Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

← Encyclopedia

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus — the Artemision — was the great sanctuary of Artemis on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, one of the largest temples of the Greek world and, by the reckoning of later antiquity, one of its Seven Wonders. Little of it now stands: the site, near the modern Turkish town of Selçuk, is marked chiefly by marshy ground and a single re-erected column assembled from scattered drums.

The cult was older than any of the temples raised over it. Excavation has shown worship on the spot reaching back into the early first millennium BCE, on a low site by a river mouth that silted steadily through the building’s whole history. The temple that won the sanctuary its fame was the vast marble structure begun in the sixth century BCE, its construction associated by ancient writers with Croesus, the wealthy king of nearby Lydia. That building burned in 356 BCE; the tradition that the arsonist, one Herostratus, set the fire to make his name immortal is reported by ancient authors and was repeated for centuries, though how much of the story is fact is past recovering. The Ephesians rebuilt on the same plan and at greater expense, and it was this later temple — a forest of columns on a platform far larger than the Parthenon’s — that travellers came to count among the wonders.

The goddess worshipped there was not quite the huntress Artemis of mainland Greek myth. Her cult image, known from Roman copies, showed a rigid figure hung with rows of rounded protuberances across the chest, long read as breasts and hence the epithet “many-breasted”; their meaning is disputed, with scholars variously taking them for breasts, eggs, or the severed offerings of sacrificed bulls. Greeks called her Artemis and identified her with their own; the figure beneath the name was an older Anatolian mother-goddess, and the identification was a convergence rather than a simple inheritance. The temple held the right of asylum, drew pilgrims and the wealth that came with them, and gave the city much of its standing in the Roman province of Asia. The Acts of the Apostles records the silversmiths of Ephesus, who made shrines of the goddess, rioting against Paul’s preaching with the cry “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians” — a notice that registers, from the other side, how central the cult was to the city’s livelihood.

The temple’s end came piecemeal. It was plundered in a third-century raid attributed to the Goths, and the cult faded through late antiquity as Christianity spread and imperial favour withdrew; the stone was quarried away in the centuries that followed. What had been among the most celebrated buildings of the ancient world was, by the medieval period, scarcely a memory on the ground. The marsh kept its foundations, and a few carved fragments reached distant museums; the goddess outlasted her house only as a name.

→ Related: Deity · Dendera