Ephesus
These materials on the history and geography
of Ephesus were compiled from the following sources:
Unger, Merrill F., Bible Dictionary
Encyclopedia Britannica
Bean, G. E., "Aegean Turkey: An Archaeological Guide"
Conybeare and Howson, "The Life and Epistles of St. Paul"
Ephesus, the most important Greek city in Ionian Asia Minor, the
ruins of which lie near the modern village of Selcuk in western
Turkey (near the city of Izmir).
In Roman times it was situated on the northern slopes of the hills
Coressus and Pion and south of the Cayster (Küçükmenderes)
River, the silt from which has since formed a fertile plain but
has caused the coastline to move ever farther west. The Temple
of Artemis, or Diana, to which Ephesus owed much of its fame and
which seems to mark the site of the classical Greek city, was
probably on the seaboard when it was founded (about 600 BC), one
mile east by northeast of Pion (modern Panayir Da{g hacek}). In
Roman times a sea channel was maintained with difficulty to a
harbor well west of Pion. By late Byzantine times this channel
had become useless, and the coast by the mid-20th century was
three miles farther west. Ephesus commanded the west end of one
great trade route into Asia, that along the Cayster valley, and
had easy access to the other two, along the Hermus (Gediz) and
the Maeander (Büyükmenderes) rivers.
History.
Ephesus enters history in the mid-7th century BC, when it was
attacked by the Cimmerians. Unlike its neighbour, Magnesia, it
survived the attacks. For part of the early 6th century the city
was under tyrants. Though allied by marriage to the kings of Lydia,
its people could not hold back the Lydian Croesus, who asserted
a general suzerainty over the city. He did, however, present many
columns and some golden cows for a new and splendid rebuilding
of the Artemiseum (Temple of Artemis). At this time, according
to Strabo, the Ephesians began to live in the plain; and to this
period, too, should be allotted the redrafting of the laws, said
to have been the work of an Athenian, Aristarchus. Ephesus soon
submitted to Cyrus of Persia. Early in the Ionian revolt (499-493
BC) against the Persians, Ephesus served as a base for an Ionian
attack on Sardis; but it is not mentioned again until 494, when
the Ephesians massacred the Chiot survivors of the Battle of Lade.
The massacre may have occurred because Ephesus was a commercial
rival of the chief rebels, Chios and Miletus. Ephesus maintained
friendly relations with Persia for about 50 years: in 478 Xerxes,
returning from his failure in Greece, honoured Artemis of Ephesus,
although he sacked other Ionian shrines, and left his children
for safety in Ephesus; and Themistocles landed there in the 460s
on his flight to Persia. But after 454 Ephesus appears as a regular
tributary of Athens. Great Ephesians up to this time had been
Callinus, the earliest Greek elegist (mid-7th century BC), the
satirist Hipponax, and the famous philosopher Heracleitus, one
of the Basilids.
Ephesus shared in a general revolt of 412 BC against Athens, siding
with Sparta in the Second Peloponnesian War, and remained an effective
ally of Sparta down to the end of the war. Threatened by Persia
after 403, Ephesus served in 396 as the headquarters of King Agesilaus
of Sparta. In 394 the Ephesians deserted to Conon's anti-Spartan
maritime league, but by 387 the city was again in Spartan hands
and was handed by Antalcidas to Persia. There followed the pro-Persian
tyranny of Syrphax and his family, who were stoned to death in
333 on Alexander the Great's taking the city. After 50 years of
fluctuating fortune, Ephesus was conquered by the Macedonian general
Lysimachus and resettled around Coressus and Pion (286-281 BC).
Lysimachus introduced colonists from Lebedus and Colophon and
renamed the city after his wife, Arsinoo--a name soon dropped.
This was the beginning of Ephesus' Hellenistic prosperity. It
became conspicuous for the abundance of its coinage.
After the defeat of Antiochus the Great, king of Syria, by the
Romans in 189 BC, Ephesus was handed over by the conquerors to
the king of Pergamum. Attalus III of Pergamum bequeathed Ephesus
with the rest of his possessions to the Roman people (133 BC).
Thenceforth, Ephesus remained subject to Rome, except for a brief
time beginning in 88 BC, when, at the instigation of Mithradates
the Great of Pontus, the cities of Asia Minor revolted and killed
their Roman residents. The Ephesians even killed those Romans
who had fled for refuge to the Artemiseum; notwithstanding which
they returned in 86 BC to their former masters. Their claim, preserved
on an extant inscription, that in admitting Mithradates they had
merely yielded to superior force was rudely brushed aside by Sulla,
who inflicted a very heavy fine. Although it twice chose the losing
side in the Roman civil wars and although it was stoutly opposed
by Pergamum and Smyrna, Ephesus became under Augustus the first
city of the Roman province of Asia. The geographer Strabo wrote
of its importance as a commercial centre in the 1st century BC.
The triumphal arch of 3 BC and the aqueduct of AD 4-14 initiated
that long series of public buildings, ornamental and useful, that
make Ephesus the most impressive example in Greek lands of a city
of imperial times.
