Demonstrations · Part 8

Thus the fixed points for determining the chronology of Ephraim's life are:

1. The death of his patron, St. Jacob, Bishop of Nisibis, in 338, after the first siege of that city.

2. The third siege, in which he was among the defenders of the city, in 350.

3. The surrender of Nisibis by Jovian, and its abandonment by its Christian inhabitants, 363; followed by Ephraim's removal to Edessa.

4. The consecration of Basil to the see of Cæsarea, late in 370, followed by Ephraim's visit to him there.

5. The deliverance of the Edessenes from the persecution of Valens (370-372), celebrated by Ephraim in a hymn.

6. Ephraim's death, 373.

To this list it would be right to prefix the meeting of the Council of Nicæa in 325, if the evidence of Ephraim's presence at it, along with St. Jacob, were sufficient. But it has no early attestation; and no writer prior to Theodoret (Hist. Eccles. II. 30) associates the name of Jacob with any incident in Ephraim's life.

The date of Ephraim's birth is nowhere directly stated, but it is usually assumed to have been early in the reign of Constantine (306-337), on the authority of the Vatican Life, which says, "In the days of the victorious Constantine, true believer, was born the holy man Ephraim." But the statement of the Parisian Life is less explicit, and is capable of a different meaning:--"He was in the days of the victorious Constantine." This merely implies that Ephraim (if the pronoun represent him) lived in the reign of that emperor. But it rather appears that Ephraim's father is meant, inasmuch as he is the subject of the immediately preceding sentence which describes him as a heathen priest; and the purport of the passage is, that the saint was the son of a man who not merely had been one of an idolatrous priesthood, but continued to be so after Constantine had acknowledged the Christian religion.

The earlier authorities give no express statement on this point; but a late tenth-century Greek menologium, that of the Emperor Basil (Porphyrogenitus), says that he "continued from the reign of Constantine to that of Valens," --implying as it seems that he was born, as the Vatican Life represents, after Constantine's accession in 306.

Considering, however, that the Life in both its forms affirms that Ephraim was brought by St. Jacob to the Council of Nicæa in 325--in which it is borne out by Gregory Barhebræus in his Ecclesiastical Chronicle (who though a very late writer (1226-1286) had access to early authorities and judgment in using them)--it is hard to reconcile the chronology, for the improbability of the admission of a lad of nineteen, in any capacity, to that venerable assembly, is very great. If we accept it as a fact that he was chosen by Jacob to accompany him, and was permitted to be present among the Fathers at Nicæa, it seems almost necessary to place his birth before Constantine became emperor.

Farther: the menologium above cited adds that he died "in extreme old age;" and the tone and tenor of his testament go far to confirm the truth of these words. But as he died in 373, he cannot have been more than 67 years old in that year if he was born in 306. No doubt 67 is a ripe age, but hardly sufficient to warrant the strong expression of the menologium. Without pressing its language unduly, we may surely take it as implying that he had passed the "threescore years and ten" of the Psalmist at the time of his death--in other words that he was born not later than the first or second year of the fourth century.

Thus by rectifying the text and rendering of the opening sentences of the Life, we relieve ourselves of the supposed necessity of placing his birth in or after 306. And his presence in the Council of 325, and his extreme old age in 373, concur in pointing to the beginning of the fourth century--if not to the later years of the third--as the probable time of that event.

However this may be, whether he was born in 306 or earlier, it is certain that by far the greater part of the long life of the "Deacon of Edessa"--all of it save its last ten or eleven years (363-373) was passed in his native Nisibis; and that he did not even attain the diaconate till he was considerably over sixty years of age, and within three years of his end.

VIII.--His Writings: Their Characteristics.

