On August 13 every year, the Latin Church commemorates two men together: Pope Saint Pontian and the Roman presbyter Saint Hippolytus, who had opposed three successive popes for eighteen years before reconciling in the Sardinian mines. This article traces, from the earliest Roman chronicles to the current Annuario Pontificio and Martyrologium Romanum, the canonical judgment the Church has preserved across seventeen centuries: that Hippolytus was the first antipope, a theologian of the first rank, a reconciled martyr, and a saint — but never the Bishop of Rome.