Hermogenès
Hermog'enès ( ῾Ερμογένης, Merassry-born), a disciple of Asia Minor, and probably companion in labor of the apostle Paul; mentioned, along with Phygellus, as having abandoned him during his second imprisonment at Rome, doubtless from alarm at the perils of the connection (2Ti 1:15). A.D. 64.' In the Roman Breviary (in Fest. S. Jac. Apost. Pars. aestiva, p. 485, Milan, 1851) the conversion of Hermogenes is attributed to St. James the Great, and in the legendary history of Abdias, the so-called bishop of Babylon (Fabricius, Cod. Apocryph. N.T. p. 517 sq.), Hermogenes is represented as first practicing magic, and converted, with Philetus, by the same apostle. Grotius, apparently misled by the circumstance that the historian or geographer Hermogenes, mentioned by the scholiast of Apollonius Rhodius (2, 722, Frag. Hist. Graec. Didot. ed., 3:523), wrote on primitive history, and incidentally (?) speaks of Nannacus or Anacus- and may therefore probably be the same as the Hermogenes whom Josephus mentions as having treated on Jewish history (Apion, 1, 23) — suggests that he may be the person mentioned by the apostle Paul. This, however, is not likely. Nothing more is known of the Hermogenes in question, and* he cannot be identified either with Hermogenes of Tarsus, a historian of the time of Domitian, who was put to death by that emperor (Sueton. Domit. 10; Hoffman, Lex. Univ. s.v.; Alford on 2Ti 1:15), nor with Hermogenes the painter, against whom Tertullian wrote (Smith's Dict. of Class. Biography, s.v.), nor with the saints of the Byzantine Church, commemorated on Jan. 24 and Sept. I (Neale, Eastern Church, 2, 770, 781).
