The Persian Wars and Edessa (338 – 373)

The wars that framed and ended St. Ephrem’s first life and opened his second: the three sieges of Nisibis by Shapur II (338, 346, 350), survived by the city and commemorated in Ephrem’s own Hymns of Nisibis; the death of the emperor Julian in Persia in 363 and the treaty by which the new emperor Jovian ceded Nisibis to the Sasanians, forcing its Christians into exile; Ephrem’s migration to Edessa for his final decade; and the famine of 372–373, in which the old deacon organized relief for the dying before dying himself, a month later, in June 373 — the one episode of his charity that the earliest sources independently record.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

Three Sieges Under Shapur II

The middle decades of Ephrem’s life at Nisibis were dominated by war. The Sasanian king Shapur II, pressing against the Roman frontier in Mesopotamia, laid siege to the city on three separate occasions — in 338, 346, and 350 (Brock, St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, SVS Press, 1990, introduction). Nisibis, a strongly fortified Roman bastion, withstood all three. The third and most dramatic, in 350, saw Shapur dam the local river Mygdonius and loose the pent-up waters against the city walls in an attempt to breach them by flood — an episode that left its imprint on Ephrem’s poetry, where the besieged city is likened to Noah’s Ark riding upon the waters (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction; Carmina Nisibena 1, ed. Beck, CSCO 218/219).

These sieges and the deliverances from them are the historical substance behind the Carmina Nisibena, the “Hymns of Nisibis,” the cycle most directly tied to the events of his city’s history (the cycle as a whole is discussed in the chapter on the verse homilies and commentaries and within the madrashe tradition in the teaching hymns). One much-repeated detail — Theodoret’s account that Ephrem urged Bishop Jacob onto the walls during the siege of 338 — should be handled with care: Theodoret’s own Historia Religiosa tells the story of Jacob and the walls without mentioning Ephrem at all, and the linkage is suspect. [Disputed: Theodoret (Ecclesiastical History 2.30) associates Ephrem with the 338 siege; but his Historia Religiosa recounts the siege episode without Ephrem, and the connection is regarded as a later embellishment (Brock, Hymns on Paradise).]

363: Julian’s Death and the Surrender of Nisibis

The decisive turn came in 363. The emperor Julian — “the Apostate,” who had set out to restore paganism — invaded the Sasanian empire and was killed in the field that summer. His hastily proclaimed successor, Jovian, extricated the trapped Roman army only by a humiliating peace, the terms of which handed over to Persia a swathe of frontier territory, Nisibis among it (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction; the events narrated by the eyewitness historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 25). Ammianus records that a condition of the surrender required the Christian Roman population of Nisibis to depart; Jovian gave up the city and its Christians went into exile.

For Ephrem this was the end of the only home he had known — a city Roman and Christian for his whole life, now given over to the Zoroastrian empire. The bitterness of Julian’s apostasy and the catastrophe that followed it found direct expression in his four Hymns against Julian (Contra Julianum, ed. Beck, CSCO 174/175), which are among the most historically pointed of all his works, a deacon’s verse commentary on the apostate emperor and the loss of Nisibis. The wars that had three times spared his city had now, by the diplomacy of defeat, taken it away.

Migration to Edessa

In the wake of the 363 surrender, Ephrem — by now an old man, probably in his late fifties — made his way west, perhaps a hundred miles, to Edessa (modern Urfa/Şanlıurfa), the great Syriac Christian center that remained on the Roman side of the new frontier (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). There he spent the last decade of his life. Edessa was a more cosmopolitan and more hellenized milieu than Nisibis, and it was also a city seething with the religious movements Ephrem would spend his final years combating in verse: the followers of Bardaisan, of Marcion, of Mani, and the Arians (the polemical works of this period are treated in the chapter on the Hymns against Heresies and the prose refutations). It is as the “deacon of Edessa” — Jerome’s phrase — that the wider Church would remember him, even though Nisibis had been the city of his birth and the longer half of his life (Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 115). The work of teaching he carried on at Edessa, and the institution sometimes called the “School of the Persians,” are treated in the chapter on Nisibis and Edessa.

The Famine of 372–373 and Ephrem’s Relief Work

The last act of Ephrem’s life is also the best-attested act of his charity, and it is worth pausing on the quality of the evidence. The episode is recorded by Palladius in his Lausiac History (chapter 40), written around 419/20 — within two generations of the event — and it is repeated by Sozomen, who draws closely on Palladius. Brock judges Palladius “very probably reliable” here, finding “no reason to doubt the historicity” of the account (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction).

