One of the early admirers of Ephrem's works, theologian Jacob of Serugh (d. 521), who already belonged to the generation that accepted the custom of a double naming of their language not only as Aramaic ("Ārāmāyā") but also as "Syriac" ("Suryāyā"), wrote a homily ("memrā") dedicated to Ephrem, praising him as the "crown" or "wreath" of the "Arameans" (), and the same praise was repeated in early liturgical texts. Only later, under the Greek influence, already prevalent in the works of Theodoret of Cyrus from the middle of the 5th century, it became customary to associate Ephrem with Syrian/Syriac identity, and label him only as "the Syrian" (), thus blurring his Aramaic self-identification, attested by his own writings and works of other Aramaic-speaking writers, and also by examples from the earliest liturgical tradition.