The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus

In the persecution under Decius, around the year 250, seven young men of Ephesus of good family confessed themselves Christians and would not sacrifice. They were stripped of rank and given time to reconsider, gave away what they had, and went up to a cave on the mountain above the city to pray. The emperor, returning, ordered the mouth of the cave sealed with stone.

The tradition says they slept for close to two hundred years, and that in the reign of Theodosius the Second the stones were taken away by a landowner who wanted them for building. The seven woke believing they had slept a night. One went down into Ephesus to buy bread, keeping to the walls out of fear of the persecution, found crosses over the gates of a Christian city, and was arrested for treasure hunting when he offered a coin of Decius at a baker's stall.

The bishop and the governor came up to the cave and the emperor himself came to Ephesus, and after they had told what happened they lay down again and died, and were buried where they were. The Menaion names them Maximilian, Jamblichus, Martinian, John, Dionysius, Exacustodianus, who is also called Constantine, and Antoninus.

The reason the account was told and retold in exactly those decades is that a dispute over the resurrection of the body was live in the Church at the time, some teaching that the soul rises and the body does not. The waking was received as an answer given in fact rather than in argument: these bodies had been laid down and were standing up again.

A cemetery and church of the Seven Sleepers on the slope above Ephesus are real, were excavated in the 1920s, and hold hundreds of graves and inscriptions dedicated to them from the fifth century onward. That the veneration existed at Ephesus in the fifth century is documented fact; the sleep itself is the tradition of the Church, held as tradition. Their memory is kept on the fourth of August and again on the twenty second of October, and in the hymns of the day they are not called wise or eloquent but sleepers, which is what the Church calls the dead.