ABSTRACT
Ephrem the Syrian, a writer whose life spanned the better part of the fourth century, spent that life on the most unstable of shifting frontiers: the West Asian border between the Roman and the Persian Empires. For the majority of the first six decades of his life, Ephrem resided in Roman Nisibis, a town besieged by the Persian leader Shapur II three times: in 338, 346, and 350. This border struggle involved the lives of many regular Romans, but even the emperor Julian came to clash with Shapur and died. His successor, Jovian, found the struggle too much, and resolved the conflict temporarily by ceding several towns to Persian rule. Nisibis was one of them, and some time after the relinquishment of Nisibis to Shapur in 363, Ephrem and other Nisibene Christians moved from that city, many of them eventually making their way to Roman Edessa, 100 miles to the west. Though Ephrem is the subject of an extensive Byzantine hagiography, his life, in a historical sense, is difficult to know beyond these bare sketches: the best resources that we have for determining the circumstances in which he lived are the texts, both hymns and metrical poems, that Ephrem left behind.
