Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

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The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus — the Artemision — stood on the flat coastal plain of Asia Minor where the Cayster river loosened into the Aegean, and for the better part of a millennium it was reckoned the largest temple of the Greek world. Travelers who had seen the pyramids and the walls of Babylon ranked it first of all of them. Little of that grandeur survives the ground now: the site, beside the modern Turkish town of Selçuk, is low marsh, scattered drums, and a single column reassembled from broken pieces that a visitor must be told is a temple before it reads as one. The river that fed the harbor and the cult eventually buried both.

The site before the building

The sanctuary was older than any of the temples raised over it, and older than the city that grew rich from it. Excavation beneath the marble foundations has reached worship on the spot running back into the early first millennium BCE — a holy place on a low, wet site by a river mouth, chosen for the spring and the marshy ground rather than for any defensible height. From the deepest levels came the deposit that has fixed the spot in the history of money as firmly as in the history of cult: a cache of more than a thousand objects, sealed under the early building, that included some of the earliest coins ever struck — small lumps of electrum, the pale gold-silver alloy of the Lydian rivers, dated to the first half of the seventh century BCE. The goddess of Ephesus was, from very early, a goddess into whose foundations the new invention of coined wealth was laid as an offering.

That wealth is the through-line of the whole story. The deity of the place was a power of abundance and increase, and the city around her treated her house as a treasury, a bank, and a refuge at once. Money was native to the site before the great temple rose over it.

Croesus and the marble dipteros

The building that won the sanctuary its fame was begun in the sixth century BCE, around the middle of it, on a scale no Greek had attempted. Ancient writers tie its construction to Croesus, the proverbially wealthy king of nearby Lydia, whose gifts to the temple included a set of its columns; inscribed column drums recovered from the site preserve a royal dedication consistent with the tradition. The architects named by Vitruvius, Strabo, and Pliny are Chersiphron of Crete and his son Metagenes, credited with solving the engineering problems of moving and raising column shafts of a size the mainland had never handled. The work was said to run on for generations.

What made the temple extraordinary was not height but extent and material. It was a dipteros — its cult chamber ringed not by one colonnade but by a double file of columns — built, by Pliny’s account, wholly of marble, the first temple so constructed on such a scale. Pliny the Elder gives its measure in his Natural History as four hundred and twenty-five feet long and two hundred and twenty-five feet wide, carried on a hundred and twenty-seven columns each sixty feet high, a number of them carved with figures in relief. Those figures are the rationale: a forest of columns standing in shallow, glittering rows, the eye losing count of them. The platform that carried this weight was well over twice the footprint of the Parthenon at Athens, which is the temple most Greeks of the age would have measured it against — and the Ephesian building dwarfed it.

Fire, and the name that would not be erased

That temple burned in 356 BCE. The tradition, reported by ancient authors and repeated for centuries afterward, is that the fire was set deliberately by a man named Herostratus, who confessed under torture that he had done it for no cause but to fasten his name to something that would never be forgotten. The Ephesian authorities answered with the opposite of fame: they executed him and made it a capital offense to speak his name, a sentence of erasure. The erasure failed — later writers recorded the name precisely because of the prohibition, and the episode gave the languages of Europe a word for celebrity won by destruction. How much of any of this is fact is past recovering, and it is best held as the sanctuary’s own legend about itself: a wonder so great that to burn it was a shortcut to immortality.

A second tradition twins the fire with a birth. Hegesias of Magnesia, and Plutarch after him, joked that Artemis could not save her own house that night because she was away in Pella, attending the delivery of Alexander the Great, born (by the reckoning) the same night the temple fell. The story belongs to the way later Greeks read the sign — the goddess of childbirth absent at a childbirth, the old world’s grandest house falling as its future conqueror drew breath.