Meanwhile the Christian Church began to win converts. A famous
protest in the theatre against the teachings of St. Paul, described
in Acts 19, is dated about AD 57. According to local belief Ephesus
was the last home of the Virgin, who was lodged near the city
by St. John and died there. The tradition that St. Luke also died
there seems to be less strongly supported. Ephesus was one of
the seven churches of Asia to which the Revelation to John was
addressed.
The Goths destroyed both city and temple in AD 262, and neither
ever recovered its former splendour. The emperor Constantine,
however, erected a new public bath, and Arcadius rebuilt at a
higher level the street from the theatre to the harbour, named
after him, the Arkadiane. A general council of the church, held
at Ephesus in 431 in the great double church of St. Mary, condemned
Nestorius and justified the cult of the Virgin as Theotokos (Mother
of God). A few years later, according to legend, the Seven Sleepers
of Ephesus (a group of 3rd-century Christian martyrs) were miraculously
raised from the dead. They too became the object of a famous cult.
The emperor Justinian built the magnificent basilica of St. John
in the 6th century. By the early Middle Ages, the city was no
longer useful as a port and fell into decline; late Byzantine
Ephesus, conquered by the Seljuqs in 1090, was merely a small
town. After brief splendour in the 14th century, even this was
deserted, and the true site of the Artemiseum remained unsuspected
until 1869.
Excavations and extant remains.
J.T. Wood, working at Ephesus for the British Museum between 1863
and 1874, excavated the odeum and theatre. In May 1869 he struck
a corner of the Artemiseum. His excavation exposed to view not
only the scanty remains of the latest edifice (built after 350
BC) but the platform below it of an earlier temple of identical
size and plan subsequently found to be that of the 6th century
BC, to which Croesus contributed. The sculptured fragments of
both temples were sent to the British Museum. In 1904 D.G. Hogarth,
heading another mission from the museum, examined the earlier
platform and found beneath its centre the remains of three yet
older structures. In its earliest known phase the temple was apparently
a small platform of green schist, containing a sealed deposit
of primitive coins and other objects. These date from c. 600 BC.
It is impossible to assign the various architects named by ancient
authors to the respective phases of the temple. At best, Chersiphron
and Metagenes can be tentatively assigned to the Temple of Croesus,
Chirocrates or Dinocrates to that of the 4th century. There had
perhaps been some repairs toward 400 BC, associated with the architects
Paeonius and Demetrius and with the prize-winning dedicatory hymn
of the famous musician Timotheus. The Artemiseum passed rapidly
through three phases before c. 550 BC. The Temple of Croesus (the
fourth phase) was remarkable for its great size (it was more than
300 feet long and 150 feet wide), for the carved figures around
the lower drums of its columns (columnae caelatae), and for the
smaller but elaborate figured friezes along its roof gutter (sima).
Croesus' temple seems to have been burned down in 356 BC. The
new temple built shortly afterward copied the old in its columnae
caelatae, one of which was by Scopas; but the new sima, instead
of small, crowded figures, had a more conventional, if vigorous,
rinceau ornament. The cella contained, among other great works,
the Amazons of Polyclitus, Phidias, and Cresilas.
Lysimachean Ephesus has been continuously excavated since 1894
by the Austrian Archaeological Institute, but so solid and extensive
is the Roman town that by the early 1960s the Austrians had rarely
penetrated to Hellenistic levels.
On the hill of Ayasoluk (Hagios Theologos) is Justinian's church
of St. John the Theologian, built around a shrine variously associated
in the early Middle Ages with the death or bodily assumption of
St. John. The church, uncovered since 1922, is a noble structure
but badly restored. On the hill there is also a beautiful Seljuq
mosque dedicated in 1375.
The public buildings of the city are arranged in a rectangular
street pattern going back to Hellenistic days. They include the
theatre, capable of seating nearly 25,000 spectators and completed
in its present form under Trajan; the agora (marketplace), surrounded
by stoas (sheltered promenades), dating from the time of Severus;
the library of Celsus, also Trajanic and well known because of
its facade; and an immense array of baths and gymnasiums.
All these buildings are to the west of Pion. On its north side
is the stadium and north of this the gymnasium of Publius Vedius
Antoninus, relatively small but very complete and with a notable
chapel for the cult of Antoninus Pius. South of Pion were the
odeum--another gift of Vedius--a roofed semicircular theatre to
hold 1,400 persons; also a series of fountains and aqueducts,
notably the aqueduct of Gaius Sextilius Pollio, which crossed
the valley from Coressus. The unmortared city wall along the crest
of Coressus appears to be that of Lysimachus.
Of the early Byzantine city, besides the stretch of curtain wall
on Panajir Dag, there remain the ruined church of the Seven Sleepers
to its east and the long double basilica of the Virgin, the scene
of the council, to its west. This basilica was rebuilt several
times; it was largely around this building, between the great
gymnasiums and the stadium of the classical city, that the early
Byzantine Ephesians gathered.