Of the innumerable writings--controversial, expository, hortatory, devotional--which were for Ephraim the fulfilment of his dream in childhood, the fruit of the many years of literary activity that exercised his full heart and busy brain, enough remains to give an adequate idea of his powers and to amaze us by its variety and abundance. The exaggeration of Sozomen who reckons the number of lines written by him at "three hundred myriads" (three millions) is not to be taken as more than a rough guess at the probable total; but it is evidence of the impression made on the men of the generations to whom his works were transmitted by his fertility. That he himself was conscious of this gift appears in the fact that he records the dream and claims for his hymns and sermons that in them is to be found its interpretation. His faculty of speech, as Gregory informs us in a remarkable passage, though adequate to utter the thoughts of any other mind, was sometimes overborne by the rapid rush and abounding throng of the ideas with which his inspiration filled him, in such measure that he was forced to pray for the intermission of its flow, "Restrain, O Lord, the tide of Thy grace!" Copiousness is the characteristic, and its excess is the chief fault, of Ephraim as an author. The Syriac language has great capacity for condensation; and the parallelism of balanced clauses which Syriac literature affects, conduces to brevity. But on the other hand, the Syrian mind has a tendency to amplify; amplification is the besetting sin of Syriac writers,--of Ephraim not least. And thus, while each sentence has the severe precision of an epigram, the manifold reiteration of epigrammatic clauses amounts to verbosity: one and the same thought or fact is presented in a long-drawn series of slightly varied aspects, with change of expression or at most of illustration, till the recurrence becomes tedious. This criticism is meant primarily for his hymns; but it applies also to too many of his metrical homilies (to be described presently). In all his writings, metrical or otherwise, this habit of amplification leads him, in handling the narrations of Scripture, to fill out their simple outline with elaborate detail that wrongs their beauty and dignity. Of such treatment, examples will be found in this volume, in some of the hymns (such as the XIV^th and XV^th On the Epiphany, and in the Discourse on the Woman who was a Sinner).

His extant works (some of which are known to us only in a Greek version), and those of his lost works of which the titles are recorded, divide themselves into three classes;--Commentaries on Scripture, Homilies (mimre), and Hymns (madrashe).

1. Commentaries.--His Commentaries belonged (if we may trust the Life) to his later years, after his migration to Edessa, when he was past middle life. There he is related to have begun his exposition (still extant) of Genesis, in the preface to which he refers to the homilies and hymns which he had previously produced (Opp. Syr. Tom. I., p. 1). He seems to have commented on almost all the canonical books of the Old Testament. His expositions of the Pentateuch, the chief historical books, the Prophets (including Lamentations), and Job, survive, and have been printed (in the Roman edition of 1732-43, supplemented by that of Professor Lamy, of Louvain, Tom. II., 1886); but those which he is recorded to have written on the Psalms and Proverbs, the books which may be presumed to have most influenced the religious spirit and literary form of his works, have not been preserved. None of the above, however, have reached us in a complete form, but rather as a series of extracts, apparently abridged, from the Commentaries as originally issued by their author. In commenting on the New Testament, he treated of the Gospels, not in their separate form, but in the continuous narrative known as the "Diatessaron" compiled from them by Tatian in the second century. This work, long lost, has been lately recovered in an Armenian version. His Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul has likewise been preserved for us in Armenian. Both have been published by the Mechetarist Fathers of St. Lazaro; first in Armenian, afterwards in a Latin version. In the present volume it has been judged best to include none of the Commentaries, inasmuch as the method and spirit of Ephraim's treatment of Scripture are shown adequately, and in a more interesting form, in his Homilies and Hymns.

2. Homilies.--The Homilies are very varied in character. Many are controversial,--directed against the Jews, against heathenism in the person of the Emperor Julian, against the heresies of Manes, of Marcion, of Bardesan, of the Anomoean followers of Arius. Others set forth articles of the Faith--the Creation, the Fall, Redemption by the Passion and Crucifixion of Our Lord, His Descent into Hades, His Resurrection, the Mission of the Holy Spirit, the Rest of Paradise, the Second Coming, the End of the World. Others are expository, treating of narratives from the Old and the New Testaments, such as the life of Joseph, the Repentance of Nineveh, or the story of "the woman who was a sinner" of St. Luke vii.--Others again are hortatory--calling to repentance, warning against sin, threatening future retribution, extolling virginity. Of the Homilies two--one doctrinal, of Our Lord; one expository, of the sinful woman, are given in this selection. It is to be noted that the Homilies are usually metrical in form, being written in regular stichoi (lines of uniform length). And some of them--for example, a series of nine for the "Rogation Days," and another of eight for the "Passion Week" (week before Easter), and the vigil of "New Sunday" (first after Easter)--were and still are regularly read as lessons, as part of the offices of the Church; a singular mark of reverence--extended, it seems, to the sermons of no other divine.

