other · 377 · Salamis
He knew Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, Coptic and some Latin, and he had spent years among Egyptian monks before Cyprus, and he used all of it to build a catalogue. The number eighty is not evidential — he says himself he is matching the eighty concubines of the Song of Songs — and the method is to state a position and then refute it at length. The accidental consequence is that this dataset, and everyone else, owes him for texts that survive nowhere else: he quotes lost Gnostic writings, lost Jewish-Christian gospels and lost Marcionite material in full because he wanted to knock them down. He is also the man who went to Constantinople in his eighties, at Theophilus of Alexandria's urging, to make trouble for Chrysostom over Origen, and who is supposed to have exchanged curses with him at the harbour before turning round and dying on the voyage home. This page held the council of Constantinople and not the book.
To describe every heresy he had heard of, so that a reader who met one would recognise it — like a doctor's chest of antidotes, which is what he called the book.
Eighty heresies catalogued, a great deal of lost literature preserved by accident, and a reputation for heresy-hunting that followed him into old age.