Ephesus: Home of the Temple of Artemis

Ephesus was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, a dazzling metropolis on the Ionian coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey) that served as a hub of Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman culture for over a thousand years. At its height it was among the largest cities in the Roman Empire, with a population estimated at up to 500,000, and it was home to one of the most astonishing structures ever built: the Temple of Artemis, counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The city's identity was inseparable from its great goddess. Artemis of Ephesus was not quite the same deity as the Greek Artemis of the forests and the hunt, she was a more ancient, more complex figure, a great mother goddess of the eastern Mediterranean tradition, whose multi-breasted cult statue embodied abundance, fertility, and divine power. Her temple at Ephesus was the largest Greek temple ever built and one of the most lavishly decorated buildings in the ancient world.

Today the ruins of Ephesus near the modern Turkish town of Selcuk are among the best-preserved ancient cities anywhere in the Mediterranean, a vast, largely excavated urban landscape of marble streets, colonnaded facades, grand public buildings, and intimate domestic spaces that gives visitors an unparalleled sense of what life in a great Greco-Roman city actually looked like.

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, known in antiquity as the Artemision, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the largest Greek temple ever constructed. The building that earned this distinction was actually the fourth or fifth temple on the same sacred site, each successor larger and more magnificent than its predecessor, reflecting the extraordinary wealth and devotion that Ephesus poured into the worship of its goddess for more than a millennium.

The most celebrated version of the temple was begun around 550 BCE, funded in part by the fabulously wealthy Lydian king Croesus, who donated many of its columns. This building, described by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder as the most beautiful structure on earth, measured approximately 115 by 55 metres and was surrounded by a double colonnade of 127 columns, each about 18 metres tall. The columns were decorated with relief sculptures at their bases, and the temple was filled with extraordinary art, paintings, sculptures, and cult objects donated by worshippers from across the Mediterranean world.

In 356 BCE, a man named Herostratus burned the temple to the ground on the night of Alexander the Great's birth, hoping to achieve eternal fame by destroying the most famous building in the world. He succeeded in the fame, if not in the way he intended: ancient sources record that the Ephesians attempted to suppress his name entirely, but the historian Theopompus recorded it anyway, ensuring it has survived to the present day.

Alexander the Great, when he visited Ephesus, offered to pay for the rebuilding of the temple. The Ephesians politely declined, saying it was not fitting for one god to make offerings to another, a diplomatic compliment that acknowledged Alexander's divine ambitions. The rebuilt temple, even grander than its predecessor, stood until it was destroyed by the Goths in 262 CE and subsequently dismantled for building materials. Today a single reconstructed column rises from the marshy site of the Artemision, a lonely monument to what was once the greatest sanctuary in the Greek world.

The Artemis worshipped at Ephesus was a deity of great complexity and antiquity who significantly overlapped with but was not identical to the Greek Artemis of the literary tradition. The Greek Artemis was the virgin huntress, twin of Apollo, patron of wilderness and childbirth, a goddess of clear, sharp edges and strong boundaries. The Artemis of Ephesus incorporated these qualities but added a deeper, more archaic layer: she was a great mother goddess, a figure of abundance and nourishment, whose famous cult statue featured rows of what were variously interpreted as breasts, eggs, bull scrotums, or gourds covering her torso.

Modern scholarship leans toward identifying these protuberances as bull scrotums, trophies from sacrificed animals that decorated the goddess's cult image and symbolised the abundance and fertility she bestowed. Whatever their exact nature, they gave the goddess's image a distinctive, unmistakable character quite different from any other representation of Artemis in the Greek world.

The worship of Artemis at Ephesus was served by a large priesthood that included the Megabyxoi, eunuch priests who served the goddess as her male attendants, and various grades of female priests and virgin attendants. The cult attracted worshippers and suppliants from across the ancient world: the temple served as a bank (its sacred status made it a safe repository for deposits), a sanctuary (suppliants who reached its precinct could not be harmed), and a centre of oracular consultation.

The great festival of the Artemisia, celebrated each spring, drew enormous crowds to Ephesus and featured processions, athletic competitions, music, and sacrifice on a scale that rivalled the Olympic Games. The month of Artemision (roughly April) was sacred to the goddess, and the period of the festival was considered so holy that the Athenians suspended executions during it, including, famously, the execution of Socrates in 399 BCE.

Several founding myths explained Ephesus's origins and its special relationship with Artemis. The most common tradition credited the foundation of the city to the Amazons, the legendary race of warrior women who were said to have established the sanctuary of Artemis on the Ephesian hill. The Amazons' connection to Artemis (as a goddess of female independence and power) made them appropriate founders for her most famous sanctuary, and later traditions elaborated on the Amazon connection, placing various Amazon queens and warriors in the city's mythological history.

An alternative tradition credited the foundation of the Greek city to Androclus, the son of the Athenian king Codrus, who led an Ionian migration to the coast of Anatolia in the 11th century BCE. According to the oracle's prophecy, Androclus was to found a city where a fish and a boar showed him the way: when fish being grilled at a seaside camp scattered sparks that set the undergrowth on fire, flushing out a boar that Androclus chased and killed on the hillside where the city was founded, the oracle's terms were fulfilled. Androclus was worshipped as the city's founding hero throughout antiquity, and his tomb was shown to visitors in the Roman period.