3. Hymns.--But it is in his Hymns that Ephraim lives,--for the Syrian Churches, and indirectly for the Christian world, of the East if not of the West. Throughout Syrian Christendom, divided as it has been for ages--in the Malkite, Nestorian, Jacobite, and Maronite communities, from the Mediterranean to the Tigris, and beyond, even to the Malabar remnant of the Syro-Indian Church, all of which retain Syriac as the language of their ritual,--the whole body of public worship is shaped by his hymnody and animated with his spirit. It is literally the fact that the Hymns of Ephraim go with every member of every one of these Churches from the first to the last of his Christian life, from the font to the grave. The Epiphany Hymns (included in the present selection) are interwoven into the Baptismal Office; among the Funeral Hymns (which Dr. Burgess has made accessible to English readers) are to be found dirges proper for the obsequies of each and all, lay and cleric, young and old, male and female. Nor is it to be doubted that it was from these Syriac offices that those of the Greek-speaking Churches derived this characteristic, common to both, by which both are differentiated from those of the West,--"hymns occupying in the Eastern Church" (as Dr. Neale observes) "a space beyond all comparison greater than they do in the Latin," so that "the body of the Eastern breviary is ecclesiastical poetry." That the Syrian Church, and not the Greek, took the initiative in the development of ritual, appears from the facts that, though there is evidence of the use of Psalms and Canticles from Scripture throughout Christendom from the first, it is only with Ephraim's contemporary, Gregory Nazianzen, that Greek sacred poetry can be said to have taken shape,--and that his verses failed to gain a place in public worship. He wrote in the metres of the heathen classics; and it was not until a later day, and from the hands of other writers, working on other lines, that the hymns appeared which won their way into the Greek ritual,--hymns written in rhythmic prose, in what seems to be conscious imitation of the Syriac model.

The imitation, however, is by no means complete; it is apparent in the general tone and manner, but does not extend to the form: just as the Greek version of Ephraim's Hymns, though faithfully reproducing his thoughts and literary method, makes no attempt to retain his metrical system; but is a rendering into what in form is prose of an original which is in verse. That this should be so is unavoidable, for Syriac metres are incapable of adaptation to the Greek language. Syriac literature, in all else imitative, here and here only has found out for itself an independent course. Elsewhere it leans on one side to the Hebrew model to which it was drawn by affinity of language and by the influence of the Old Testament; on the other to the Greek, as found in the New Testament and in the writings of the great Divines of the Alexandrian and Antiochian patriarchates, who were the leaders of religious thought for Eastern Christendom. In hymnody alone it struck out a line of its own; it set an example for the Greek-speaking Churches to follow, so far as was possible for them under the conditions above indicated. The Syriac Hymnody is constructed on the Hebrew principle of parallelism, in which thought answers to thought in clauses of repetitive or antithetical balance: but, unlike the Hebrew, its clauses are further regulated by strict equivalence of syllabic measure. But though in this latter respect it seems to approach to the forms of Western verse, ancient or modern, yet the resemblance is but superficial: Syriac verse is not measured by feet--whether determined by syllable quantity, as in Greek and Latin, or by accent, as in English and other modern languages. Thus the metre of Syriac poetry is substantially the "thought-metre" (as it has been well called) of Hebrew, reduced to regularity of form by the rule that each of the lines into which the balanced clauses fall, shall consist of a fixed number of syllables. There is no systematic rhyme; but the nature of the language which by reason of its uniformity of etymological structure abounds in words of like terminations, often causes correspondences of sound amounting to rhyme, or at least to assonance. The lines are very short; not exceeding twelve syllables, sometimes confined to four. Ephraim, though not the actual inventor, was the first master of this metrical system, the first to develop it into system and variety. His favorite metres are the five-syllabled and the seven-syllabled. In his more elaborate poems, such as the Nisibene series, which are rather Odes than Hymns, the strophes or stanzas into which the lines are arranged are often long and of complicated structure, each strophe consisting of many lines (ranging from four up to fourteen or more) of various lengths according to a fixed scheme rigidly adhered to throughout the poem--sometimes throughout a group of cognate poems. In other poems, especially in Hymns intended for popular or ecclesiastical use, where simplicity of structure is suitable, the lines which compose each strophe, whatever their number, are of uniform length. So easily do the Syriac tongue, and the genius of Syriac literature, lend themselves to this scheme of short, syllabically equal clauses, that (as has been already stated) many even of the Homilies are metrical; arranged not indeed in strophes, but in continuous succession of brief stichoi, all of one and the same length--usually of seven syllables; a sort of blank verse, but a blank verse with no animating accents, no varying pauses. A Homily so constructed would fatigue the ear of a modern audience by its monotony: but inasmuch as some portions of Ephraim's Homilies were used in certain ecclesiastical Offices, probably recited in a sort of chant, it may be that in such use we have the explanation of their quasi-versified structure.