The temple of the wonder

The Ephesians rebuilt, on the same plan and at greater cost, and it was this later temple that the lists of marvels mean. It rose on a higher stepped platform, a broad flight of stairs lifting the whole colonnade above the plain, larger again than what Croesus had paid for. When the epigrammatist Antipater of Sidon set down one of the earliest catalogs of the Seven Wonders — the Babylonian walls, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the hanging gardens, the Colossus, the pyramids, the tomb of Mausolus — he ended by declaring that when he saw the house of Artemis mounting to the clouds, all the rest lost their brightness, and that outside Olympus the Sun had never looked on anything so grand. The verdict was a literary commonplace within a century: the temple was the wonder against which the others were measured.

The image and its rows of swellings

The goddess in the chamber was not quite the lean huntress of mainland Greek myth, and the difference is the most discussed thing about her. Her cult image is known chiefly from Roman copies — rigid, frontal, columnar figures, the legs sheathed in tiers of animals, the upper body banded with reliefs, a tall crown on the head, the forearms held stiffly forward — among them the marble statues recovered at Ephesus and now in the museum at Selçuk. The body of the figure is less a human shape than a container of living things: registers of lions, bulls, sphinxes, griffins, and bees run down the lower half in horizontal bands, a band of the signs of the zodiac sometimes circles the chest, winged beings flank the shoulders. It is an image that reads as a hierarchy of the world rather than as a person — the goddess as the ground in which the orders of creatures stand. Across the chest the figure carries rows of rounded, pendulous swellings, and the meaning of those swellings has never been settled. For centuries they were read as breasts, which gave the goddess her standing epithet, many-breasted; the earliest such readings are Christian polemics — Minucius Felix and Jerome among them — taking the breasts as the badge of a fertility cult. Later scholars have proposed eggs, or gourds, or the severed offerings of sacrificed bulls strung on the original wooden image. Robert Fleischer’s study of the iconography argued that the swellings were detachable ornaments hung on the archaic statue rather than any part of its body, and a hypothesis that read them specifically as bulls’ scrotal sacs has not held. Excavations of the late 1980s recovered amber pendants, drop-shaped and drilled for hanging, that have been proposed as the literal ancestors of the carved swellings. The debate decides nothing about the goddess; it records how thoroughly the image resists the categories — breast, egg, fruit, offering — that observers from the outside have tried to lay over it.

The figure beneath the Greek name was an older Anatolian mother-goddess, a power of abundance worshipped on the site before Greek settlers arrived on the coast. They called her by the name of their own Artemis and treated the two as one — the identification a convergence under a shared word rather than a descent of one goddess from another. The broader life of the goddess, and her Roman afterlife as Diana, belongs to those entries; what stayed at Ephesus was the great Anatolian mother, attended in her own forms.

The institution: priests, bees, asylum, and money

Her cult had an apparatus to match her temple. The high priest bore the title Megabyzos, a name of Persian derivation; in some accounts the senior priests were eunuchs, set apart wholly for the service of the goddess. Alongside them served bodies of officials whose insignia the city stamped on its coins: priestesses called the Melissai, the bees, and male attendants the Ephesians called the Essenes, who lived in ritual purity for a set term — a year, by one report — and then returned to ordinary life. The bee that gives the priestesses their name is a civic emblem of Ephesus as much as a cultic one, struck on the city’s coinage for centuries, so that the goddess’s officials and the city’s money carried the same sign. Around the goddess turned the apparatus of a great shrine: an annual festival, a sacred precinct with its own calendar, and processions that carried her images out from the temple through the city and back, binding the marble house to the streets that lived off it.

Two functions made the temple central to the life of Asia Minor beyond its worship. The first was the right of asylum: the precinct was an internationally recognized refuge, where the hunted and the indebted could not be seized, and the limits of that sanctuary — how far from the altar the protection ran — were negotiated and renegotiated under Hellenistic kings and then under Rome, where the boundary was extended, abused, and reined in by turns. The second was banking. The temple’s inviolability made it a strongbox; private deposits and civic funds were held under the goddess’s protection, so that to plunder the temple was to rob half a province. Pilgrims came, and pilgrim money came with them — the silver and gold of devotion that made Ephesus one of the wealthiest cities of the Greek East and a leading city of the Roman province of Asia.

