Most of the original Seven Wonders of the World are best known for their incredible construction techniques by inspired architects whose names have justly gone down in the annals of ancient history for their achievements. The Temple of Artemis (also known less precisely as Temple of Diana) has the unfortunate legacy of being most famous for its pointless destruction, at the hands of history’s original attention seeker.
Built – in its most famous phase – around 550 BC at Ephesus (near modern day Selçuk, in Turkey) the shrine to the Ephesian goddess of fertility Artemis was a masterpiece of its day, forged from brilliant marble. Ironically, it was its immense beauty that would prove its undoing – by making it the perfect target.
Three Ages of Ancient Ephesus
Temples had stood at the sacred site of Ephesus for many years before the most famous example was erected there in the 6th century BC.
Pausanias – a Greek traveller and geographer of the 2nd century AD, who remains highly respected by modern archaeologists for his sober and careful work – noted in his time that it was very ancient indeed, older even than the oracular shrine of Apollo at Didyma from the 6th century BC.
He was right. Excavations at the site before the First World War by British archaeologist David George Hogarth – supplemented by corrective re-excavations in 1987-88 – identified three successive temples overlying one another on the site, confirming Pausanias’ report. The earliest dated back to the Bronze Age.
In the second half of the eighth century BC, a clay-floored perpiteral temple (that is, a temple with a single row of columns on all sides) was erected at the site, but destroyed in the 7th century BC by a great flood. It was the replacement for this fallen structure that was to see Ephesus enter its most notorious phase.
The New Temple
Croesus, the wealthy king of Lydia from 560/561 BC until his defeat by the Persians in about 547 BC, bankrolled the building of an enriched and magnificent new shrine to Artemis at Ephesus. It was designed by the Cretan architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes, on a marshy site sagely chosen – according to Pliny the Elder – to make the structure less susceptible to earthquakes.
The new structure was made from shiny marble. Its peripteral columns were doubled to make a wide ceremonial passage round the cella (the inner chamber). A new ebony or grapewood cult statue – housed in a naiskos mini-temple to the east of the open-air altar – was sculpted by the artist Endoios. The whole construction was said to measure 91 metres by 46 metres – four times the size of the previous temple.
It proved exceptionally popular, serving not only as a place of worship, but also as a marketplace. Many pilgrims of all different stripes – from merchants to kings and simple sightseers – came from miles around to visit, trade and worship, bearing gifts ranging from statues of the goddess to gold and ivory jewellery (we can tell because of the many examples excavated at the site since), all the while strengthening the powerful cult of Artemis.
Fame At Any Cost
The night of July 21, 356 BC, should go down in history for one reason only – namely the fact that it was when Alexander the Great was born, in Pella, the capital of Macedon. Yet it’s not, and for all the wrong reasons.
Herostratus was a twisted, lonely young Ephesian. That evening, he snuck into the unguarded Temple of Artemis and set it alight, burning it to the ground. Instead of running away, Herostratus allowed himself to be captured, and proudly admitted to his crime. “A man was found to plan the burning of the temple of Ephesian Diana,” noted the Roman writer and historian Valerius Maximus in the 1st century AD, of Herostratus’ act of arson, “so that through the destruction of this most beautiful building his name might be spread through the whole world.”
Plutarch later remarked that there had been a feeling Artemis was too preoccupied with Alexander’s delivery to save her own burning temple. Feeling some guilt for the matter, Alexander actually offered to pay for the building of a new shrine, but the Ephesians refused (they didn’t think it was right for one god to build a temple to another).
Herostratus’s Legacy and the Temple Today
Another temple was eventually built at the site, after Alexander’s death, in 323 BC. Scopas of Páros was its architect, and it was bigger still than even its predecessor, measuring 130 metres by 69 metres, with 127 carved columns, each 18 metres high. It fared little better, and was destroyed during a raid by the Goths in 262 BC. A fourth and final version fell in 401 AD, when it was attacked by a mob led by St. John Chrysostom.
As for Herostratus? He was promptly executed, and in a bid to dissuade similar-minded fame-seekers, the Ephesian authorities also forbid any mention of him in word or writing, on pain of death. That didn’t prevent Greek historian Theopompus from recording the arsonist’s name and deeds though, and – unwittingly or otherwise – granting Herostratus the very fame he craved. The term “Herostratic fame” – essentially “fame at any cost” – has passed into modern languages, and been used to describe the deeds of such contemporary psychopaths as John Lennon’s murderer Mark Chapman.
The site of the temple was rediscovered in 1869 by an expedition led by British architect, engineer and archaeologist John Turtle Wood, sponsored by the British Museum. Several artefacts and sculptures from the reconstructed temple can be seen in the museum today in the Ephesus Room. Marking the site itself is a single column constructed of dissociated fragments discovered at the site over the years – an appropriately solemn tribute to an ancient wonder that fate never smiled on kindly.