In point of literary value as poems, a high place cannot be claimed for these Hymns. Some of them indeed have much of the devotional fervor, and not a little of the human pathos, of the Psalms of David: others show something of the antithetic point and epigrammatic terseness of the Proverbs of Solomon. Yet the devout aspirations and confessions of the poet are too often forced and artificial in their utterance; in his funeral dirges we seem here and there to detect the false note of the professional mourner in the effort to exhaust all possible topics of grief; in all his poems he tends to prolong the series of his parallelisms to a wearisome length and with an iteration that, though laboriously varied, is tedious,--an iteration that has no precedent in the poetry of the Old Testament, save in one or two of the latest Psalms, such as the CXXXVI^th with its recurring burden "For His mercy endureth for ever," or the CXIX^th with its artificial arrangement (often emulated in Syriac Hymnody) by which each of the twenty-two letters of the alphabet in turn is made to head each one of eight consecutive verses in praise of the Law of the Lord. On the whole, it must be admitted that the greater qualities of poetry, such as abound everywhere in nearly every writer of the Hebrew Scriptures,--of truth in rendering the inmost feelings of man's heart in words of absolute simplicity, of aspiration that rises without effort to the highest things of God--to these Ephraim's Hymns have no claim.

For these shortcomings in his poetry, two main causes may be assigned.

One is in the man himself,--or rather, in his mode of life. Naturally, he was prone to feel for and with his fellow-men; for the sorrows of the bereaved, the cares of the toiling poor whose lot (as he proved in the last and best episode of his history) moved him to sympathy and active succour. He can be simple accordingly when he deals with the homely facts of life. But the main tenor of his course was ascetic; he looked on this life and the life beyond--on man and to God--with a vision clouded by the gloom of unnatural solitude and self-mortification. An assiduous student of Scripture, he had an ear for its threatenings rather than its promises and consolations; dread and dismay entered into his heart more deeply than hope; the "Stand in awe and sin not" of the Psalmist was more familiar to his spirit than the "Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous." The perpetual proneness to tears on which his biographers dwell with admiration, and which he seems to have thought it right to foster, has its reflex in his writings, in the hysterical overflow of his fears, his lamentations and his self-reproach. He had lived as an anchorite till his nature became morbid, and its moral fibre was weakened. But to reach the highest levels in religious literature, whether in prose or in poetry, a man must be sane, his mind healthy and strong,--with a health and strength sustained and exercised by wholesome daily contact with the lives of other men.

