POLICARPO, saint. — A disciple of the apostle s. Giovanni (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., V, 20, 5 ff.) and ordained by him bishop of Smyrna (Tertullian, De praescr., 32, 2), he came to Rome around 155 to discuss the Quartodeciman question with Pope Anicetus, without, however, reaching an agreement. During his stay in Rome he converted adherents of the sects of Marcion and Valentinus. It is not known whether his encounter with Marcion, whom he characterized as the “firstborn of Satan” (Irenaeus, Haer., 3, 3, 4), took place in Rome or at Ephesus. He died a martyr the following year (156).
According to Irenaeus (in Eusebius, op. cit., V, 20, 8), he wrote several letters to individual communities and persons. The Churches that received letters were located near Smyrna. P. enjoyed great authority there (the Martyrdom of P. [16, 8] calls him an “apostolic and prophetic man”), which explains such activity in Asia Minor. It is nevertheless surprising in this regard that his only surviving letter is addressed to a Church outside Asia and that this epistle has been poorly preserved, since the Greek text of this letter to the Philippians exists in the Greek manuscripts only in part (ch. 1–9, 2), whereas the Latin translation has preserved it in its entirety (v. ALBANI. Siegmund, Die Überlieferung der griechischen christlichen Literatur in der lateinischen Kirche, Munich 1909, p. 130). The authenticity of this epistle cannot be doubted, since it was mentioned as early as by Irenaeus, Haer., 30, 3, 4, and since Eusebius, op. cit., III, 36, 14–16, gives quotations from II. If, however, Jerome, De vir. illustr., 17, says that the letter to the Philippians was read “usque hodie in conventu Asiae,” his statement is surprising, because one would rather expect in an Asian setting the public reading of letters addressed to Churches of Asia Minor. It appears that the letter to the Philippians formed part of a collection of the Ignatian epistles, and such a connection is also suggested by the fact that the epistle to the Philippians presents itself in ch. 13 as an accompanying letter for the dispatch to the Philippians of a collection of the letters of s. Ignatius. But while in ch. 13, 2 Ignatius is still alive, in 9, 1 his death is presupposed. This contradiction led Harrison to hypothesize that the present epistle is the fusion of two distinct letters of P. The fusion must nevertheless be ancient, because Eusebius knows both ch. 9 and ch. 13. Generally
it is said that P.’s letter reveals knowledge of the First Epistle of Clement, but this assertion is not certain, since the agreement between P. and I Clem. could also be explained by the hypothesis that the two writers depend upon earlier traditions held in common, especially in the moral section. Such a hypothesis would also make understandable P.’s use of Jewish expressions (“firstborn of Satan”: 7, 1; “debtor of sin”: 6, 1; cf. Enoch, 6, 3). It is perhaps unfair to compare style and content in P. with those in Ignatius to the former’s disadvantage (e.g. ed. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa, II, Leipzig 1898, p. 512), because — granting Ignatius’ greater originality — literary style is also conditioned by the different literary genre.
Si devono supporre diverse recensioni del testo. Un certo Pionio (non il martire dello stesso nome) aveva inserito il Martirio in un Corpus Polycarpianum, in cui al Martirio era aggiunta una vita di P., quest'ultima del testo senza valore storico. Inoltre Pionio aveva forse pubblicato una nuova recensione del Martirio. Eusebio aveva inserito il Martirio di P. nella sua collezione dei più antichi martiri. Nella sua Hist. eccl., IV, 15 dà un estratto dal Martirio di P. che rivela una recensione differente dal testo dei manoscritti.