The number seven has always had a mystical significance. The Creation, after all, took seven days, and in the Apocalypse there were seven candlesticks, seven stars and seven trumpets, seven horns, and seven plagues. In the Hebrew tradition every seventh year was a sabbatical, and Christianity has its seven sacraments, its seven virtues and, God between us and all harm, its seven deadly sins.
Perhaps it was for this reason that the Sleepers of Ephesus should number seven. In any event, we know exactly who they were: Constantius, Dionysius, Joannes, Maximianus, Malchus, Martinianus and Serapion, and even to this day they have a profound effect upon German August weather. But let us start at the beginning.
Back in the third century AD, the Roman Emperor was Decius. Decius, though no doubt an excellent man in many other ways, had little sympathy with new religions, and in the year 250 he launched one of his periodic campaigns to stamp out Christianity. Ephesus did not escape, and Constantius and his six friends, being Christians, were obliged to flee. They took refuge in a cave on a hill outside the city and, rather than root them out by force, their imperial pursuers walled up the entrance to the cave, whereupon the sealed septet fell into a deep and trance-like sleep.
This first sleep of the Seven Sleepers lasted 187 years. They awoke in the reign of the Emperor Theodosius II, and their strange story came to light when one of them went down to Ephesus to buy provisions - and tendered a coinage that was nearly two centuries out of date. Summoned before the Emperor, the seven succeeded in persuading him that there was indeed life after death - and then, almost by way of demonstration, they retreated once more to their cave and resumed their trance. There, so the story goes, they remain until this very day - waiting just outside Ephesus for their next awakening on the Day of Judgment.
Now while they were awake, none of these seven young men displayed the slightest interest in the weather. The whole story, indeed, has nothing at all to do with meteorology - except that in Germany the feast-day of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, July 27th, has the same significance as does St Swithin's Day in these parts. According to tradition, if it rains on Siebenschlafertag it will rain on each of the following 40 days as well.
And, coincidence or not, the Belgians also have a rainy saint, St Godelieve, whose baleful influence is allegedly the same and whose feast-day also falls on this day, July 27th.