Ephesus

EPHESUS, an ancient Ionian city on the west coast of Asia Minor. In historic times it was situated on the lower slopes of the hills, Coressus and Prion, which rise out of a fertile plain near the mouth of the river Cayster, while the temple and precinct of Artemis or Diana, to the fame of which the town owed much of its celebrity, were in the plain itself, E.N.E. at a distance of about a mile. But there is reason to think both town and shrine had different sites in pre-Ionian times, and that both lay farther south among the foot-hills of Mt. Solmissus. The situation of the city was such as at all times to command a great commerce. Of the three great river basins of Ionia and Lydia, those of the Hermus, Caster and Maeander, it commanded the second, and had already access by easy passes to the other two.

The earliest inhabitants assigned to Ephesus by Greek writers are the "Amazons," with whom we hear of Leleges, Carians and Pelasgi. In the i 1th century B.C., according to tradition (the date is probably too early), Androclus, son of the Athenian king Codrus, landed on the spot with his Ionians and a mixed body of colonists ; and from his conquest dates the history of the Greek Ephesus. The deity of the city was Artemis; but we must guard against misconception when we use that name, re membering that she bore close relation to the primitive Asiatic goddess of nature, whose cult existed before the Ionian migra tion at the neighbouring Ortygia, and that she always remained the virgin-mother of all life and especially wild life, and an em bodiment of the productive power of the earth. The well-known monstrous representation of her, as a figure with many breasts, swathed below the waist in grave-clothes, was probably of late and alien origin. In early Ionian times she seems to have been represented as a natural matronly figure, sometimes accompanied by a child, and to have been a more typically Hellenic goddess than she became in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

Croesus and the Persians.

Twice in the period 7oo–soo B.c. the city owed its preservation to the interference of the goddess; once when the Cimmerians overran Asia Minor in the 7th cen tury and burnt the Artemision itself ; and once when Croesus be sieged the town in the century succeeding, and only retired after it had solemnly dedicated itself to Artemis, the sign of such dedi cation being the stretching of a rope from city to sanctuary. Croesus presented most of the columns required for the restora tion of the temple of Artemis, as well as some cows of gold. To counteract, perhaps, the growing Lydian influence, Athens, the mother-city of Ephesus, despatched one of her noblest citizens, Aristarchus, to restore law on the basis of the Solonian constitu tion. The labours of Aristarchus seem to have borne fruit. It was an Ephesian follower of his, Hermodorus, who aided the De cemviri at Rome in their compilation of a system of law about the middle of the sth century B.C. And in the same generation Hera clitus, probably a descendant of Codrus, quitted his hereditary magistracy in order to devote himself to philosophy, in which his name became almost as great as that of any Greek. Poetry had long flourished at Ephesus. From very early times the Homeric poems found a home and admirers there; and to Ephesus belong the earliest elegiac poems of Greece, the war songs of Callinus, who flourished in the 7th century B.C. and was the model of Tyr taeus (q.v.). The city seems to have been more than once under tyrannical rule in the early Ionian period ; and it fell thereafter first to Croesus of Lydia, and then to Cyrus, the Persian, and when the Ionian revolt against Persia broke out in the year Soo B.C. under the lead of Miletus, the city remained submissive to Persian rule. When Xerxes returned from the march against Greece (478 B.c.), he honoured the temple of Artemis, although he sacked other Ionian shrines, and even left his children behind at Ephesus for safety's sake. After the final Persian defeat at the Eurymedon (466 B.c.), Ephesus for a time paid tribute to Athens, with the other cities of the coast, and Lysander first and Agesilaus afterwards made it their headquarters. To the latter fact we owe a contemporary description of it by Xenophon. In the early part of the 4th century it fell again under Persian in fluence, and was administered by an oligarchy.