The second cause is to be found in the method, above described as his--developed though not actually invented by him, and made his own--which he chose as the vehicle of his thoughts and emotions. The "thought-metre" of the Hebrew poets was regulated (as we have seen) by balance of sense, not of sound--member answering to member, verse by verse, in equivalence or contrast of substance merely, not of verbal form: and in this metre, which has been happily likened to the alternating beat of a bird's wings as it mounts aloft, they had shown it to be possible to attain the highest reach of sublime expression of the utmost that man's spirit can conceive of God and Heaven. The Syriac Hymnists had the unhappy idea of effecting a compromise between their two contrasted models, the Hebrew and the Greek; and to this end they compelled their verses into conformity by syllabic measure, of sound, as well as of sense. This artificial structure has an effectiveness of its own, and is suited to the popular ear; but it is incapable of the elevation which the earlier and simpler method attained without effort. As its Semitic parallelism of substance excluded Syriac poetry from the variety in topic and largeness in conception of the Greek, so this grecized regularity of form hampered its efforts to rise to the upper regions where the Hebrew is at home. The wings are free and ample by whose regulated stroke Hebrew poetry is borne, and they carry it to the supreme height: in Syriac poetry the flight is too commonly low and feeble, because its wings are clipped. In the former we are conscious of a uniformity as of the unconstrained waves of the sea, following in a succession of endless change--a uniformity that is majestic: in the latter we detect the uniformity of the water-wheel, that with artificial movement draws up and dispenses the waters of the well in vessels of fixed measure--a uniformity that is mechanical and monotonous.

IX.--The Selections Included in the Present Collection.

The specimens of Ephraim's compositions offered in these selections are:--

(1) The Nisibene Hymns, (2) The Hymns of the Nativity, (3) The Hymns for the Epiphany, (4) Three Homilies (i., On our Lord; ii., On Reproof and Repentance; iii., On the Sinful Woman).

Of (2) the Nativity Hymns, the first thirteen are reprinted from the version by the Rex. J. B. Morris (Oxford, 1847), made from the Roman Edition of the Syriac Works of Ephraim. The rest of the series as translated (six in number, making nineteen in all) were unknown when that edition was completed in 1743. These latter, and also (3) the Epiphany Hymns (with one exception) have since come to light in the Nitrian collection of the British Museum, and were printed by Professor Lamy in his St. Ephraim (Tom. I, cc. 1-144; Tom. II., cc. 427-504), 1882-1889. In the same edition (Tom. I., cc. 145-274; 311-338) were first printed (4) the three Homilies. Our translations of these follow Lamy's text, with here and there a slight variation where errors seem to exist. These two series of Hymns belong to the ecclesiastical class: their titles appropriate them to two great Festivals of the Church, and portions of these are embodied in Syriac Rituals still in use. Of the two Homilies, the former was written for the Feast of the Epiphany, like the Hymns which precede it.

The Nisibene Hymns (1) are translated from the text as first printed by Dr. Bickell (1866), whose edition, like that of Dr. Lamy, rests upon mss. of the Nitrian collection. They also were unknown to the Roman editors of the last century, and to the English translator of 1847; and they have not till now appeared in English. The series when complete consisted of 77 Hymns. Of these the first division (I.-XXXIV.) treat of the fortunes of the Church in Nisibis, Carrhena [Haran], and an unnamed city (probably Edessa). The remainder (XXXV. to end) deal with the topics of Death and the Resurrection. The present selection comprises 46 of these, namely:--of the first division, the first 21, those which relate to Nisibis and which are the Nisibene Hymns proper; of the second division, two series--one of 8 hymns (XXXV.-XLII.) in which Death and Satan hold monologue or dialogue,--the other of 17 (LII.-LXVIII.), similar in character, but with Man as a third interlocutor.

X.--Probable Dates of His Works.

