AD) extended absolution to Christians who had committed grave sins, such as adultery. Some suggest Hippolytus himself advocated a pronounced rigorism. At this time, he seems to have allowed himself to be elected as a rival Bishop of Rome, and continued to attack Pope Urban I (222–230 AD) and Pope Pontian (230–235 AD). G. Salmon suggests that Hippolytus was the leader of the Greek-speaking Christians of Rome. Allen Brent sees the development of Roman house-churches into something akin to Greek philosophical schools gathered around a compelling teacher. Also under this view: during the persecution at the time of Emperor Maximinus Thrax, Hippolytus and Pontian were exiled together in 235 to Sardinia, likely dying in the mines. It is quite probable that, before his death there, he was reconciled to the other party at Rome, for, under Pope Fabian (236–250 AD), his body and that of Pontian were brought to Rome. The so-called Chronography of 354 (more precisely, the Liberian Catalogue) reports that on August 13, probably in 236, the two bodies were interred in Rome, that of Hippolytus in a cemetery on the Via Tiburtina, his funeral being conducted by Justin the Confessor. This document indicates that, by about 255, Hippolytus was considered a martyr and gives him the rank of a priest, not of a bishop, an indication that before his death the schismatic was received again into the Church. Legends The name Hippolytus appears in various hagiographical and martyrological sources of the early Church. The facts about the life of the writer Hippolytus, as opposed to other celebrated Christians who bore the name Hippolytus, were eventually lost in the West, perhaps partly because he wrote in Hellenic Greek. Pope Damasus I dedicated to a Hippolytus one of his famous epigrams, referring to a priest of the Novatianist schism, a view later forwarded by Prudentius in the 5th century in his "Passion of St Hippolytus". In the Passionals of the 7th and 8th centuries he is represented as a soldier converted by Saint Lawrence, a legend that long survived in the Roman Breviary. He was also confused with a martyr of the same name who was buried in Portus, of which city he was believed to have been a bishop, who was put to death by drowning in a deep well. According to Prudentius' account, a martyr Hippolytus was dragged to death by wild horses, a striking parallel to