A Mysterious Figure
The mysterious Statue of Hippolytus now stands in the Vatican Library. Though the inscriptions on the side of the statue’s chair are taken from the writings of Hippolytus, the figure seated on the chair may have originally depicted not Hippolytus, but a woman. So damaged was the statue, when discovered in the 16th century, it had to be heavily reconstructed, yet its only drawing before this restoration suggests a feminine figure sitting on the chair. And, in fact, the present male figure does seem to have feminine undergarments, as evident from the long frills flowing from beneath the figure’s toga. Many believe the original statute portrayed the female philosopher Themista of Lampsacus. At some point Hippolytus’s church must have obtained the statue and reimagined the female figure as a symbol of the Christian church, the bride of Christ, or perhaps as Lady Wisdom, described in Proverbs 8. Others think that the evidence regarding the statue’s gender and original identity is too tenuous to make any firm judgment. The inscriptions on the chair, however, did not require restoration and are still quite legible. They date to 222 A.D. The largest of them, taken from Hippolytus’s work called the Canon, form two calendars designed to calculate the date of all future and past Passovers and Easter Sundays.