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