Hippolytus, Concordia, Irenaeus and Abundius
The Holy Martyrs Hippolytus, Concordia, Irenaeus and Abundius of Rome
Martyr · d. 13 August 258, at Rome
Commemorated 13 August — Martyrdom at Rome under Valerian, four days after Laurence
Hippolytus was, in the Roman passion that bears his name, the officer of the prison at Rome under Decius and Valerian who had charge of the archdeacon Laurence, was converted by him together with his whole household, and — having gone out to bury Laurence's body after the roasting on the gridiron of 10 August 258 — was arrested, beaten with rods, stripped of his rank and property, and on 13 August 258 tied to untamed horses and dragged to death over the stones outside the city. With him suffered Concordia, the old nurse who had raised him, scourged to death with loaded whips, and her body thrown into a sewer; and Irenaeus and Abundius, two Christians who found it, drew it out and buried it beside him, and were drowned in the same sewer for the act. The four are kept together on August 13, the day of Hippolytus's burial on the Via Tiburtina.
The jailer of Laurence
The Roman passio sets the story in the persecution of Valerian, in the summer of 258, in which Pope Sixtus II and then his archdeacon Laurence were put to death within days of each other. Hippolytus, described as the officer in charge of the prison where Laurence was held — a man of standing, with a household, an estate and a place in the imperial service under Decius (249–251) and then Valerian (253–259) — was set to guard him.
The passion tells the conversion in the manner of its kind: the jailer, watching the archdeacon heal a blind fellow-prisoner named Lucillus, asked to be shown the same thing; Laurence catechised and baptised him, and with him, on his own estate, his nurse Concordia and the whole household, some nineteen persons. When Laurence had been executed on the gridiron on 10 August, it was Hippolytus who came by night with the presbyter Justin, took up the body, and buried it in the field of the widow Cyriaca on the Via Tiburtina.
Martyrdom
The burial betrayed him. Brought before the emperor, Hippolytus appeared — according to the passion — still in the belt and dress of his office, and was reproached for having become "a magician". He answered that he was a soldier of Christ; and to the offer of his rank, his property and the emperor's favour if he would sacrifice, he replied that he had already been enrolled under another standard. He was stripped of the military belt, beaten with rods and with the plumbatae, the whips weighted with lead; his estate was confiscated.
Concordia, questioned with the household, said that she would rather die with her master decently than live indecently with the pagans, and was scourged to death with the leaded whips on the spot. The rest of the household — the passion counts eighteen or nineteen — were taken outside the Porta Tiburtina and beheaded before Hippolytus's eyes.
Hippolytus himself was then bound by the feet to the harness of wild horses and driven over the broken ground and thorn-scrub beyond the walls until he was torn to pieces. The date given is 13 August 258, three days after Laurence. His remains were gathered by the Christians and buried in the cemetery on the Via Tiburtina which afterwards bore his name.
Irenaeus and Abundius
The body of Concordia had been thrown into a cloaca, one of the great sewers of the city, so that it might not be honoured. Two Christians, Irenaeus — the passion makes him a cleric or a water-officer of the city, which would explain his access — and Abundius, learned where it lay, went down and recovered it, and buried it beside Hippolytus. For this they were seized and thrown alive into the same sewer, and so drowned. The Western tradition keeps their own day on August 26; the Eastern synaxaria commemorate them with Hippolytus and Concordia on August 13.
The cult on the Via Tiburtina
The historical footing of the group is firmer than the romance of the passion might suggest. A Hippolytus buried in Tiburtina on the Ides of August stands in the Depositio Martyrum of the Roman calendar of 354, immediately after Laurence on the tenth — that is, the commemoration and the place are attested within a century of the events, whatever the passion may have added. The catacomb on the Via Tiburtina (San Ippolito) was a major pilgrimage site; the poet Prudentius, at the very end of the fourth century, describes going down into the crypt, seeing a painting of the saint torn apart by horses on the wall above the tomb, and hearing the story from the custodians, and made the eleventh hymn of his Peristephanon out of it.