From Alexander to the Romans.—Alexander the Great was received by the Ephesians in 334, and established democratic government. Soon after his death the city fell into the hands of Lysimachus, who introduced fresh Greek colonists from Lebe dus and Colophon and renamed the city after his wife Arsinoe; but the old name was soon resumed. Ephesus was very prosper ous during the Hellenistic period, and is conspicuous both then and later for the abundance of its coinage, which gives us a more complete list of magistrates' names than we have for any other Ionian city. The Roman coinage is remarkable for the great variety and importance of its types. After the defeat of An tiochus the Great, king of Syria, by the Romans, Ephesus was handed over by the conquerors to Eumenes, king of Pergamum, whose successor was Attalus Philadelphus. The third Attalus of Pergamum bequeathed Ephesus with the rest of his possessions to the Roman people, and it became for a while the chief city, and for longer the first port, of the province of Asia, the richest in the empire.

Henceforth Ephesus remained subject to the Romans, save for a short period, when, at the instigation of Mithridates Eupator of Pontus, the cities of Asia Minor revolted and massacred their Roman residents. The Ephesians even dragged out and slew those Romans who had fled to the precinct of Artemis for protection, notwithstanding which sacrilege they soon returned from their new to their former masters, and even had the effrontery to state, in an inscription preserved to this day, that their defection to Mithridates was a mere yielding to superior force. Sulla, after his victory over Mithridates, brushed away their pretexts, and inflicted a very heavy fine. In the civil wars of the 1st cen tury B.c. the Ephesians twice supported the unsuccessful party, giving shelter to, or being made use of by, first Brutus and Cassius, and afterwards Antony.

The Christian Period.

All this time the city was gradually growing in wealth and in devotion to the service of Artemis. The story of St. Paul's doings there illustrates this fact, and the sequel is very suggestive—the burning, namely, of books of sorcery of great value. Addiction to the practice of occult arts had evi dently become general in the now semi-orientalized city. The Christian Church which Paul planted there was governed by Timothy and John, and is famous in Christian tradition as a nurse of saints and martyrs. According to local belief, Ephesus was also the last home of the Virgin, who was lodged near the city by St. John and there died. But later events show that the pagan tradition of Artemis continued very strong and perhaps never became quite extinct in the Ephesian district. The city was proud to be termed neocorus or servant of the goddess.

Ephesus contested stoutly with Smyrna and Pergamum the honour of being called the first city of Asia; each city appealed to Rome, and we still possess rescripts in which the emperors en deavoured to mitigate the bitterness of the rivalry. One privilege Ephesus secured; the Roman governor of Asia always landed and first assumed office there: and it was long the provincial cen tre of the official cult of the emperor, and seat of the Asiarch. The Goths destroyed both city and temple in A.D. al though the city revived and the cult of Artemis continued, neither ever recovered its former splendour. A general council of the Christian Church was held there in 431 in the great double church of St. Mary, which is still to be seen. On this occasion Nestorius was condemned, and the honour of the Virgin estab lished as Theotokus, amid great popular rejoicing, due, doubtless, in some measure to the hold which the cult of the virgin Artemis still had on the city. Thereafter Ephesus seems to have been gradually deserted owing to its malaria; and life transferred itself to another and higher site (Ayassoluk) near the Artemision. The ruins of the Artemision, after serving as a quarry to local builders, were finally covered deep with mud by the river Cayster, or one of its left bank tributaries, the Selinus, and the true site remained unsuspected until 1869.

The

first light thrown on the topography of Ephesus was due to the excavations conducted by the architect, J. T. Wood, on behalf of the trustees of the British Museum, during the years 1863--1874. He first explored the Odeum and the Great Theatre situate in the city itself, and in the latter place found an inscrip tion which indicated in what direction to search for the Arte mision. Following up this clue, Wood lighted first on a ruin which he believed to be the tomb of Androclus, and afterwards on an angle of the wall of the time of Augustus. Soon afterwards he struck the actual pavement of the Artemision on the last day of 1869.

Excavation of the Artemision.

Wood removed the whole stratum of superficial deposit which overlay the huge area of the temple, and exposed to view not only the scanty remains of the latest edifice, built after 35o B.C., but the platform of an earlier temple, now known to be that of the 6th century to which Croesus contributed. Below this he did not find any remains. He sent to England parts of several sculptured drums of the latest tem ple, and archaic sculptures from the drums and parapet of the earlier building. He also made a plan of the Hellenistic temple, found many inscriptions and a few miscellaneous antiquities, and had begun to explore the Precinct, when the trustees of the British Museum suspended his operations in 1874. The site lay desolate till 1904, when the trustees sent D. G. Hogarth to re examine the remains. Wood's "earliest temple" was re-cleared and planned, remains of three earlier shrines were found beneath it, a rich deposit of offerings, etc., belonging to the earliest shrine was discovered, and tentative explorations were made in the Pre cinct. This deep digging, however, resulted in the permanent flooding of the site.

