Of the amount of success which the speculations of the Ophites enjoyed we know very little. Origen, as we have seen, speaks of them as being in his day “an insignificant sect”; and we have no proof that their numbers were ever very large[260]. Father Giraud asserts on the faith of some of the smaller heresiologists and Conciliar Acts that they spread over the whole of Asia Minor, through Syria and Palestine into Egypt on the one hand, and, on the other, to Mesopotamia, Armenia, and even to India, and this is probably more or less correct[261]. But those who had actually read their writings, as Irenaeus and Hippolytus evidently had done, seem to have looked upon them more as the source of many later heresies than as formidable by their own numbers. Whether the Sethians with whom Irenaeus would identify them were really a subdivision of the Ophite sect may be doubted, because in Hippolytus’ account of the Sethian doctrines, the existence of Jesus is never mentioned or referred to, and there is some reason for thinking them a non-Christian sect[262]. But the heresies of the Peratae and of Justinus, which Hippolytus describes as not differing much from the Ophites, certainly resemble that which has been summarized above too closely for the resemblance to be accidental; while the same remark applies to those of the Barbeliotae and Cainites described by Irenaeus, and to the Gnostics, Archontics, and others of whom we read in Epiphanius’ _Panarion_. Most of these sects seem to have flourished on the Eastern or Asiatic outskirts of the Roman Empire, although some of them probably had settlements also in Egypt, Greece, Crete, and Cyrene. As the first Ophites had contrived to make an amalgam of the fervent and hysterical worship of nature in Anatolia with the Jewish and Christian tenets, so no doubt these daughter sects contrived to fit in with them the legends of the local cults among which they found themselves. But such compromises were not likely to last long when the Catholic Church began to define and enforce the orthodox faith, and the Ophites seem to have been one of the first to succumb. In the Vth century A.D., there were still Ophite “colleges” to be found in the province of Bithynia; for Theocritus and Evander, the bishops of Chalcedon and Nicomedia, “refuted” their leaders publicly with such effect, says Praedestinatus, that they afterwards broke into their “secret places” at the head of a furious mob, drove away their priests, killed the sacred serpents, and “delivered the people from that danger[263].” This is the last that we hear of them as an organized sect, and although Justinian in A.D. 530 thought right to include them by name in his law against heretics, it is probable that by then their opinions had long since passed into other forms[264].