Feast and commemoration
The four are commemorated on August 13 — civil August 13 on the New Calendar, civil August 26 on the Old. The date is that of the Depositio Martyrum of 354 and of the Roman cemetery on the Via Tiburtina, and it stands in deliberate sequence with August 10, the feast of Laurence, and August 6/7, that of Sixtus: the Roman August keeps the whole persecution of 258 within a fortnight.
In the Byzantine books the commemoration is a synaxarion notice rather than a sung office: August 13 is the leavetaking of the Transfiguration, and the propers of the day belong to Tabor, the martyrs being kept at the sixth ode of the canon and in the reading at Orthros. Where a service is sung to them, the common of several martyrs is used.
Irenaeus and Abundius are additionally kept on August 26 in the Roman Martyrology, that being the day assigned to their own death; the Eastern usage keeps all four together.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received imperishable crowns from thee our God; for possessing thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and broke also the feeble insolence of demons. By their prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2
Torn asunder by the horses of the tyrant, thou wast not divided from Christ, O glorious Hippolytus; and with thee thy nurse in her old age was crowned, and the two who went down into the pit for her sake. Wherefore we cry to you all: pray unfailingly for us.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Hippolytus is painted in the Byzantine manner as a young or middle-aged martyr in a short military tunic and a chlamys, holding the cross of martyrdom — the dress of his office in the passion, since he is remembered as an officer of the guard — and is usually placed in the company of Laurence and Sixtus in the great composite images of the Roman martyrs of 258.
Where the martyrdom itself is shown, the scene is unmistakable and old: the saint bound by the feet to a pair or a team of galloping horses and dragged over stones, his body already broken, the executioners driving them on. It is precisely the image Prudentius saw painted over the tomb in the catacomb on the Via Tiburtina at the end of the fourth century, and it passed from there into Western manuscript illumination and, much later, into panel painting; the composition is the same one used in classical art for the death of the mythological Hippolytus, which is one of the reasons the two stories are hard to disentangle.
Concordia is shown as an elderly woman in a dark maphorion with the martyr's cross, standing at Hippolytus's shoulder — the nurse beside the man she raised. Irenaeus and Abundius appear as two beardless or young men, sometimes with the attribute of water or a well-mouth for the sewer in which they died.
No pre-1900 image of these martyrs has been located in a public-domain reproduction for this collection; the entry carries no stored icon.
Disputed questions
- Which Hippolytus? The Roman church of the third century had a celebrated Hippolytus the presbyter and theologian, author of the Refutation of All Heresies, the Commentary on Daniel and the Apostolic Tradition, who broke with Pope Callistus, was exiled to Sardinia under Maximinus about 235, was reconciled, and was buried on the Via Tiburtina about 236. The martyr kept on August 13 is buried in that same cemetery on that same road, and the two have been merged since antiquity. The scholarly consensus is that the passio of the jailer, which first appears in the passionals of the seventh and eighth centuries, is a later legend that attached itself to the older and historically attested Roman grave; it is complicated further by a third Hippolytus, a bishop of Portus, with whom the writer was also confused. This entry follows the synaxarion in treating the martyr of August 13 as the companion of Laurence, while recording plainly that the identification cannot be sustained historically.
- The horses. Prudentius's account of death by wild horses is an exact doublet of the death of the mythological Hippolytus, son of Theseus, dragged to death by his own team at Troezen — and Prudentius knew it and plays on it. Whether the manner of death is historical, or was read out of the name and out of the painting the poet saw, is not decidable.
- Concordia's death. The Greek synaxaria and some modern renderings say she was beheaded with the household; the Latin passion, followed here, has her scourged to death with the plumbatae, the household beheaded separately.
- The number of the household. The passion gives nineteen; other recensions eighteen. They are commemorated collectively and are not named.