History of the Artemision.

The history of the Artemision, as far as it can be inferred from the remains, is as follows. (I) There was no temple on the plain previous to the Ionian occupa tion, the primeval seat of the nature-goddess having been in the southern hills, at Ortygia (near mod. Arvalia). Towards the end of the 8th century B.C. a small shrine came into existence on the plain. This was little more than a small platform of green schist with a sacred tree and an altar, and perhaps later a wooden image, the whole enclosed in a temenos. But this early shrine was presently enriched by Greeks with many and splendid offer ings of Hellenic workmanship. The whole treasure can be dated to a period considerably anterior to the reign of Croesus. This treasure is now divided between the museums of Constantinople and London. (2) Within a short time, perhaps after the Cim merian sack (? 65o B.e.), this shrine was restored, slightly en larged, and raised in level, but not altered in character. (3) About the close of the century the shrine was replaced by a temple of regular Hellenic form. The latter was built in relation to the earlier central statue-base, but at a higher level than either of its predecessors, doubtless for dryness' sake. There is now no certain evidence of its architectural character; but it is very probable that it was the early temple in which the Ionic order is said to have been first used, after the colonists had made use of Doric in their earlier constructions ; and that it was the work of the Cnossian Chersiphron and his son, Metagenes, always regarded afterwards as the first builders of a regular Artemision. Their temple is said by Strabo to have been made bigger by another architect. (4) The latter's work must have been the much larger temple, exposed by Wood, and usually known as the Archaic or Croesus temple. This overlies the remains of No. 3, at a level higher by about a metre, and the area of its cella alone contains the whole of the earlier shrines. Its central point, however, was still the primitive statue-base, now enlarged and heightened. About half its pavement, parts of the cella walls and of three columns of the peristyle, and the foundations of nearly all the platform, are still in position. The visible work was all of very fine white marble. Fragments recovered show that the workmanship and Ionic style were of the highest excellence, and that the building presented a variety of ornament, rare among Hellenic temples. The whole ground-plan covered about 8o,000 sq.ft. The height of the temple is doubtful. Judged by the diameter of the drums, the columns of the Croesus temple were not two-thirds of the height of those of the Hellenistic temple.

This fourth temple is, beyond question, that to which Croesus contributed, and it was, therefore, in process of building about 540 B.C. It took 120 years to complete. It was dedicated prob ably between 43o and 420 B.C., and the famous Timotheus, son of Thersander, carried off the prize for a lyric ode against all comers. Its original architects were, probably, Paeonius of Ephesus, and Demetrius, a priest of the shrine itself. Of this temple Herodotus speaks as existing in his day; and unless weight be given to an isolated statement of Eusebius, that it was burned about 395 B.C., we must assume that it survived until the night when one Hero stratus, desirous of acquiring eternal fame if only by a great crime, set it alight. This is said to have happened in 356 B.C. on the October night on which Alexander the Great came into the world. But the exactness of this portentous synchronism makes the date suspect. (5) It was succeeded by what is called the Hellenistic temple, begun almost immediately after the catas trophe, according to plans drawn by the famous Dinocrates the architect of Alexandria. The platform was once more raised to a higher level by means of huge foundation blocks bedded upon the earlier structures. The new columns were of greater diameter than the old and over 6o ft. high ; and from its great height the whole structure was regarded as a marvel, and accounted one of the wonders of the world. Since, however, other Greek temples had colonnades hardly less high, and were of equal or greater area, it has been suggested that the Ephesian temple had some distinct element of grandiosity, no longer known to us—perhaps a lofty sculptured parapet or some imposing form of podium. The fifth temple was once more of Ionic order, but the finish and style of its details as attested by existing remains were inferior to those of its predecessor. The great sculptured drums and pedestals, now in the British Museum, belong to the lower part of certain of its columns: but nothing of its frieze or pediments (if it had any) has been recovered. Begun probably before 35o B.C., it was in building when Alexander came to Ephesus in 334 and offered to bear the cost of its completion. It was probably finished by the end of the century. It stood intact, except for very partial restorations, till A.D. 262 when it was sacked and burned by the Goths : but it appears to have been to some extent restored afterwards, and its cult no doubt survived till the Edict of Theodosius closed the pagan temples (about 389).

