Nothing more is known of him with certainty than that, when he was proceeding to the stake, he left, as a parting gift to his friends, a hymn in which the divinity of the Holy Spirit was acknowledged. We learn this fact from St. Basil, by whom it is incidentally recorded. ( 100.29.)

On the supposed authority of this testimony, some have erroneously attributed to Athenogenes the morning hymn (ὕμνος ἑωθινός) beginning Δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις Θεῷ, and the evening hymn (ὕμνος ἑσπερινός) beginning Φῶς ἱλαρὸν ἁγίας δόξης. (For the hymns themselves, see Usher, Diss. de Symbolo-Apostolico, &c. p. 33; Thomas Smith's Miiscellanea priora, p. 152; Fabric. Bibl. Gr. vii. pp. 171-2.) But Basil in this passage makes no mention whatever of the morning hymn, while he expressly distinguishes the evening hymn from that of Athenogenes, and says that he does not know who was its author. Cave falls into the above-mentioned error in the first volume of his Historia Literaria (ed. 1688), but corrects it in the dissertation de Libris et Officiis Ecclesiasticis Graecorum, appended to the second volume, published in 1698. Le Moyne makes Athenogenes contemporary with Clemens Alexandrinus, and represents him as suffering under the emperor Severus. In this chronology Cave and Lumper concur. Garnier, in a note upon the above-cited passage in Basil, identifies this Athenogenes with one whom the martyrologies represent as suffering under Diocletian. Baronius and Tillemont strangely suppose that Athenogenes is one and the same with Athenagoras, whose apology for the Christians was addressed to M. Aurelius Antoninus and his son Commodus.