Of the compositions contained in this volume, none yields internal evidence of its date, except the Nisibene Hymns of the first division. Hymns XXXV.-XLII. (not included here), apparently belong to the later (or Edessene) period of Ephraim's life, and to the reign of Valens,--i.e., they are later than the year 363. The 21 Hymns which stand first in our collection may confidently be assigned to the year of the third siege (350) and the thirteen following years. Hymn I. was indubitably composed while the siege was still urgent; Hymns I. and III. immediately after the deliverance; Hymns IV.-XII. deal with the fortunes of the city and country in a troubled time of invasion that succeeded; the rest (XIII.-XXI.) treat of the four successive Bishops of Nisibis under whom Ephraim lived--Jacob, Babu, Valgesh, and Abraham. The last-named is not elsewhere recorded except by Elias of Nisibis, but the death of Valgesh is known to have occurred in 361. The Hymns therefore which celebrate the accession of Abraham to the See (XVII.-XXI.) must be placed in the interval, 361-363, the latter being the year when Ephraim with all the Christian population of the city was driven out by Sapor. Hymns XIII.-XVI., being written while Valgesh was Bishop--for they compare him with his two predecessors--fall into the interval between the year of the siege (350) which they speak of as past,--and the year of the death of Valgesh (361). Bickell assigns IV.-XII. to the months of Sapor's invasion in 359; XIII.-XVI. to 358 and 359; XVII.-XXI. to 363, in the short space between Julian's death and the surrender of Nisibis.

It is probable that most of his Hymns that are definitely controversial belong, like most of his controversial writings, to the years of his later life, at Edessa. And as we have seen, the earliest of them that can be confidently dated, is not earlier than 350. But it would be hasty to conclude that he had composed no Hymns before that date, and that in the Nisibene Hymns of the siege we have the first fruits of the vine of his vision. In 350 he must have been over forty--perhaps over fifty years of age; and it is highly improbable that a fertility which proved to be so abundant, did not begin to manifest itself at a much earlier age; or that a literary offspring of such bulk and importance was all produced in the last five and twenty years of a long life. The earlier authorities concerning his life give no definite information on this head; and the Syriac Life is vague in its statements and untrustworthy in its chronology. The account given of Barhebræus, a well-informed but very late writer (thirteenth century), can hardly be accepted as embodying any genuine tradition, but has probability in its favor:--"From the time of the Nicene Council (he writes ), Ephraim began to write canticles and hymns against the heresies of his time,"--for few of his hymns are without a polemic spirit, though (as has been said) those that are purely controversial seem to be of a later period. A much later author indeed, Georgius "Bishop of the Arabians" (writing in 714) warns us that there is no evidence to assign any of Ephraim's writings to the twenty years' interval between the Nicene Council and the year 345--"especially (he adds) to the years before 337." This writer, however, is here arguing in support of the claim of Aphrahat to be an independent author, against those who regarded him as a disciple of Ephraim; and he rests his case on the ground that whereas the Demonstrations of Aphrahat are (as we shall see presently) dated from 337 to 345, no composition of Ephraim's can be shown to have been written so early. And it must be admitted that the earliest date (as above noted) that can be fixed with certainty for any of Ephraim's innumerable productions in 350,--thirteen years later than Aphrahat's earlier Demonstrations. Against this is to be set the tradition of Ephraim's presence at Nicæa, implying as it does that even in 325 he had made himself a notable person,--and the probability that one who has left such ample proof of the copiousness of his literary gift, must have begun to exercise it before a date at which he would have passed his thirtieth year (supposing his birth to have been in 306), or even have entered middle life (if we place it at the beginning of the century). The two writers were unquestionably contemporary, and as yet no sufficient data have been discovered to determine to which of them seniority belongs.

Second Part

Aphrahat the Persian Sage.

1. Name of Author of Demonstrations long Unknown.--The author of the Demonstrations, eight of which appear (for the first time in an English version) in the present volume, has a singular literary history. By nationality a Persian, in an age when Zoroastrianism was the religion of Persia, he wrote in Syriac as a Christian theologian. His writings, now known to us as the works of Aphrahat, were remembered, cited, translated, and transcribed for at least two centuries after his death; but his proper name seems to have been for a time forgotten, so that in the mss. of the fifth and sixth centuries the Demonstrations are described as composed by "the Persian Sage," or "Mar Jacob the Persian Sage;" and a writer of the eighth century, who had made a minute study of these writings and ascertained their date, admits that he has been unable to find out "who or what he was, his rank in the Church, his name or abode." Not only so, but the name Jacob assigned (rightly or wrongly) to him has led to a confusion of identity. His works have been ascribed for many hundred years--from a date not long after their composition down to quite recent times, to an earlier Jacob, the famous and saintly Bishop of Nisibis in the days of Constantine the Great. It is not until the tenth century that the true name of "the Persian Sage" emerges to light as Aphrahat, by which he is unhesitatingly designated by several well informed and accurate authorities of that and the three succeeding centuries., and under which he is known to modern scholars.

