Hill—The Man Who Needed No Introduction 99and remembering. This is the case particularly if the learned material was reviewed
regularly, as Irenaeus says it was. At the time when he saw Florinus in lower Asia,
Irenaeus was, as a παῖς, at least astute enough to pick up that Florinus, a young Roman
official, was trying to make a favorable impression on Polycarp. This is not, I would
suggest, the insight of an eight- or ten-year-old. A youth of sixteen to eighteen, on the
other hand, might well be attentive to such things. It is likewise with his description of
Florinus as at the time “faring illustriously in the royal court” (λαμπρῶς πράσσοντα ἐν
τῇ βασιλικῇ αὐλῇ). How many eight- or ten-year-olds pay attention to the civic achieve-
ments of visiting minor officials? This sort of awareness is at least more appropriate
for someone who was himself about to enter into public life or had already done so.
Irenaeus’s contemporaries in Rome normally did this sometime between the ages of
thirteen and eighteen,^17 most often at the Festival of Liber every March 17, when they
exchanged the childhood toga praetexta for the toga virilis, marking “a transition from
boy to youth”^18 and “the beginning of the young man’s public life.”^19
Boys in their late teenage years may have a very high capacity for learning and
memorization. They may also be animated by deep admiration for a respected, even
celebrated, elder statesman of their communities. It requires no great stretch to imag-
ine that both traits might have been found in the young Irenaeus.
b. I think it should be remembered that the subject that called forth Irenaeus’s use
of the word παῖς in the Letter to Florinus was not his experience with Polycarp but his
acquaintance with Florinus. Obviously he knew Polycarp at the time when he says he
was a παῖς and observed Florinus trying to impress the bishop, but he never remotely
implies that his acquaintance with the two men ended at just the same time. Still speak-
ing of his remembrance of Florinus, but as he begins to transition to relating what he
remembered of Polycarp, Irenaeus uses a slightly different turn of phrase: “For, the
things learned from childhood [ἐκ παίδων] grow up together with the soul, becoming
one with it.” He is reporting to Florinus what he learned not simply “as a child” or at
a point “in childhood” but, “from childhood,” which is something potentially quite
different. Justin, for instance, boasts that men and women “who have been Christ’s
disciples from childhood [ἐκ παίδων], remain pure at the age of sixty or seventy years”
(1 Apol. 15.6). Here ἐκ παίδων speaks of an ongoing and continuous experience (dis-
cipleship) that only began in childhood, not a brief experience that ended there. Simi-
larly, Genesis 46:34, where Joseph instructs his brothers to say to Pharaoh, “you shall
say, ‘Your servants have been keepers of livestock from our youth [ἐκ παίδων] even
until now, both we and our ancestors.’”^20 Things happening “from childhood” start
in childhood, but they do not end there. Irenaeus certainly means to say that he was
learning things from and about Polycarp while he was still a παῖς (probably a late
teen), at the time he was taking notice of Florinus’s efforts to gain Polycarp’s approval.
But the expression ἐκ παίδων does not place an upper limit on the time when he was
learning these things from and about Polycarp.
c. When Irenaeus has occasion to speak of his acquaintance with Polycarp apart
from any thought of Florinus in Hae r. III.3.4, he does not use the word παῖς (despite
Kirsopp Lake’s translation in the Loeb edition). Instead, he says he was “in my first
age” (ἐν τῇ πρώτῃ ἡμῶν ἡλικίᾳ; in prima nostra aetate). What does he mean by this?