Hippolytus’ commentary On the Song of Songs survives mainly in Georgian manuscripts in Frankfurt and in Jerusalem, used in Gérard Garitte's previous edition, along with a Greek paraphrase in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and in Syriac and Armenian fragments in Venice. There are also citations in Paleo-Slavic florilegia located in Moscow and used by Bonwetsch for his edition. Yancy Smith has produced a new, critical edition of this text with an English, annotated translation, and with parallel versions of the alternative fragmentary texts where they occur (pp. 42–7, 418–561).

Smith brilliantly locates the passages on anointing in the commentary with a rite of chrismation following baptism, drawing out the community significance by means of iconographic as well as purely verbal, conceptual imagery (In Canticles 2.4; 11.2; 15.2). The significance of the anointing is the participation in Christ as Logos and is associated with a post-baptismal imposition of hands (pp. 92–3). We are witnessing, he argues, in this text a modelling of early Christian initiation as mystagogic, occurring well before the fourth century when theologians such as St John Chrysostom or Cyril of Jerusalem conceived of catechesis in such terms (p. 110).

Smith argues further that the location for the baptisms and post-baptismal anointing is the Easter Paschal mysteries. Before the discovery of the Georgian text, the fragments had been considered by Zahn and others to be from a paschal liturgy. But the Georgian text hardly shows a carefully crafted Homily. Following Bonwetch, Smith claims that the text was intended for oral delivery and was a ὑπόμνημα, notes in aid of memory. He identifies correctly In Canticles with the block of writings containing the Daniel Commentary (Commentary on Daniel 1.17.2), which provides the critical evidence that the season for baptisms was for the author the paschal season (pp. 17–18).

It is this feature that enables the author of the text to be located at Rome: initiatory rites in the Easter season were a Western and not an Eastern practice (p. 15). Thus the location of one writer in the Hippolytan corpus, indeed probably Hippolytus himself, in the East with no contacts with Rome, as Cerrato argued, fails. Smith is clearly aware that he has avoided the fundamental methodological error that has identified cultural with geographical distance (pp. 86–92). Thus the plausibility of more than one author of the list preserved on the Hippolytan Statue at Rome is again affirmed.

Smith convincingly locates the Statue historically within a Roman house-church-school, producing new arguments from his exposition of In Canticles. The focus is on a banquet scene set in a private house that has resonances in the Traditio Apostolica, as evidenced by images of the couch (In Canticles 26.1–27.10, and pp. 203–7). This leads him to extend the interpretative power of the underlying discourse that he is identifying into non-verbal, iconographic imagery. It was not accidental that the Statue as an artefact in the building of a house-school contained a table of paschal festivals.

The original statue was pagan and evoked a non-verbal imagery that left its mark in a Christian context, and the particular imagery for which Smith opts, following Markus Vinzent, is of the figure of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, personification of the divine virtue of the city of Rome, mother of Hippolytus and wife of Heracles (pp. 54–9). But it is also pointed out that there is a connection between the figure and Logos-Sophia, and therefore with the Logos theology of Hippolytus’ works, exemplified in In Canticles 21.2. The anointed Solomon, as in consequence bearer of the Logos, fills the world with meaning and rivals the Roman, imperial vision (In Canticles 1.3 and 13, and pp. 336–9).

Smith traces similar iconographic connections with the myth of Dionysius and Ariadne, particularly in Ovid's version, with Christ's words to the synagogue similarly those to a wounded wife. Israel is exhorted to become ‘a type of all crowns’ like Ariadne, whose transformation into the divine is represented in the constellations (In Canticles 7.5 and pp. 349–50). The mythological narrative has helped to shape the typological interpretation. Similarly in the eleventh labour of Heracles, where three nymphs, daughters of Atlas, attend the garden of Hesperides. The nymphs have left their traces on descriptions of the women who come to the tomb on resurrection morning, Martha and Mary, the myrrhophores (pp. 360–1).

We see here, in Smith's exposition, the way in which the tendency to exclusivism in verbal discourse is considerably lessened in iconographical discourse where images far more easily blend into each other and form a communicative bridge across nascent cultures. He is to be commended for producing a highly sophisticated study that describes this taking place, with great significance for our understanding of the Hippolytan community. What is now required is a epistemological model that is able to explain theoretically how the transformation of culture takes place by the association of iconographic concepts in terms of what Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblance’ that nevertheless become exclusively distinct through exhaustive verbal definitions.