Hippolytus the Jailer
The Holy Martyr Hippolytus, keeper of the prison, and those with him
Martyr · d. 13 August 258, at Rome
Commemorated 10 August — Kept with Laurence the Archdeacon and Sixtus; dragged to death by horses
Hippolytus is the keeper of the prison in which the archdeacon Laurence was held at Rome in August 258. Set to guard the Church's most conspicuous prisoner, he saw a blind fellow-prisoner named Lucillus receive his sight at the archdeacon's hands, asked for baptism, and was baptised with his whole household; after the martyrdom he took up the body from the fire and buried it, and for that was seized, scourged, and — in the form the tradition has always given — dragged to death behind wild horses. The Greek Menaion names him in the very heading of August 10, beside Laurence and Xystus; the Latin books keep him on August 13. He must be distinguished with care from Hippolytus of Rome, the third-century writer and bishop kept on January 30, with whom he has been confused since antiquity.
The keeper of the prison
The Roman passio of St Laurence, composed in the fifth or sixth century, is the source for everything told of Hippolytus. In it he is an officer of the city guard charged with the custody of the arrested archdeacon during the three days between Laurence's arrest and his death — the days in which the prefect waited for the treasure of the Church to be produced. The prison, in the legend, fills with the sick and the curious; a prisoner named Lucillus, long blind and worn out with weeping, is baptised by Laurence and rises seeing. Hippolytus, who has watched it, asks whether he too may be shown "the treasures" of which the archdeacon speaks, and is answered that they are not gold but the promise of eternal life. He is baptised, and with him — in the manner of the household baptisms of the Acts of the Apostles, on which the scene is patterned — his nurse Concordia and the nineteen persons of his family.
Burial and death
After Laurence was roasted on the gridiron on 10 August, the passio has Hippolytus and the presbyter Justinus carry the body away by night, wrap it in linen with spices, and bury it on the Via Tiburtina in the estate of the widow Cyriaca. Concealment of a condemned Christian's body was itself a capital act under the rescript, and when the thing became known the prefect had Hippolytus brought before the emperor Valerian. He refused to sacrifice; Concordia was beaten to death with leaded scourges before his eyes, and the rest of the household beheaded; and Hippolytus himself was stripped of his soldier's belt, tied by the feet to the necks of unbroken horses, and dragged through thistles and rough ground until he died — on 13 August, three days after Laurence. The Christians gathered what was left and buried him in the cemetery on the Via Tiburtina which bears his name to this day, opposite the tomb of Laurence.
The tangle of the Hippolyti
The cemetery of Hippolytus on the Via Tiburtina is real, ancient, and was a great centre of pilgrimage; the Roman calendar of 354 enters an Ypoliti in Tiburtina on the ides of August; the poet Prudentius, at the end of the fourth century, describes visiting the shrine and seeing there a painting of a martyr torn apart by horses, and wrote the eleventh hymn of his Peristephanon upon it. But Prudentius's Hippolytus is a presbyter who had followed the schism of Novatian and returned to the Church, and the death by horses in his account is so exactly the death of the Hippolytus of Greek myth, the son of Theseus destroyed by his own team, that scholars from Döllinger onward have doubted whether the manner of death was ever anything but an inference from the name. Add to this the learned Hippolytus the writer (c. 170 – c. 235), rival bishop of Rome and exile in the Sardinian mines, whose statue was found on the same Via Tiburtina in 1551, and the eastern martyr-bishop of the Censorinus company kept on January 30, and it becomes clear why the name has never been disentangled. The jailer of the Laurentian passio is the latest of these strands and the one the Byzantine calendar received on August 10.
Feast and commemoration
August 10 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 23), within the Dormition Fast and the afterfeast of the Transfiguration. The Greek Menaion heads the day with the three names together — Λαυρεντίου τοῦ ἀρχιδιακόνου, Ξύστου πάπα Ῥώμης καὶ Ἱππολύτου — and appoints Hippolytus no proper office; the Slavic calendars list him last among "those with" Laurence. In the West he is kept on 13 August, the day of his death and of the ancient station at his tomb on the Via Tiburtina, together with Concordia and the household.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Hippolytus, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Hippolytus the jailer is painted as a soldier-martyr: a bearded man of middle years in the belted military tunic and cloak, holding the cross, sometimes with the keys of the prison in his hand. In narrative cycles he appears twice — kneeling at his baptism in the cell while Laurence pours the water, and bound by the ankles between two rearing horses — and it is the second scene, the equi indomiti, that fixed his image in the West from Prudentius's description of the painting at his tomb onward. The distinction from the January 30 Hippolytus is not made visually: Byzantine painters give the bishop-martyr the omophorion and this one the soldier's dress, but the inscriptions are identical and the two are frequently conflated in menologion panels. No pre-1900 image has been stored for this entry, precisely because no candidate could be assigned to this Hippolytus rather than to the bishop, the writer, or the statue.
Disputed questions
- Which Hippolytus is commemorated on August 10? The Greek notice gives only the name, in the company of Laurence and Xystus, which places it unambiguously within the Laurentian legend: the Hippolytus of the tenth is the converted jailer. This entry is therefore distinct from Hippolytus of Rome (January 30), whose entry sets out the full history of the confusion and follows the Byzantine identification of that day's martyr with the writer. Whether the two were ever one man is a question the sources do not allow to be settled; that the calendars keep two feasts, in two months, under two different narratives, is a fact.
- Presbyter, soldier, or Novatian? Prudentius makes him a schismatic presbyter reconciled before death, the passio a soldier and jailer converted by Laurence, and the Roman martyrology has at times run the two together. The topography — a great and undoubtedly ancient shrine on the Via Tiburtina facing that of Laurence — is the one hard fact, and it is what drew the two cults together in the first place.
- The horses. Almost certainly borrowed, whether from the myth of Theseus's son or from the painting Prudentius saw. His actual death is unknown.
- Concordia and the household. The nurse and the nineteen are known only from the passio. They are kept with him in the Western books and are not separately named in the East.