Refutation of All Heresies 4.16.2

Authorship disputed: The work names no author. Book 1 was long printed among Origen's works as the Philosophumena; after books 4–10 were found in a manuscript from Mount Athos (published 1851), it was assigned to Hippolytus, the usual view today, though some scholars ascribe it to another Roman writer of the same circle. Books 2 and 3 are lost, and book 4 lacks its beginning.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 82

οἱ αὐτοὶ δὲ φύσεως· ἀρέσκοντες, νοοῦντες, εὐφυεῖς, εὐσεβεῖς, δίκαιοι, ἄγροικοι, προσχαρεῖς, κοπιαταί, ἀπὸ ἐτῶν (??), ἐρεθισταί, νωθροί· τούτων ὁ στόμαχος μικρός ἐστι, πληροῦνται τάχα, πολλὰ βουλευόμενοι, φρόνιμοι, φειδωλοὶ εἰς ἑαυτούς, εἰς ἄλλους δαψιλεῖς, ἀγαθοποιοί, σώματι βραδεῖ· ἐν μέρει εἰσὶ λυπηροί, ἀμελεῖς εἰς φιλίαν, ὠφέλιμοι διὰ τὸν νοῦν, κακοπαθεῖς.

English · Claude translation

The same by nature: pleasing, intelligent, gifted, pious, just, rustic, gracious, hard-working from the age of …, easily provoked, sluggish. Their stomach is small, they are quickly filled; they deliberate much, are prudent, sparing toward themselves, lavish toward others, beneficent, slow of body; at times they are sorrowful, careless in friendship, useful because of their mind, much-suffering.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 82 · Ludwig Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, eds., S. Hippolyti episcopi et martyris Refutationis omnium haeresium librorum decem quae supersunt (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1859); section divisions from Paul Wendland, ed., Hippolytus Werke 3: Refutatio omnium haeresium, GCS 26 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916) · Greek text: L. Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, Refutationis omnium haeresium (Göttingen, 1859), digitized by the Perseus Digital Library; section divisions from P. Wendland (GCS 26, 1916), digitized by the First Thousand Years of Greek project (Open Greek and Latin); both CC BY-SA 4.0

Text

As printed in Duncker–Schneidewin. Manuscript variants and the editor's apparatus are not reproduced; no textual problem is noted in this passage.

Translation

Claude translation (claude-opus-5-5), 2026-09-27 · Translated by Claude from the Greek text of Duncker–Schneidewin; made independently of existing English translations.

Compare

Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1886) (an older public-domain English translation, whole volume at CCEL; checked against ours only after ours was made) · Its chapter numbers differ from the standard (Wendland) numbering used here.

Notes

Translation notes

A number could not be read by the digitizers (marked (??) in the digital text).

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 4.16.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/4/16/2/).

The SBL abbreviation for this work has not been checked yet.

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 4.16.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/4/16/2/).