The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus was born in Ephesus around 535 BCE and developed his philosophy of the eternal flux of all things, “you cannot step into the same river twice”, in the intellectual environment of the wealthy Ionian city. His doctrine that fire was the fundamental principle of the universe may have been influenced by the sacred fire maintained in the Artemision. Though famously misanthropic (“the Weeping Philosopher,” he was called), he is one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and gives Ephesus an intellectual legacy to complement its religious and commercial one.

Ephesus's history spans more than three millennia, from Mycenaean-era settlements through Greek colonisation, Lydian and Persian rule, Macedonian conquest, and eventually incorporation into the Roman Empire, where it flourished as the capital of the province of Asia and one of the largest cities in the world.

The site was first settled in the Bronze Age, and Hittite records refer to a city called Apasa in the region that may correspond to later Ephesus. The Greek city was established during the Ionian migration of the 11th, 10th centuries BCE and quickly grew into one of the most prosperous of the Ionian Greek cities, benefiting from its excellent harbour and its position at the western terminus of major trade routes from the Anatolian interior.

In the 6th century BCE, Ephesus came under the rule of the Lydian king Croesus, who was a major benefactor of the Artemision and maintained generally good relations with the Greek cities of the Ionian coast. After Croesus was defeated by Cyrus the Great of Persia in 547 BCE, Ephesus passed to Persian control and remained under Persian rule (with interruptions during the Ionian Revolt of 499, 493 BCE) until Alexander the Great liberated the Ionian cities in 334 BCE.

Under Macedonian and then Seleucid rule, Ephesus was refounded on a new site by Alexander's general Lysimachus around 290 BCE, who renamed it Arsinoe (a name that did not stick). The city came under Roman control in 133 BCE when the last king of Pergamon bequeathed his kingdom to Rome. Under Roman rule it became the capital of the province of Asia and the fourth-largest city in the empire, a dazzling urban centre of temples, libraries, bathhouses, theatres, and colonnaded streets that attracted visitors, merchants, and scholars from across the Mediterranean world.

The city's gradual decline was caused by the silting of its harbour (the coastline has shifted significantly since antiquity, and the ancient harbourside city now lies several kilometres inland), plague, earthquake, and the disruption of long-distance trade. By the Byzantine period it had shrunk to a small town, and it was finally abandoned in the medieval period.

Ephesus holds an important place in early Christian history that gives the city a significance extending well beyond its Greek and Roman mythology. The Apostle Paul visited Ephesus on his missionary journeys, founding a Christian community there and spending approximately three years in the city. His presence provoked the famous riot of the silversmiths described in the Acts of the Apostles: craftsmen who made silver shrines of Artemis feared that Paul's preaching against idols was threatening their livelihood, and they filled the great theatre of Ephesus with a crowd chanting “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”

Paul's letter to the Ephesians (one of the epistles in the New Testament) is addressed to the Christian community he founded there. The Gospel of John and the Revelation to John are both traditionally associated with Ephesus, and according to tradition, the Virgin Mary spent her final years near Ephesus under the care of the Apostle John. The House of the Virgin Mary, a small stone chapel on a hillside near the ancient site, identified in the 19th century based on the visions of the German mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, is today a major pilgrimage site visited by both Christians and Muslims.

Ephesus hosted the Third Ecumenical Council in 431 CE, at which the title Theotokos (“God-bearer” or “Mother of God”) was officially affirmed for the Virgin Mary, a decision of enormous importance for the development of Christian theology and Marian devotion. The council took place in the great church of Mary (the Mariana Basilica), built within the ruins of an ancient building, fragments of which still stand.

The ruins of ancient Ephesus near the modern Turkish town of Selcuk (in Izmir Province) are among the best-preserved ancient city sites in the world and one of Turkey's most visited attractions. The UNESCO-listed site covers a vast area and can occupy a full day's exploration.

The main archaeological zone contains an extraordinary wealth of marble monuments: the Library of Celsus (its reconstructed two-storey facade is one of the most photographed ancient buildings in the world), the Great Theatre (seating 25,000, where Paul caused the silversmith riot), the Curetes Street colonnaded boulevard, the Temple of Hadrian, the Agora, the Odeon, and the remarkable Terrace Houses (Hanghaus), a series of wealthy Roman-era residences whose mosaic floors, wall paintings, and domestic fittings are displayed under protective shelters and offer an intimate picture of daily life in ancient Ephesus.

The site of the Temple of Artemis lies about 1.5 kilometres from the main Ephesus site, near Selcuk. Only a single reconstructed column rises from the marshy ground, a lonely remnant of what was once one of the largest buildings in the ancient world. A small museum display at the site provides context.

The Ephesus Museum in Selcuk displays finds from the excavations, including the famous cult statues of Artemis of Ephesus, Roman-period sculptures, and objects from everyday life in the ancient city. The House of the Virgin Mary, 9 kilometres from Selcuk, is a short detour for visitors interested in the early Christian dimension of the site.

Selcuk is easily reached from Izmir (about 80 kilometres south) and is also accessible from the nearby resort town of Kusadasi. The best seasons to visit are spring (April, May) and autumn (September, October); summer brings intense heat and very large crowds.

Common questions about Ephesus, the Temple of Artemis, and visiting the site today.