Palladius tells it thus. A severe famine struck Edessa — the modern chronology places the failed wheat harvest in early summer 372 and dates relief to the new crop of the following spring. Ephrem, who had lived as a recluse, came out of his cell, rebuked the rich who were hoarding grain while the poor died, and — being trusted as “a man of God” — was put in charge of distributing the relief that the wealthy were now shamed into giving. He had pallets set up in the public porticoes, some three hundred beds for the sick and dying, and tended them through the crisis. Then, Palladius concludes, “when that year of famine had passed… he returned to his cell, and a month later he came to his end” (Palladius, Lausiac History 40; Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). The theological poet of the Syriac Church ended his life not at the writing-desk but as the organizer of a soup kitchen and a hospice — the deacon’s office of service carried to its furthest point.

The Wars in the Hymns

It is one of the marks of Ephrem’s genius that he did not merely live through these events but turned them into theology. The Carmina Nisibena read the sieges of his city not as bare military history but as a sacred drama: the besieged Nisibis becomes the Ark riding the floodwaters of Shapur’s dam, the deliverances become signs of God’s protection, the bishops become the city’s true defenders, praying on the walls. The Hymns against Julian, composed after the catastrophe of 363, read the apostate emperor’s death and the loss of Nisibis as a judgment — the proud persecutor struck down, the Christian city handed over for a season, yet God’s purposes unshaken. Ephrem’s response to the disasters of his age was neither resignation nor mere lament but interpretation: the events of empire were taken up into the framework of salvation history and given a meaning that the politics alone could not supply (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction; Griffith, “Ephraem the Syrian’s Hymns Against Julian,” Vigiliae Christianae 41, 1987).

This is why the Persian wars matter for more than chronology. They are the historical soil from which a substantial part of Ephrem’s poetry grew, and they show his characteristic method already at work: the reading of the visible world — here, the world of armies and treaties and famines — as a field of signs pointing beyond itself (the method treated fully in the chapter on types and symbols). The deacon who watched his city besieged and surrendered did not retreat into private piety; he made the public catastrophe into public catechesis, teaching his people to read their own history as the dealings of God.

The Exile and the Old Age at Edessa

The migration to Edessa was, for a man near sixty, an uprooting of the most painful kind: the loss of the city of his birth, his baptism, and his life’s service, and resettlement in a strange and more cosmopolitan place. Yet the Edessene decade was extraordinarily productive. Freed — or forced — from the routines of Nisibis, Ephrem threw himself into the controversies of his new city, sharpening his polemic against the Bardaisanites, Marcionites, Manichaeans, and Arians who flourished there (see the chapters on against heresies), and it is at Edessa that the tradition places the organization of the women’s choirs (see that chapter). The exile, in other words, was also a second flowering. The loss of Nisibis gave the Church the Edessene Ephrem — the polemicist, the choir-master, the famine-relief organizer — and it is largely as “the deacon of Edessa” that history remembers him, though Nisibis had the longer claim. The old age of the refugee was not a winding-down but a final intensification of the deacon’s labor, ended only by the famine that killed him.

Death, June 373

Ephrem died in 373. As Brock emphasizes, this is the one fixed point in his chronology: the year is “certain, 373” (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). The day is most reliably given as 9 June, a date supplied by the sixth-century Chronicle of Edessa and consistent with the famine chronology of Palladius, which has him dying a month after the crisis passed (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction; other sources give 15, 18, or 19 June). [Disputed: the day of death is given as 9 June by the Chronicle of Edessa (Brock, Hymns on Paradise); other traditions give 15/18/19 June, and the later Roman feast settled on 18 June, then 9 June after 1969 — see the chapter on veneration.]

He died, as he had lived his last years, a deacon of the Church and a refugee from a lost city, having turned the disasters of the Persian wars into some of the most enduring poetry of Christian antiquity.

References

Brock, Sebastian. St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Popular Patristics 10), 1990. Introduction — the three sieges, the 363 surrender, the migration to Edessa, the famine, and the certain death-year.
Palladius. The Lausiac History 40 (c. 419/20). The famine, Ephrem’s rebuke of the hoarders, the three hundred beds, and his death a month later.
Sozomen. Ecclesiastical History 3.16 (c. 440s), drawing on Palladius for the famine-relief.
Jerome. De Viris Illustribus 115 (392). “Ephrem, a deacon of the church of Edessa.”
Ammianus Marcellinus. Res Gestae 25 (late 4th c.). Eyewitness account of Julian’s Persian campaign, Jovian’s treaty, and the surrender of Nisibis.
Beck, Edmund (ed.). Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Paradiso und contra Julianum. CSCO 174/175 (Scriptores Syri 78–79). Louvain, 1957. (The Hymns against Julian.)
Beck, Edmund (ed.). Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Carmina Nisibena. CSCO 218/219, 240/241 (Scriptores Syri 92–93, 102–103). Louvain, 1961, 1963. (The Hymns of Nisibis.)