But of the cities of W. Asia, no one took a higher place than Ephesus; though not one of the most ancient, or noticed by Homer. Pliny ascribes its origin to the Amazons; and Strabo gives an excellent account of its site, the chief feature of which was a celebrated port called Panormus, with the temple of Diana, one of the Seven Wonders of the world, at a little distance without the city walls. The worship of this Diana (of Asiatic origin, and symbolized by her peculiar statue) was earlier than the planting of the Ionian colony by Androcles, as has been reasonably suspected, on a hill called Coressus, the lower ground (ultimately the chief part of the city) having been only gradually built over. After its first colonization we hear nothing of Ephesus till the time of Crœsus, who is said to have failed to take the town, owing to a device of a certain Pindarus, who attached the city to the temple by a rope, thus making the intervening space sacred, or an asylum. On this the story goes, that Crœsus, of all princes then ruling, a lover of the gods, spared, indeed, the city, but showed his common sense by changing its constitution and banishing Pindarus. It further appears that Crœsus dedicated golden bulls at Ephesus, and helped largely in the construction of the first temple dedicated there. The temple we now know was about 1,400 yards from the city, a fact, apparently, not anticipated by the first modern investigators of its site.
The inhabitants of Ephesus, as a rule, were time-servers, and ready to court the support of whosoever for the time being were their most powerful neighbours. Thus, at first, they joined the Ionian revolt; then, on the overthrow of Xerxes, were for a while tributary to Athens; and then, again, after the victories of Lysander, permitted their city to be the head-quarters of the Spartan operations against Asia Minor; though he could not, however, persuade the people to change the name of their city to that of his wife Arsinoe. After the overthrow of Antiochus, Ephesus was added by the Romans to the kingdom of Pergamus.
Again, when Mithradates was all-powerful, we find the people of Ephesus, to please him, joining in a general massacre of the Romans in their town; indeed, going to such lengths as not to respect the asylum of their own temple; the natural result being a severe punishment of this fickle population on the ultimate success of the Romans. On an inscription, however, recently discovered, we believe, by Mr. Wood, but now at Oxford, the people assert that they had been compelled to act against their will, and that they were none the less, at heart, the devoted friends of the Romans. As a place of commercial importance, Ephesus did not survive the first three centuries of the Roman empire, as the city was sacked by the Goths in A.D. 262, and its famous temple burnt, an event of which some traces have been detected during the recent excavations on its site. In later days it passed into the hands of the Seljuks and Turks, and a great mosque was built there by Selim I. on the rising ground overlooking the port. The long occupation of the site of Ephesus by a mixed population is attested by the discovery there by Mr. Wood of a hoard of coins, belonging chiefly to the Western States of Europe, and struck during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Among these are some of the Christian subjects of Saro-khan, an emir of Magnesia in the fourteenth century.[[20]] It is believed that the present name of its site, Aiosoluk, is a corruption of Hagios Theologos (St. John), the name borne by Ephesus during the Middle Ages.
[20]. An interesting account of these coins (2,231 in number) has been given in the Numism. Chron., vol. xii. New Ser., 1872, by Mr. H. A. Grueber, of the British Museum. The whole “find,” with some lumps of metal, weighed more than seventeen pounds of silver. Among these were coins of Naples, of Rhodes, of the Seljuk Amírs, of Venice, Genoa, and of the Papal States, their dates embracing a period of about eighty years, from A.D. 1285.
The chief glory of Ephesus was its temple. According to the most ancient reports, there had been in remote times one, at least, of the grandest proportions which Herodotus claims, with that of Juno at Samos, as among the greatest works of the Greeks. Its architect is said to have been contemporary with Theodorus and Rhœcus, the builders of the Samian Heræum, early in the sixth century B.C.; and Xenophon, especially, notices it, as he deposited there the share entrusted to him of the tenth, arising from sale of the slaves of the Ten Thousand at Cerasus, which was appropriated to Apollo and Artemis.[[21]] We have here an instance of a custom noticed elsewhere,—viz., that the great temples of the Hellenic world were often used as banks of deposit, where treasure was collected, not merely in the form of anathemata or dedicated objects, but, also, in large quantities of bullion, &c., in trust. Many inscriptions in Boeckh show clearly that the administrators of the temples employed these treasures as loans. Artemis was, in fact, a queen, whose dower was the wealth accumulated in her temple. As is well known, the original (or the second temple of Artemis, for this point is not clear) was burnt by Herostratus, in B.C. 356, traditionally, on the same night on which Alexander the Great was born, but it was soon rebuilt. It would take a whole book, says Pliny, to describe all its details, and it is admitted to have been the largest temple of antiquity.
[21]. In Pausanias, vii. 11, will be found a very full and interesting account of the worship of the Ephesian Artemis, but it is too long to quote here. Pindar says, the worship was instituted by the Amazons, Crêsos or Korêsos, an autochthon, and Ephesus, the son of the river god Cayster, being the first builders of the temple. For details of the older temples, see Strab. xiv. 641; Xen. Anab. v. 3; Plin. xvi. 79; and Vitruv. x. 6.
Among other valuables, the temple contained the famous picture by Apelles of Alexander, while the circuit round it was an asylum where debtors and worse rogues could screen themselves from justice, an evil which, as an inscription recently found there shows, Augustus found it needful to restrain within reasonable limits. Ephesus, too, was the usual port where the Roman proconsuls landed, on their way to their several provinces. Thus, Cicero came to Ephesus when going to his government in Cilicia. So, too, Metellus Scipio put in there before Pharsalia, and M. Antonius after Philippi. There, too, also, was collected the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra before the fatal day of Actium.[[22]]
[22]. Le Quien’s “Oriens Christianus” gives a list of seventy Christian bishops of Ephesus from Timothy to A.D. 1721. A good many of the later ones could only have been bishops in name.
But the most interesting matter to us in connection with Ephesus have been Mr. Wood’s excavations there, with his discovery not only of many unexpected monuments of the ancient town, but of undoubted relics of the famous temple itself. Mr. Wood, as the constructing engineer of the Smyrna and Aidin Railway, had naturally become well acquainted with the neighbourhood of Ephesus, and, hence, so early as 1863, had made, at his own expense, some excavations, clearing out thereby the Odeum, and ascertaining the true position of the Magnesian and Coressian gates. In these researches, he met with several valuable inscriptions, one of them referring to a certain Roman, Publius Vedius Antoninus, who was at the time the γραμματεὺς—the Scribe or Town-clerk—of the city.[[23]] By degrees the position of the Theatre, the scene of the tumult at the time of St. Paul’s visit, was clearly made out; but where was the Temple? In the prosecution of his excavations Mr. Wood had, however, met with many decrees of the people of Ephesus relating to the Temple,—one of them containing much curious information about the ritual used in the Temple-worship, with lists of the votive offerings, to be carried on certain days in procession “through the Magnesian Gate to the Great Theatre, and thence back again through the Coressian Gate to the Temple.” Among the list of statues are several of Diana, probably, such as those which “Demetrius and his craftsmen” manufactured in the days of St. Paul.
[23]. Colonel Leake, in 1824, seems to have given the first sensible suggestion as to where the temple ought to be sought for. The Admiralty chart of 1836 (the foundation of the maps of Kiepert 1841-1846) and of Guhl (1843), afforded also the first accurate survey of the Gulf of Scala Nova. In 1862, Mr. Falkener suggested the head of the harbour to the west of the city as the most likely site.