These three Ophite chapters are taken first because in our text they begin the heresiology strictly so called.[90] As has been said, the present writer believes them to be an interpolation made at the last moment by the author, and by no means the most valuable, though they are perhaps the most curious part of the book. They resemble much, however, in thought the quotations in our text attributed to Simon Magus, and although the ideas apparent in them differ in material points, yet there seems to be between the two sets of documents a kind of family likeness in the occasional use of bombastic language and unclean imagery. But when we turn from these to the extracts from the works attributed to Valentinus and Basilides which Hippolytus gives us, a change is immediately apparent. Here we have dignity of language corresponding to dignity of thought, and in the case of Valentinus especially the diction is quite equal to the passages from the discourses of that most eloquent heretic quoted by Clement of Alexandria. We feel on reading them that we have indeed travelled from the Orontes to the Tiber, and the difference in style should by itself convince the most sceptical critic at once of the good faith of our careless author and of the authenticity of the sources from which he has collected his information. 6. THE VALUE OF THE WORK What interest has a work such as this of Hippolytus for us at the present day? In the first place it preserves for us many precious relics of a literature which before its discovery seemed lost for ever. The pagan hymn to Attis and the Gnostic one on the Divine Mission of Jesus, both appearing in Book V, are finds of the highest value for the study of the religious beliefs of the early centuries of our Era, and with these go many fragments of hardly less importance, including the Pindaric ode in the same book. Not less useful or less unexpected are the revelations in the same book of the true meaning of the syncretistic worship of Attis and Cybele, and the disclosure here made of the supreme mystery of the Eleusinian rites, which we now know for the first time culminated in the representation of a divine marriage and of the subsequent birth of an infant god, coupled with the symbolical display of an “ear of corn reaped in silence.” For the study of classical antiquity as well as for the science of religions such facts are of the highest value.