The position he occupied in the Christian world has been much disputed. He is usually described as Bishop of Portus, the harbour of Rome, and modern scholarship has come to the conclusion that he exercised a general superintendence with the rank of a bishop over the various congregations of foreigners, traders and others, on the Italian sea-board, with Portus as his headquarters. A very dignified and striking statue, alas much mutilated, has been found amid the ruins over the Cemetery of Hippolytus. On the back and sides of the chair on which the figure of the scholar-bishop is sitting, is engraved a generally received list of his works. There is no doubt as to the genuineness of the statue in question, which dates from about the year 222. It ranks as the oldest Christian statue which has come to light; indeed, it stands alone as an example of very early Christian sculpture, and was probably erected in an interval of the Church’s peace in the reign of the Emperor Alexander Severus, and is a striking proof of the unique position which the writer and scholar held in the Christian community. There is no doubt he was done to death--what, however, was the peculiar form of his martyrdom is uncertain. We know he was exiled to Sardinia, where he suffered, and his remains were brought back to Rome with the remains of Pontianus, somewhile Bishop of Rome, who also suffered martyrdom at the same time in Sardinia; Pontianus being laid in the papal crypt in the Cemetery of Callistus, and Hippolytus in the catacomb which bears his name on the Via Tiburtina, about the year 237. Pope Damasus, the great restorer of the sanctuaries of Rome, enlarged and beautified the crypt where the honoured remains were deposited, in the latter years of the fourth century, and a few years later Prudentius the Christian poet in his collection of hymns entitled _Peristephanôn_--the Crowns of the Martyrs--devotes a long poem to the shrine and memory of Hippolytus. In the opening years of the fourth century, when Honorius, Theodosius’ son, was reigning over the Western Empire, it is evident that the fame and reputation of Hippolytus, scholar and martyr, were among the popular histories of Christendom, and his tomb one of the chief objects of pilgrimage. The lines of Prudentius, written in the closing years of the fourth century, are quoted as giving a picture of a famous catacomb as it appeared to a scholar and poet in the days of Theodosius and Honorius. They also give some idea of the estimation and reverential regard with which the martyrs and confessors of the first age of Christianity were held in the century which immediately followed the Peace of the Church: