Galen, etc.), and sought by such objectionable means to support their heretical views. We have thus probably to see in them a group of Roman theologians, who, towards the close of the 2nd cent. and the beginning of the 3rd cent. maintained exegetical and critical principles essentially the same as those which the Antiochean school with greater clearness and definiteness set forth toward the end of the 3rd cent. (§§ 31, 1; 47, 1). The attempt, however, which they made to found an independent sect in Rome about A.D. 210 was an utter failure. According to the report of the Little Labyrinth, they succeeded in getting for their bishop a weak-minded confessor called Natalius. Haunted by visions of judgment and beaten sore one night by good angels till in a miserable plight, he hasted on the following morning to cast himself at the feet of bishop Zephyrinus (A.D. 199-217), successor of Victor, and showing his stripes he begged for mercy and restoration.--The last of the representatives of the Theodotians in Rome, and that too under this same Zephyrinus, was a certain =Artemon= or Artemas. He and his followers maintained that their own doctrine (which cannot be very exactly determined but was also of the dynamic order) had been recognised in Rome as orthodox from the time of the Apostles down to that of bishop Victor, and was first condemned by his successor Zephyrinus. This assertion cannot be said to be altogether without foundation in view, on the one hand, of the agreement above referred to between Theodotus the younger and the Roman Hermas, and on the other hand, of the fact that the Roman bishops Zephyrinus and Callistus had passed over to Noëtian _Modalism_. Artemon must have lived at least until A.D. 260, when Paul of Samosata (§ 33, 8), who also maintained fellowship with the excommunicated Artemonites in Rome, conducted a correspondence with him.