disgust the whole body of citizens ordered to quit the city within
three days, and "men appointed to compel obedience to the order,
with threats of death to every one who delayed his departure; and
the whole city was a scene of mourning and lamentation, and in every
quarter nothing was heard but one universal wail, matrons tearing
their hair, and about to be driven from the homes in which they had
been born and brought up; the mother who had lost her children, or
the wife who had lost her husband, about to be torn from the place
rendered sacred by their shades, clinging to their doorposts,
embracing their thresholds, and pouring forth floods of tears.
Every road was crowded, each person struggling away as he could.
Many, too, loaded themselves with as much of their property as they
thought they could carry, while leaving behind them abundant and
costly furniture, which they could not remove for want of beasts of
burden." {159}

One treasure, however, they did remove, of which the old soldier
Ammianus says nothing, and which, had he seen it pass him on the
road, he would have treated with supreme contempt. And that, says
Theodoret, was the holy body of "their prince and defender," St.
James the mountain hermit, round which the emigrants chanted, says
Theodoret, hymns of regret and praise, "for, had he been alive, that
city would have never passed into barbarian hands."

There stood with Jacob in the breach, during that siege of Nisibis,
a man of gentler temperament, a disciple of his, who had received
baptism at his hands, and who was, like himself, a hermit--Ephraim,
or Ephrem, of Edessa, as he is commonly called, for, though born at
Nisibis, his usual home was at Edessa, the metropolis of a Syrian-
speaking race. Into the Syrian tongue Ephrem translated the