refutation of All Heresies, which seemed to have perished. But in 1701 a Greek work surveying the views of the Greek philosophers, the Brahmins and the Druids, was printed by Gronovius as the Philosophumena of Origen. In 1842 a Greek named Minas Minoides found on Mount Athos a fourteenth-century manuscript of Books iv-x of the same work, of which the part previously published was evidently Book I. These eight books E. Miller published in 1851 as Origen's Philosophurneua or Refutation of All Heresies. But it was soon perceived that they were not the work of Origcn at all but of Hippolytus, being his long-lost Refutation of All Heresies, mentioned by Eusebius (as Against All Heresies [Church History vi. 22. 2]) and by Jerome (On Illustrious Men 61), and they were republished under the name of Hippolytus by Duncker and Schneidewin in 1859. One scholar, d'Ales, has endeavored to show that Book iv really contains Books ii and iii and part at least of Book iv, but this cannot be said to have been proved. As it is, however, these discoveries and reesarches have given us one of the major works of Hippolytus almost complete.

        A long series of other discoveries has brought various lost works of Hippolytus to light in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, and Slavic translations. The remarkable thing is that so few of them have been preserved in Greek, but Hippolytus had been out of harmony with the dominant clement in the Roman church most of his later life, and Greek very soon ceased to be the language of Roman Christianity; in fact, Hippolytus is really our last Greek writer in the Western church.

        The literary work of Hippolytus was done principally between A.D. 200 and 235. The inscription on the back of the chair lists at least ten of his works, but two lines are probably lost at the top, with the upper part of the chair back.[79] Eusebiuslists eight works but says that many others were current in his day. Jerome names nineteen, and Photius, who seems to have confused Hippolytus with Gaits, mentions a number of his works (Bibliotheca 48, 121, and 202) but does not attempt a unified list. Upon the basis of thcsc and the manuscript discoveries of recent years, a list of no less than forty works of Hippolytus can be reconstructed, covering the fields of scripture interpretation, polemic and doctrinal writing, church law, and chronology. Harnack listed forty-three, of which eight arc preserved, complete or nearly so, in Grcek or in ancient versions; twelve arc lost; and twenty-three arc represented only by fragments, few or many.