The Chronicle.

        Yet another phase of Hippolytus' literary work was as a chronicler. As early as A.D. 222-23 he had written his Determination of the Date of Easter, which is mentioned in the chair list and also by Eusebius (Church History vi. 22. 1); the Easter table carved on the side of the chair is taken from it. Aside from that, it is lost, but a similar work in Latin (De Pascha computus), written in A.D. 242-43 and wrongly ascribed to Cyprian, may be regarded as a corrected form of it. But now in A.D. 234 he wrote his Chronicle (Chronicon). In scope the book was a chronicle of world history from the Creation to A.D. 234, the date of its composition. The Greek original of it is lost, except for some fragments, principally a leaf of a sixth or seventh century papyrus book from Oxyrhynchus (Oxyrhynchus Papyri vi. 870) and a considerable portion found in a Madrid manuscript. But a good part of it is preserved, sometimes more or less modified, in three different Latin versions, and there is also an Armenian translation. It made use of the “Little Chronology” in the Miscellanies of Clement of Alexandria (i. 21. 109-36) and also of the Chronography of Julius Africanus, which had recently appeared in A.D. 22 1. Hippolytus shared the view of Africanus that the “Last Day” (of a thousand years) would follow the year of the world 6ooo and was careful to prove that the year he wrote was the year of the world 5738. One of the book's most important features was the “Diamerismos” or “Division” of the earth among the posterity of Noah (Genesis, chap. 10), which was often reflected in later writers. The Madrid manuscript shows that the “Diamerismos” included the “Stadiasmos” or measurement in stadia of the Great Sea, a kind of navigation book for the Mediterranean.