Mount Prion, according to Chandler, is among the curiosities of Ionia enumerated by Pausanias. It has served as an inexhaustible magazine of marble, and contributed largely to the magnificence of the city. "The Ephesians, it is related, when they first resolved to provide an edifice worthy of Diana, met to agree on importing materials. The quarries, then in use, were remote, and the expense, it was foreseen, would be prodigious. At this time a shepherd happened to be feeding his flock on mount Prion[249], and two rams fighting, one of them missed his antagonist, and, striking the rock with his horn, broke off a crust of very white marble. He ran into the city with this specimen, which was received with excess of joy. He was highly honoured for this accidental discovery; the Ephesians changing his name from Pixodorus to Evangelus, the good messenger, and enjoining their chief magistrate, under a penalty, to visit the spot, and to sacrifice to him monthly." This custom continued to be observed, even so late as the time of Augustus Cæsar.
Not far from the gymnasium, are cavities with mouths, like ovens, forming burial-places, made to admit bodies, which were thrust in. This was supposed to have belonged to the oratory or church of St. John, rebuilt by Justinian. Near the city, also, are quarries in the bowels of the mountain, with numberless mazes, and vast, silent, dripping caverns. In many parts of this, Dr. Chandler informs us, are chippings of marble and marks of tools. He found chippings, also, which supplied marble for the city wall, and huge pieces lying among the bushes at the bottom.
The Ephesians, at the time in which the learned traveller to whom in this account we have so frequently referred, were a few Greek peasants, living in extreme wretchedness, dependence, and insensibility; "the representatives of an illustrious people, and exhibiting the wreck of their greatness; some, the substructions of the glorious edifices which they raised; some beneath the vaults of the stadium, once the crowded scene of their diversions; and some by the abrupt precipice, in the sepulchres, which received their ashes."
These ruins were visited by Sir John Hobhouse. "The desolate walls of the mosque of St. John, and the whole scene of Aiasaluck," says he, "cannot but suggest a train of melancholy reflections. The decay of these religions is thus presented, at one view, to the eye of the traveller! The marble spoils of the Grecian temple adorn the mouldering edifice, over which the tower of the Mussulman, the emblem of another triumphant worship, is itself seen to totter, and sink into the mouldering ruins." Not a single inhabitant, not even a shepherd's hut, was to be seen on the actual site of this once resplendent city! "Its streets are obscure and overgrown," says Chandler. "A herd of goats was driven to it for shelter from the sun at noon; and a noisy flight of crows from the quarries seemed to insult its silence. We heard the partridge call in the area of the theatre, and of the stadium. The glorious pomp of its heathen worship is no longer remembered; and Christianity, which was there nursed by apostles, and fostered by general councils, until it increased in fulness of stature, barely lingers on in an existence hardly visible."
Since this, the state of Christianity there has fallen still lower. In 1812, one Greek, who was a baker, living at Aiasaluck, and three or four fishermen, who lived in sheds near the river, were the only Christians to be found in the city of Ephesus[250].
NO. XXXVI.—GERASA. (DJERASH.)
This city is placed among those of the Decapolis, in Matthew, vii. 28; and it is from a rock near it, from which the swine are described as having ran down into the Dead Sea. By some it is included in Cœlosyria; by others in Arabia.
The ruins of this city were discovered by the well known traveller, M. Seetzen (Conseiller d'Ambassade de S. M. l'Empereur de Russie). His letters were addressed to M. von Zach, Grand Marshal of the court of Saxe Gotha, and part of them appeared, at different times, in the Moniteur. Some members of the National Institute sent over these papers to Sir Joseph Banks, by whom they were forwarded to the Palestine Association.
One of the most interesting portions of this journal is that, which comprises the account of the ruins of Jerrash, situated in about the centre of the Holy Land, the dilapidated buildings of which had, till then, escaped the notice of its lovers of antiquity, and which, for beauty and importance, may be compared to those of Palmyra and Balbec.