The existence of any place called Gergesa, however, is declared by the weightiest authorities whom I have consulted to be very questionable; and no such town is mentioned in the list of the cities of the Decapolis, in the territory of which (as it would seem from Mark v. 20) the transaction was supposed to take place.  About Gerasa, on the other hand, there hangs no such doubt.  It was a large and important member of the group of the Decapolitan cities.  But Gerasa is more than thirty miles distant from the nearest part of the Lake of Tiberias, while the city mentioned in the narrative could not have been very far off the scene of the event.  However, as Gerasa was a very important Hellenic city, not much more than a score of miles from Gadara, it is easily imaginable that a locality which was part of Decapolitan territory may have been spoken of as belonging to one of the two cities, when it really appertained to the other.  After weighing all the arguments, no doubt remains on my mind that “Gadarene” is the proper reading.  At the period under consideration, Gadara appears to have been a good-sized fortified town, about two miles in circumference.  It was a place of considerable strategic importance, inasmuch as it lay on a high ridge at the point of intersection of the roads from Tiberias, Scythopolis, Damascus, and Gerasa.  Three miles north from it, where the Tiberias road descended into the valley of the Hieromices, lay the famous hot springs and the fashionable baths of Amatha.  On the north-east side, the remains of the extensive necropolis of Gadara are still to be seen.  Innumerable sepulchral chambers are excavated in the limestone cliffs, and many of them still contain sarcophaguses of basalt; while not a few are converted into dwellings by the inhabitants of the present village of Um Keis.  The distance of Gadara from the south-eastern shore of the Lake of Tiberias is less than seven miles.  The nearest of the other cities of the Decapolis, to the north, is Hippos, which also lay some seven miles off, in the south-eastern corner of the shore of the lake.  In accordance with the ancient Hellenic practice, that each city should be surrounded by a certain amount of territory amenable to its jurisdiction,[101] and on other grounds, it may be taken for certain that the intermediate country was divided between Gadara and Hippos; and that the citizens of Gadara had free access to a port on the lake.  Hence the title of “country of the Gadarenes” applied to the locality of the porcine catastrophe becomes easily intelligible.  The swine may well be imagined to have been feeding (as they do now in the adjacent region) on the hillsides, which slope somewhat steeply down to the lake from the northern boundary wall of the valley of the Hieromices (Nahr Yarmuk), about half-way between the city and the shore, and doubtless lay well within the territory of the polis of Gadara.