other · 363 · Edessa
Julian died on campaign in Persia and Jovian bought his army's retreat by ceding Nisibis, which had held out through three sieges. The Christian inhabitants were permitted to leave and Ephrem went with them, over the new frontier to Edessa, where he spent the last decade of his life. What he did there is why he is in this dataset: he wrote in verse, in Syriac, for congregations to sing — hundreds of hymns on the nativity, on faith, on paradise, against the heresies — and he wrote them partly because Bardaisan and the followers of Mani had got there first with hymns of their own and he judged that the answer to a song is a better song. Sozomen, who could not read Syriac, says his works were translated into Greek in his own lifetime and lost none of their force, which is a compliment a Greek historian did not often pay east of Antioch.
To leave a city that had just changed empires, with the rest of the Christians who were allowed out.
Ten years at Edessa, the hymns that made him the classic poet of Syriac, and a school that outlived him.