On the Martyrdom and Commemorations of St Hippolytus. 205 And now there has been laid before the reader evidence in favour we do not say of the fact, but of a tradition, unvarying so far as it reaches, that Hippolytus Bp. of Portus was drowned at Portus, and there buried, and that his day was commonly kept on 21st 23rd August. For the account which late critics un- hesitatingly receive, that he rested in the Ager Veranus, and that the Ides of August was his commemoration-day, there is no evidence save the most confused hymn of Prudentius, and even that betrays itself. But what of the statue ? That was found in the Ager Veranus. A highly curious fact but if as M. Bunsen allows to be more than possible, it belongs to the 6th century, then its evidence will not countervail all the rest. But the statue may be of the 4th century, and in that case what does its evi- dence amount to ? Did it belong to the church of St Hippolytus? There is no proof that it did. But suppose it were so. Does it follow that the saint whom it represents was the saint whose relics were there entombed? Is it a strange thing that there should be images of more than one saint in a church ? Above all, images of saints of the same name ? Is it not a well-known mode of grouping early saints? The Three Marys, the Two St Johns will occur to every reader. Is it unlikely that in the church of the Laurentian Hippolytus there should be commemo- rations of the two Roman martyrs of that name ? Is it not above all things possible that a visitor seeing two images, or a painting of the martyrdom of one, an image of the other, and hearing the two legends, should have moulded them in his own mind into one. Here it seems to me that we have an intelligible ground for such a confusion on the part of so learned a man ; elsewhere I know of none. If this be so, we must suppose that the Roman Church in her veneration for her great martyr Laurence, appointed to him and to his master and forerunner to the grave, Sixtus, and to Hippolytus, the fruit of his blood, festival days, which whether truly fixed or not, represented their connection with each other, and their deaths within a few days of each other : and that as her calendar and range of feasts enlarged, she gave to the mar- and looked across at the "muri vetus- palace and adjoining church. tissimi Portus etpenecollisi." TLethoug7it In 1612 the navigation was reopen- of restoring it. ed, and in 1825 the present village of In 1583 Card. Corneus restored the Fiumicino built.
