The blunder started with Gyllius, and was afterwards supported with all the immense learning of Du Cange. It was soon denounced by Valesius,[1184] and shown to be utterly inconsistent with the most obvious facts in the case; but the reputation of the great authorities upon its side gave it a vitality which made it the commonly received opinion until the most recent times. Unger, however, contested the error, once more, in his important work entitled _Quellen der Byzantinischen Kunstgeschichte_,[1185] published in 1878, and maintained the correct view, but without discussing the question at length. Schlumberger, also, in his monograph on the Emperor Nicephorus Phocas, has seen the facts in their true light.[1186] Under these circumstances one is strongly tempted to let the fallacies with which Gyllius and Du Cange maintained their views pass into oblivion, and to be satisfied with proving the truth on the subject. But the great authority and eminent services of these students of the topography of the city, and the tenacity with which the error they countenanced has held the field demand some account of the arguments which have been employed in support of an untenable position. Gyllius[1187] entered upon the discussion of the subject with the fixed idea that no locality entitled to be regarded as a suburb could be seven miles distant from the city to which it belonged. With this conviction rooted in his mind, he found himself called to interpret the passage in which Sozomon relates how Theodosius the Great, upon leaving Constantinople for Italy to suppress the rebel Eugenius, stopped at the seventh mile from the city to invoke the Divine blessing upon the expedition, in the Church of St. John the Baptist which the emperor had erected at that point of the road.[1188] Gyllius knew his Greek too well not to recognize the obvious meaning of this statement. He acknowledges that the passage may be understood to intimate that the church above mentioned stood at the seventh milestone from Constantinople. But while allowing that this is a possible meaning of the historian’s words, he contends that it cannot be his actual meaning, because the Hebdomon, being a suburb, could not be so distant from the city as seven miles. Hence Gyllius separates the numeral adjective “seventh” from the noun “mile,” and treating the former as a proper name, construes the passage to signify that the Church of St. John the Baptist, in the suburb of the Hebdomon, was one mile from the capital. The proposed construction is so original that it must be given in its author’s own words: “Theodosius egressus unum milliare extra Constantinopolim, in æde Divi Joannis Baptistæ, quam ipse construxerat in Hebdomo suburbio, a Deo precatus est.”