2. Their Subjects, and Arrangement.--The Demonstrations are twenty-two in number, after the number of the letters of the Syriac alphabet, each of them beginning with the letter to which it corresponds in order. The first ten form a group by themselves, and are somewhat earlier in date than those which follow: they deal with Christian graces, hopes, and duties, as appears from their titles:--"Concerning Faith, Charity, Fasting, Prayer, Wars, Monks, Penitents, the Resurrection, Humility, Pastors." Of those that compose the later group, three relate to the Jews ("Concerning Circumcision, the Passover, the Sabbath"); followed by one described as "Hortatory," which seems to be a letter of rebuke addressed by Aphrahat, on behalf of a Synod of Bishops, to the clergy and people of Seleucia and Ctesiphon; after which the Jewish series is resumed in five discourses, "Concerning Divers Meals, The Call of the Gentiles, Jesus the Messiah, Virginity, the Dispersion of Israel." The three last are of the same general character as the first ten,--"Concerning Almsgiving, Persecution, Death, and the Latter Times." To this collection is subjoined a twenty-third Demonstration, supplementary to the rest, "Concerning the Grape," under which title is signified the blessing transmitted from the beginning through Christ, in allusion to the words of Isaiah, "As the grape is found in the cluster and one saith, Destroy it not" (lxv. 8). This treatise embodies a chronological disquisition of some importance.

3. Dates of Composition.--Of the dates at which they were written, these discourses supply conclusive evidence. At the end of section 5 of Demonstr. V. (Concerning Wars), the author reckons the years from the era of Alexander (b.c. 311) to the time of his writing as 648. He wrote therefore in a.d. 337--the year of the death of Constantine the Great. Demonst. XIV. is formally dated in its last section, "in the month Shebat. in the year 655" (that is, a.d. 344). More fully, in closing the alphabetic series (XXII. 25) he informs us that the above dates apply to the two groups--the first ten being written in 337; the twelve that follow, in 344. Finally, the supplementary discourse "Concerning the Grape" was written (as stated, XXIII. 69) in July, 345. Thus the entire work was completed within nine years,--five years before the middle of the fourth century,--before the composition of the earliest work of Ephraim of which the date can be determined with certainty.

4. Extent and Limits of their Circulation.--These Demonstrations, though they fell far short of attaining the unbounded popularity which was the lot of the countless Hymns and Homilies of Ephraim, appear to have won for themselves a recognized place in Syriac literature. It is true that, in striking contrast with the overwhelming numbers of mss. containing portions, great or small, of Ephraim's works, which are to be met with in nearly every collection of Syriac written remains, one complete and two incomplete copies are all that have reached us of this series of twenty-three treatises; and extracts or quotations from them very rarely occur. Yet it is clear that compositions which were thought worthy at an early date of translation into at least one foreign tongue, must have had some considerable reputation in the country of their origin; and it may be presumed that these two or three mss. (of the fifth and sixth centuries), are the survivors of a fairly large number of which the majority have perished.

The Armenian translation is probably the earliest evidence now extant of the circulation (though under a wrong ascription of authorship) of the Demonstrations, of which it comprises nineteen. Armenian scholars seem to agree in the belief that it was made in the fifth century, before its original was more than a hundred years in being. An Ethiopic translation of the discourse "On Wars" is extant, but there is no evidence that it formed part of a version extending to all or any of the remaining twenty-two, nor is its date even approximately determinable.