Located somewhere between ancient fiction and Christian hagiography, the story of Euphemia and the Goth recounts the tale of a young girl from Edessa, Euphemia, whose widowed mother, Sophia, is deceived and manipulated into letting an unnamed Gothic soldier marry her daughter. Later, as the story develops, events take a turn for the worse, and the pregnant Euphemia is taken away to the Goth’s homeland, only to find that he is already married. She is then given as a slave to the Goth’s wife, and suffers terrible abuse before being miraculously rescued.

The story is set in ca. 395 ce Edessa, in the context of the invasion of Mesopotamia by the Huns, although possibly composed decades later in the fifth century. As in some other cases from Syriac literature, Euphemia and the Goth reads in many ways like a tale from the genre of the Greek novel.