Photius’ remark that Hippolytus did not keep to the Attic style is an understatement of the case with regard to our text. Jacobi, its first critic, was so struck by the number of “Latinisms” that he found in it as to conjecture that it is nothing but a Greek translation of a Latin original.[68] This is so unlikely as to be well-nigh impossible if Hippolytus were indeed the author; and no motive for such translation can be imagined unless it were made at a fairly late period. In that case, we should expect to find it full of words and expressions used only in Byzantine times when the Greek language had become debased by Slav and Oriental admixtures. This, however, is not the case with our text, and only one distinctly Byzantine phrase has rewarded a careful search.[69] On the other hand neologisms are not rare, especially in Book X,[70] and everything goes to show the truth of Cruice’s remark that the author was evidently not a trained writer. This is by no means inconsistent with the theory that the whole work is by Hippolytus, and is the more probable if we conclude that it was originally spoken instead of written.
This is confirmed when we look into the construction of the author’s sentences. They are drawn out by a succession of relative clauses to an extent very rare among even late Greek writers, more than one sentence covering 20 or 30 lines of the printed page without a full stop, while the usual rules as to the place and order of the words are often neglected. Another peculiarity of style is the constant piling up of several similes or tropes where only one would suffice, which is very distinctly marked in the passages whenever the author is speaking for long in his own person and without quoting the words of another. In all these we seem to be listening to the words of a fluent but rather laborious orator. Thus in Book I he compares the joy that he expects to find in his work to that of an athlete gaining the crown, of a merchant selling his goods after a long voyage, of a husbandsman with his hardly won crops, and of a despised prophet seeing his predictions fulfilled.[71] So in Book V, after mentioning a book by Orpheus called _Bacchica_ otherwise unknown, he goes on to speak of “the mystic rite of Celeus and Triptolemus and Demeter and Core and Dionysus in Eleusis,”[72] when any practised writer would have said the Eleusinian mysteries simply. A similar piling up of imagery is found in Book VIII, where he speaks of the seed of the fig-tree as “a refuge for the terror-stricken, a shelter for the naked, a veil for modesty, and the sought-for produce to which the Lord came in search of fruit three times and found none.”[73] But it is naturally in the phrases of the pastoral address with which Book X ends that the most salient examples occur. Thus, the unconverted are told that by being instructed in the knowledge of the true God, they will escape the imminent menace of the judgment fire, and the unillumined vision of gloomy Tartarus, and the burning of the everlasting shore of the Gehenna of fire, and the eye of the Tartaruchian angels in eternal punishment, and the worm that ever coils as if for food round the body whence it was bred,[74]--or, as he might have said in one word, the horrors of hell.