Great is Artemis of the Ephesians

That economic centrality is exactly what surfaces, from the far side, in the Acts of the Apostles. The narrative sets Paul’s preaching at Ephesus against the trade in the goddess’s image: a silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, gathers the craftsmen on the argument that this teaching against hand-made gods threatens both their livelihood and the honor of the great goddess, and the city’s theater fills for two hours with the shout that Artemis of the Ephesians is great. Whatever its precise history, the account registers what a great cult was worth to the city built around it — the goddess as the engine of an entire economy of devotion, her image reproduced in metal and sold to those who came to her house. The later Christian life of the city, addressed in the epistle to the Ephesians, speaks to that church and not to the temple; the two stand on opposite sides of the same change.

Recovering the temple in scholarship

Almost everything known of the building’s form is reconstruction, assembled from three kinds of evidence that rarely agree. The literary witnesses come first: Pliny the Elder’s measurements in Book 36 of the Natural History, the architects named by Vitruvius and Strabo, the epigram of Antipater of Sidon that fixed the temple in the canon of wonders, and the description in the Acts of the Apostles of the cult’s place in the city’s economy. Against these stand the coins of Roman Ephesus, which show the temple’s facade in miniature — the count of columns, the stepped base, the image of the goddess between the central columns — and which remain the chief source for the elevation, even where the die-cutters compressed the building to fit the flan. The third witness is the ground itself, opened by the British Museum’s excavators: John Turtle Wood, who located the buried temple in 1869, and David George Hogarth, whose campaign of 1904 and 1905 cut down to the earlier phases and the foundation deposit.

The hardest single problem, the meaning of the cult image’s swellings, has its own literature. The standard catalog of the statue type and its Roman copies is Robert Fleischer’s Artemis von Ephesos und verwandte Kultstatuen aus Anatolien und Syrien (1973), which treats the swellings as removable ornaments of the original wooden image rather than anatomy; the iconography is set out for an English readership in Lynn LiDonnici’s study of the cult statue’s development. The numismatic record of the foundation deposit has been reread repeatedly for the dating of the first coinage, and the architecture of the building has been digitally reconstructed from the coins and the surviving blocks in a recent photogrammetric study published in the ISPRS Annals. What the whole apparatus produces is not a single agreed temple but a family of plausible ones — the price of a wonder taken so thoroughly apart.

The slow end

The temple’s end came piecemeal, by raid and by silt and by the turning of the age. It was plundered in the third century, in a seaborne raid attributed to the Goths around 268 CE, and never fully recovered the splendor that the catalogs of wonders had fixed. Through late antiquity the cult faded as Christianity spread across the province and imperial favor withdrew from the old shrines; a tradition places a final dismantling near the turn of the fifth century. Stone went where worked marble always goes — into the kilns for lime, into the walls and columns of later buildings, the wonder taken apart course by course for material.

The deeper cause was the one written into the site from the start. The Cayster carried down its silt year after year, as it had through the building’s whole life, and pushed the coastline steadily out; the harbor that made Ephesus filled and died, the plain crept seaward, and the low sanctuary by the old river mouth sank into standing water. By the medieval period the most celebrated building of the ancient world was a name without a place, lost under several feet of mud. It took an English engineer, John Turtle Wood, six seasons of digging on commission for the British Museum to find it again, at the very end of 1869, by tracing the processional road out from the city until it struck the buried wall. Later excavation reached the earlier temples beneath, and the foundation deposit with its first coins. The river that had drowned the marble outlasted it; the marsh holds the foundations of the house of the goddess where the cut stones of her colonnade went into other walls and other cities.

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