The Revelation was given in Patmos, one of the group of the Sporades, a small, rocky, and irregularly shaped island, some ten miles long by five miles wide, lying in the Ægean Sea, off the coast of Asia Minor, about sixty miles from Ephesus and thirty-five miles from Miletus,37 to which John was banished “for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus”. According to tradition offenders of rank were banished to this island under the Roman Empire to work in the mines and marble quarries; and the Apostle John perhaps shared in this harsh lot during his imprisonment, as asserted by Victorinus in his commentary, the earliest work on the Apocalypse, written [pg 033] toward the close of the third century. The chief feature of the modern island is the Monastery of St. John, founded in A. D. 1088, which lies a mile and a half south of La Scala, the landing place; while halfway up the hillside a grotto, known as the cave of the Apocalypse, is pointed out as the traditional place where the visions of the book were seen. The natural scenery of the island is rugged and the view of the sea and of the neighboring islands very fine, which may have contributed somewhat to the imagery of the book, as has been suggested by different travelers.38 The content of the visions was doubtless committed to writing soon afterward, and probably while John was still a prisoner in Patmos, though the general work of authorship may have been done later at Ephesus.39