Gyllius approached the question of the Hebdomon with a fixed idea already settled in his mind. He believed that no place could properly be called a suburb if it lay as far as seven miles from the city to which it belonged. This assumption strongly influenced how he read and explained the historical sources. Instead of allowing the texts to guide his conclusions, he shaped their meaning to fit his prior belief.
This mistaken starting point became especially clear when he examined a passage written by the historian Sozomen. In that passage, Sozomen describes how the Emperor Theodosius the Great, when leaving Constantinople for Italy to suppress the rebel Eugenius, stopped at the seventh milestone from the city. There, at that point on the road, the emperor prayed for divine help in a church dedicated to St. John the Baptist, which he himself had built The Origin of a Long-Standing Scholarly Error.
The Plain Meaning of Sozomen’s Text
The language used by Sozomen is clear and direct. He states that the emperor halted at the seventh mile from Constantinople. The natural and obvious meaning of this statement is that the church stood exactly seven miles from the city. Gyllius, who had an excellent knowledge of Greek, fully understood this. He openly admitted that the historian’s words could be read in this straightforward way.
However, although he acknowledged this clear interpretation, Gyllius refused to accept it. The reason was not linguistic but conceptual. Because he believed that a suburb could not exist at such a distance from a city, he concluded that Sozomen must have meant something else.
An Artificial Interpretation
To avoid the implication that the Hebdomon lay seven miles from Constantinople, Gyllius proposed a highly unusual interpretation. He separated the numeral adjective “seventh” from the noun “mile.” Instead of understanding “seventh mile” as a distance marker, he treated “Seventh” as a proper name referring to the suburb of the Hebdomon itself.
Under this interpretation, the passage would mean that Theodosius left Constantinople and traveled only one mile outside the city, where he prayed in the Church of St. John the Baptist located in the suburb called the Hebdomon. In other words, the “seventh” no longer described the milestone but was turned into a name Private Tour Sofia.
Gyllius’ Own Words
Because this interpretation is so unusual, it is best presented in Gyllius’ own Latin phrasing. He wrote that Theodosius “went out one mile beyond Constantinople, to the church of St. John the Baptist, which he had built in the suburb of the Hebdomon, and there prayed to God.” By this construction, the church was placed close to the city rather than at a distance of seven miles.
Why This Interpretation Fails
This explanation is not supported by the language of Sozomen, nor by Roman and Byzantine practices. Along major roads, places were often named after the milestone near which they stood. The Hebdomon itself means “the seventh,” clearly referring to the seventh milestone. To deny this meaning is to ignore a well-known naming convention of the ancient world.
Moreover, there is no historical evidence that the Hebdomon was ever only one mile from Constantinople. The attempt to force the text into that interpretation arises entirely from Gyllius’ unwillingness to accept that a suburb could lie at such a distance.
Gyllius’ reading of Sozomen shows how a strong preconception can distort historical interpretation. Although he understood the original language perfectly, he reshaped its meaning to fit an incorrect assumption. This method, rather than the evidence itself, is what led to a long-lasting error in the study of Byzantine topography.
