Reference edition:

Chronica minora. 1: accedunt Hippolyti Romani praeter Canonem paschalem fragmenta chronologica, collegit et emendavit Carolus Frick, Lipsiae 1892, 153-174 (Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana)

         The De cursu temporum, also transmitted under the title De mundi duratione, is a treatise that Hilarianus wrote at the request of a group of friends and followers, who were perhaps troubled by pagan prophecies that the year 398 would see the end of Christ’s cult — which, for Christians, necessarily coincided with the end of the world (cfr. August. De civit. Dei 18.53-54: Lana, pp. 85-88; Zecchini 2003, p. 330).

            In several addresses, Hilarianus develops his own millenary point of view concerning how long the world will endure. Since, according to Genesis, God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, and since, in God’s eyes, one thousand years are like one day — Psalms 90(89):4 and 2 Peter 3:8 —, the world will likewise last six days, of a thousand years each. There will thus be a first resurrection, after which the just will live one Saturday of a thousand years, while the evildoers will live in suffering. At the end of this millennium, when the cosmic week has taken place, a second resurrection will occur, marking the definitive and eternal triumph of God and the just. Through minute calculations, Hilarianus explains that 5,530 years elapsed between Creation and the passion and death of Jesus (which he dates to the 25 March 29), at which point only 470 remained until the world would reach 6,000 years of age. As he declares (allowing us to date the work precisely), he writes during the consulships of  Flavius Cesarius et Nonius Atticus Massimus, in 397. 369 of these 470 years have already passed (his count includes the year of Jesus’ death, 29, and the year in which he wrote, 397): thus 101 years remain and, according to Hilarianus, the world will end, and the first resurrection will take place, in 497 (again counting inclusively: Lana, p. 84).

            One unusual note of the work is that Hilarianus concerned himself not only with humanity’s past (although this did interest him) but also, and above all, with its future: the century that would follow his, until the fatal end of the 6,000 years, would be punctuated by the catastrophes that John had written about in Apocalypse. In Hilarianus, “there is no difference in the degree of his knowledge of the past, present, and future: everything has already been written in the Sacred Scriptures: it suffices to know how to read it and to make careful calculations (ratione cogente)” (Lana, p. 85) [F. Giannotti; trad. C. Belanger]