A temple bigger than the Parthenon
Ephesus was a Greek city on the coast of Asia Minor, today’s western Turkey, and Artemis was its great goddess. Around 560 BCE the Ephesians began a huge marble temple for her, one of the first Greek temples built in marble. Croesus, the rich king of Lydia, paid for many of its columns, as the historian Herodotus records; it is the same Croesus who sent gifts to the oracle at Delphi. The temple used the elegant Ionic order of the eastern Greek cities, with a forest of tall columns.
In 356 BCE a man named Herostratus set fire to it to make his name live for ever. The Ephesians tried to ban his name, and failed. A later tradition, told by Plutarch, says the fire broke out on the night Alexander the Great was born. The city rebuilt the temple on the same plan, raised on a higher platform. When Alexander passed through, he offered to pay for the work if his name went on the building; according to the geographer Strabo, the Ephesians tactfully refused, saying it was not fitting for one god to make offerings to another.
One of the Seven Wonders
The rebuilt temple was counted among the Seven Wonders of the World. The Greek poet Antipater of Sidon, who listed them, wrote that after seeing the temple of Artemis the other wonders paled. The others included the Pyramids of Giza and the statue of Zeus at Olympia. Pilgrims came from across the Mediterranean, and the temple was also a bank and a place of refuge.
The goddess of Ephesus did not look like the slim huntress of Greek art. Her cult statue, known from Roman copies, stood stiffly, covered with animals and rows of rounded shapes whose meaning is still discussed. Her cult was so important to the city that, according to the Acts of the Apostles, the silversmiths who sold her images started a riot against Saint Paul in the theatre, shouting “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians”.
Where the marble went
The temple’s decline came slowly. Gothic raiders damaged it in the 260s CE. As Christianity spread, the old cults were closed in the late fourth century, and the abandoned temple became a source of building stone. Its marble blocks were burned for lime or reused in new buildings nearby, such as the churches and later the mosque built on the hill of Ayasuluk, above the temple. A popular story says some of its columns ended up in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, but there is no proof.
Meanwhile the river Cayster carried silt down the valley and buried what was left. The site was forgotten, and when the British engineer John Turtle Wood began looking for it in 1863, nobody knew where it was. He found it at the end of 1869, after six years of digging, by following an ancient inscription that described a procession from the city to the temple. His finds went to the British Museum. Today a single column, rebuilt from fragments, stands in a marshy hollow near Selçuk.
The Roman city
Ephesus grew even richer after it came under Rome in the second century BCE. It became the leading city of the province of Asia, with a busy harbour and monuments paid for by emperors and local benefactors. The marble Curetes Street runs downhill past the small Temple of Hadrian to the facade of the Library of Celsus. Above it, the Terrace Houses preserve the wall paintings and mosaics of wealthy families, and the Great Theatre could seat about 25,000 people.
The same silt that buried the temple slowly choked the harbour, and the city lost its access to the sea; the coast is now several kilometres away. Austrian archaeologists have excavated Ephesus since 1895, and in 2015 the site, including the Temple of Artemis and the hill of Ayasuluk, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its Greek foundations and Roman grandeur make it one of the best places to see how Greek culture spread and then lived on under Rome.
Where to see it
The ruins of Ephesus are just outside Selçuk, near the Aegean coast of Turkey, about an hour south of Izmir. The site of the Temple of Artemis lies on the edge of Selçuk, and the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in the town holds statues of the goddess. Sculpture from the temple, including a carved column drum, is in the British Museum in London.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Ephesus”.
- Herodotus, Histories 1.92; Strabo, Geography 14.1.22; Plutarch, Alexander 3; Acts of the Apostles 19.
- British Museum, sculptured column drum from the Temple of Artemis, and the excavations of J. T. Wood.
- Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut, Ephesus excavations.
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