After Wood's explorations, the city remained desolate till when the Austrian Archaeological Institute obtained a concession and began systematic excavation. This has been carried down no farther than the imperial stratum. The main areas of operation have been : (1) The Great Theatre. The stage buildings, orchestra and lower parts of the cavea have been cleared. In the process considerable additions were made to Wood's find of sculptures in marble and bronze, and of inscriptions. This theatre has a peculiar interest as the scene of the tumult aroused by the mis sion of St. Paul ; but the existing remains represent a reconstruc tion carried out after his time. (2) The Hellenistic Agora, a huge square, surrounded by porticoes, lying S.W. of the theatre and having fine public halls on the S. It has yielded fine sculpture in marble and bronze and many inscriptions. (3) The Roman Agora, with its large halls, lying N.W. of the theatre. Here were found many inscriptions of Roman date and some statuary. (4) A street running from the S.E. angle of the Hellenic Agora towards the Magnesian gate. This was found to be lined with pedestals of honorific statues and to have on the west side a re markable building, stated in an inscription to have been a library. (5) A street running direct to the port from the theatre. This was known as the Arcadiane after having been restored at a higher level than formerly by the emperor Arcadius (A.D. 395). It leaves on the right the great Thermae of Constantine, of which the Austrians have cleared out the south-east part. Part of the quays and buildings round the port were exposed, after measures had been taken to drain the upper part of the marsh. (6) The Double Church of the Virgin "Deipara" in the N.W. of the city, wherein the council of 431 was held. Here interesting inscrip tions and Byzantine architectural remains were found. Besides these excavated monuments, the Stadion ; the enceinte of fortifi cations erected by Lysimachus, which runs from the tower called the "Prison of St. Paul" and right along the crests of the Bulbul (Prion) and Panajir hills; the round monument miscalled the "Tomb of St. Luke"; and the Opistholeprian gymnasium near the Magnesian gate, are worthy of attention.

The work done by the Austrians enables a good idea to be obtained of the appearance presented by a great Graeco-Roman city of Asia in the last days of its prosperity. It may be realized better there than anywhere how much architectural splendour was concentrated in the public quarters. But the restriction of the clearance to the upper stratum of deposit has prevented the acquisition of much further knowledge. Both the Hellenistic and, still more, the original Ionian cities remain for the most part unexplored. It should, however, be added that very valuable topographical exploration has been carried out in the environs of Ephesus by members of the Austrian expedition.

The Turkish village of Ayassoluk (the modern representative of Ephesus), more than a mile N.E. of the ancient city, is note worthy for a splendid ruined mosque built by the Seljuk, Isa Bey II., of Aidin, in 1375, which contains magnificent columns : for a castle, near which lie remains of the pendentives from the cupola of the great cathedral of St. John, now deeply buried in its own ruins; and for an aqueduct, Turkish baths and mosque tombs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-E.

Curtius, Ephesos (1874) ; C. Zimmermann, Bibliography.-E. Curtius, Ephesos (1874) ; C. Zimmermann, Ephesos im ersteni christlichen Jahrhundert (1874) ; J. T. Wood, Dis coveries at Ephesus (1877) ; E. L. Hicks, Anc. Greek Inscr. in the Brit. Museum, iii. 2 (189o) ; B. V. Head, "Coinage of Ephesus" (Numism. Chron., 188o) ; J. Menadier, Que condicione Ephesii usi Sint, etc. (188o) ; Sir W. M. Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches (19o4) ; D. G. Hogarth, Excavations at Ephesus: the Archaic Artemisia ( 2 vols., 1908) with chapters by C. H. Smith, A. Hamilton Smith, B. V. Head, and A. E. Henderson. (D. G. H.)