Patrick Comerford
I was writing last week about the seven cities or places that have given their names to nine of the Pauline letters in the New Testament: Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae and Thessaloniki. I have visited many of these place, including Rome, Corinth, Ephesus and Thessaloniki.
As I was writing about Ephesus last week (22 November), I was reminded how many times I had visited the classical ruins of Ephesus, the present day Turkish city of Selçuk, and some of the sites clustered together in the this area, including the Temple of Artemis, the Library of Celsius, the Basilica of Saint John, the Isa Bey Kami, which mut be unusual as a mosque for having a name that honours Jesus, the supposed ‘House of Mary’, and the Tomb of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.
I sometimes wondered how many of the tourists who make their way from Kusadasi to Ephesus know of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus or notice the site of the cave. Yet, their story was so popular in the early Church that it is referred to even in an early Irish monastic manuscript associated with the monks of Tallaght, they were celebrated as martyrs throughout the early church, they inspired great works of literature in mediaeval Europe, and they are even discussed in one chapter of the Quran.
Tradition says the Seven Sleepers (επτά κοιμώμενοι) were a group of young men in the third century who hid inside a cave outside Ephesus (Selçuk) ca 250 CE to escape persecution and who emerged many year later – if not hundreds of years later.
In the traditional telling of this story, the seven young men were trying to escape one of the many persecutions of Christians in the Roman Empire and they awoke some 300 years later.
The earliest known version of the story is told in the writings of the Jacob of Serugh (ca 450-521), a Syriac bishop who relied on an earlier, now lost Greek source. An outline of this story appears in the writings of Gregory of Tours (538-594) and in the History of the Lombards by Paul the Deacon (720-799). The best-known Western version of the story appears in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (1259-1266).
The story is told in up to a dozen mediaeval languages and found in over 200 manuscripts, from the ninth to the 13th centuries. These include 104 Latin manuscripts, 40 Greek, 33 Arabic, 17 Syriac, six Ethiopic, five Coptic, two Armenian, and one each in Old French, Old English and Middle Irish.
The ninth-century Irish calendar Félire Óengusso or Martyrology of Óengus, attributed to Saint Óengus of Tallaght, commemorates the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus on 7 August. The Roman Martyrology commemorates them on 27 July, the Byzantine calendar commemorates them on 4 August and 22 October, while Syriac Orthodox calendars give various dates: 21 April, 2 August, 13 August, 23 October and 24 October.
Early versions of the story do not agree on or even specify the number of sleepers. Many accounts say there were seven sleepers along with a dog named Viricanus.
The number of years the sleepers slept also varies in the accounts. The highest number, given by Gregory of Tours, was 373 years; some accounts say 372; Jacobus de Voragine calculated 196 years – from 252 CE to 448 CE; other accounts suggest 195 years. Islamic accounts, including the Qur'an, suggest a sleep of 309 years: these are presumably lunar years, making it 300 solar years.
The lists include at least seven different sets of names for the sleepers, mainly variations on the names Maximian, Martinian, Dionisius, John, Constantine, Malchus and Serapion, although Gregory of Tours names them as Achillides, Probatus, Stephanus, Sambatus, Quiriacus and Diogenus.
According to the story, during the persecutions by the Roman emperor Decius ca 250 CE, seven young men were arrested as Christians. They were given time to recant their faith, but they refused to bow to Roman idols. Instead, they chose to give their worldly goods to the poor and they retired to a mountain cave to pray, where they fell asleep. The Emperor then ordered the mouth of the cave to be sealed.
Decius died in 251, and as the years passed Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. At some later time in the reign of Theodosius II (408-450), there were heated discussions about the resurrection of the body and life after death. At that time, a farmer decided to open up the sealed cave to use it as a cattle pen. But when he opened the cave, he found the sleepers inside. They woke up, imagining that had slept for only a day, and sent one of their number to Ephesus with a saucer of silver coins to buy ‘pure food’ in the bazaar.
When he arrived in Ephesus, the former sleeper was astounded to find buildings with crosses on them. The people of Ephesus, for their part, were astounded to find a man trying to use old coins from the reign of Decius to buy food. The bishop was summoned to interview the sleepers. They told him their story, and died praising God.
A pilgrim account written between 518 and 531, De situ terrae sanctae, records the existence of a church dedicated to the sleepers in Ephesus. The story spread rapidly throughout the Christian world.
The story was popularised in the West in the late sixth century by Gregory of Tours in his De gloria martyrum (Glory of the Martyrs). He claimed to have heard the story from ‘a certain Syrian interpreter’ (Syro quidam interpretante), although this could refer to a Syriac speaker or even a Greek speaker from the Levant.
The story of the sleepers is also referred to in the Quran (18: 9-26). But the surah does not speculate about the number of the sleepers nor about the years they slept in the cave: ‘My Sustainer knows best how many they were.’
As the earliest versions of the legend spread from Ephesus, an early Christian catacomb there came to be associated with the story and attracted pilgrims. During the Crusades, bones from Ephesus, claimed as relics of the Seven Sleepers, were brought to France in a large stone coffin and displayed in the Abbey of Saint Victor in Marseille.
The Seven Sleepers were included in the Golden Legend, the most popular book of the later Middle Ages.
The grotto of the Seven Sleepers is on the slopes of Mount Pion (Mount Coelian) near Ephesus (present-day Selçuk), with ruins of the religious site built over it. It was excavated in 1926-1928, when several hundred graves dated to the fifth and sixth centuries were found, with inscriptions dedicated to the Seven Sleepers on the walls and in the graves.
