ABSTRACT
The story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesos anticipates modern science fiction. Seven Christians fall into a deep slumber in a cave during the persecution by the Emperor Decius (A.D. 249-251), and do not emerge again until two centuries later, in the reign of Theodosius II (A.D. 408-450), at which time they find their city openly and joyously Christian. The tale is designed to stimulate reflection on all that had changed in the meantime, and is a mental experiment that much scholarship on religious change in Late Antiquity has attempted to replicate (one historian has even wished that he was one of the Sleepers).1 Obviously, much changed between 250 and 450: Ephesos was now crowded with churches, and the emperor was a Christian, his court attended by legions of bishops and monks. Some other things, however, had not changed: Proklos was still paying his devotions to the statue of Athena in the Parthenon, a functioning pagan temple. Had the Sleepers awoken in Athens, they might not have noticed the passage of centuries. On the other hand, Markos, a saint from Athens, who around the same time lived in an Ethiopian cave for about a century with no human contact, pointedly commented on how “Hellenism” had been abolished in his native city, and replaced with “piety,” at least “openly.”2
