Emesa

Syria

Emesa, modern Homs in western Syria, is a city on the Orontes River that rose to prominence under Rome, notably for its cult of the sun god Elagabal, and gained wider influence when Emperor Septimius Severus married into a family of Emesene notables. The novelist Heliodorus, author of the Aethiopica, describes himself as a Phoenician of Emesa. Christianity took hold in the city relatively late because of the strength of the sun cult, but it became a bishopric, and the hymn-writer Romanos the Melodist was born there in the late 5th century. Muslim forces took the city in 637, and as Hims it became the capital of a district of Islamic Syria.

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