The account remained popular, even after the Reformation. The poet John Donne asks in ‘The Good Morrow’:
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
Although their story lost popular currency at the Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon gives different accounts of the story in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Their story was revived with the coming of Romanticism. The Golden Legend may have been the source for retellings of the Seven Sleepers in Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in a poem by Goethe. It has many echoes in Washington Irving’s Rip van Winkle and in HG Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes.
Later, John Buchan refers to the Seven Sleepers in The Three Hostages, where Richard Hannay surmises that his wife Mary, who is a sound sleeper, is descended from one of the seven who has married one of the Foolish Virgins.
The Three Sleepers are characters in CS Lewis novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Several languages have idioms related to the Seven Sleepers to describe someone who is a late riser or oversleeps, including Hungarian, Norwegian, Swedish and Welsh, and there is a phrase in Irish, na seacht gcodlatáin, that refers to hibernating animals.
In Germany, Seven Sleepers’ Day (Siebenschläfertag) on 27 June recalls the legend of the Seven Sleepers and is part of traditional weather lore, with the notion that the weather that day are supposed predicts the weather for the next seven weeks.
There are earlier stories and legends in classical literature that provide similar myths if not the origin for the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. Epimenides of Knossos, or Epimenides of Crete (Ἐπιμενίδης) was a Greek philosopher-poet from Knossos or Phaistos who lived in the seventh or sixth centuries BCE. While Epimenides was tending his father’s sheep, it is said, he fell asleep in a cave in Crete that was sacred to Zeus, and awoke after 57 years with the gift of prophecy.
Aristotle and Plutarch say Epimenides purified Athens after the pollution brought by the Alcmaeonidae, a powerful noble family who negotiated an alliance with the Persians during the Persian Wars. Pericles and Alcibiades also belonged to the Alcmaeonidae, and during the Peloponnesian War the Spartans referred to the family’s curse in an attempt to discredit Pericles.
It is said that the expertise Epimenides showed in sacrifices and the reform of funeral practices were of great help to Solon in reforming the Athenian state. But the only reward he would accept was a branch of the sacred olive, and the promise of perpetual friendship between Athens and Knossos. He is also said to have prophesied at Sparta on military matters.
He died in Crete at an advanced age, and legends say he lived until he was almost 300 years old – another parallel with the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.
Several prose and poetic works have been attributed to Epimenides. But all of his works are now lost, and we only know of them through quotations by other authors. In a fragment of one of his poems, citied in the Hymn to Zeus of Callimachus, Minos of Knossos addresses Zeus:
Τύμβον ἐτεκτήναντο σέθεν, κύδιστε μέγιστε,
Κρῆτες, ἀεὶ ψευδεῖς, κακὰ θηρία, γαστέρες ἀργαί.
Ἀλλὰ σὺ γ᾽ οὐ θνῇσκεις, ἕστηκας γὰρ ζοὸς αίεί,
Ἐν γὰρ σοὶ ζῶμεν καὶ κινύμεθ᾽ ἠδὲ καὶ ἐσμέν.
They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one,
Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies.
But you are not dead: you live and abide forever,
For in you we live and move and have our being.
It is yet another parallel with the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.
Epimenides is also remembered today because he is quoted twice in the New Testament.
While speaking to a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in front of the Areopagus in Athens (see Acts 17: 22-34), the Apostle Paul quotes from Epimenides’ Cretica: ‘For “In him we live and move and have our being”.’
In this address in Athens, Saint Paul is citing the fourth line in the Hymn to Zeus of Callimachus, with its reference to one of ‘your own poets’ (Acts 17: 28). Saint Paul goes on to quote from Aratus’ Phaenomena: ‘For we too are his offspring’ (see verse 28).
When Saint Paul spoke to Saint Titus concerning his mission in Crete, he committed a logical fallacy by quoting Epimenides: ‘It was one of them, their very own prophet, who said, “Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.” That testimony is true’ (Titus 1: 12-13a).
The ‘lie’ of the Cretans is that Zeus was mortal, for Epimenides believed that Zeus is dead. The logical inconsistency of a Cretan asserting all Cretans are always liars may not have occurred to Epimenides, nor to Callimachus, who both used the phrase to emphasise their point, without irony.
However, Saint Paul must have thought long about the idea of a dead god and the dead god’s tomb as he sought to preach the Resurrection in Crete.
Epimenides is first identified as the ‘prophet’ in Titus 1: 12 by Clement of Alexandria (Stromata 1, 14). Clement mentions that ‘some say’ Epimenes should be counted among the seven wisest philosophers. But he does not indicate that the concept of logical paradox is an issue.
Saint John Chrysostom (Homily 3 on Titus) gives an alternative fragment:
For even a tomb, King, of you
They made, who never died, but ever shall be.
However, it is not clear when Epimenides became associated with the Epimenides paradox, a variation of the liar paradox. Saint Augustine restates the liar paradox in Against the Academicians (III.13.29), but does so without mentioning Epimenides.
In the Middle Ages, many forms of the liar paradox were studied under the heading of insolubilia, but they were not associated with Epimenides.
Paradoxically, I have to say I have found most if not all Cretans to be truthful and honest.
Many years ago, back in the 1980s, as I entrusted someone on the beach in Rethymnon with my wallet and valuables as I went for a swim, I was advised that it was tourists and foreigners I needed to be wary of.
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