Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

Podcast Transcript

On the night of July 21, 356 BC, the sky over the city of Ephesus glowed with the flames of one of the most famous fires in World History.

The destruction of one of the most famous temples in the ancient world was not the result of an encroaching army or a dispute between Empires; it was history’s most famous act of arson, carried out by a man who wanted his name to live on.

However, the temple came back bigger and better.

Learn more about the Temple of Artemis and its several creations and destructions on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

In a previous episode, I covered the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The seven wonders were part of a list attributed to the Greek historian Herodotus. The modern popularity of the list is attributed to a Dutch book of etchings from 1572 called the Octo Mundi Miracula.

I’ve done full episodes on two of the wonders, the Great Pyramid and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Today I want to focus on one of the other seven wonders, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

Artemis was the ancient Greek goddess of the hunt, wilderness, wild animals, childbirth, and the moon, often depicted as a fiercely independent protector of young women and nature. She was the twin sister of Apollo, which is the reason why the most recent moon program was named after her.

The tales of Artemis in Greek mythology often focused on her swift, disproportionate punishment to those who acted unjustly or immorally. Her protections made her widely revered among the Greek gods.

While there were many temples dedicated to Artemis, the center of the cult was in the city of Ephesus, on the west coast of modern day Turkey.

There were several versions of the Temple of Artemis, which were built over the centuries after earlier versions were destroyed. The first temple is estimated to have been constructed in the 7th or 8th centuries BC.

Excavations of the earliest temple, completed in the early 20th century, produced gold, ivory, and glass artifacts of veneration to Artemis. While sacred artifacts were expected, the discovery of thousands of early coins ultimately proved to be the most significant find, completely altering our understanding of the site.

The temple, frequently referred to as the Artemision, functioned as more than a mere religious sanctuary; from its very beginning, it acted as a financial institution, a role confirmed by the discovery of numerous coins.

The first version of the temple was destroyed by flooding around the year Around 560 BC.

However, it was the latter two reincarnations of the Temple that ultimately cemented its place in history.

Work on the second temple commenced soon after the destruction of the first temple. It was financed by a surprising patron: King Croesus of Lydia. During the 6th century BC, control over Asia Minor was in a state of flux. The Greeks regarded the Lydians as barbarians. While ‘barbarian’ is harsh, the Lydians’ high tribute demands likely soured Greek opinion of them.

Croesus and the Lydians wanted good relations, knowing Greeks were hard to govern, so they funded the new temple to honor Artemis. The Lydian funding was generous, given the massive construction costs.

Historical estimates of the original structure held that it was nearly twice the size of the Greek Parthenon. Croesus was sending a message to his Greek subjects with his generosity.

Yet, despite his generosity, the Lydians’ dominion over the Anatolian coast was short-lived: only three years after the Temple’s completion, it fell to the expanding Persian Empire.

The 2nd and 3rd temples gained much of their fame because they sat at the terminus of two important trade networks. Ephesus’s location, between the Ionian coast and the Persian Royal Road, made it a crucial trade hub.

As commerce and pilgrimage brought people to Ephesus, the temple’s lore naturally spread through the merchants and pilgrims who arrived to venerate Artemis.

The Greeks tended to build larger temples on marshy ground. Earthquakes are a common scourge in the region, and ancient builders believed that water saturated ground protected the massive structures.

The engineers faced challenges similar to those at the Taj Mahal, also built on saturated ground. Unlike the Taj Mahal’s stone columns, Ephesian engineers laid down charcoal topped with sheepskin. The charcoal acted as a buffer between the watery soil and the stone foundation. Charcoal’s porousness allowed water to expand without shifting the monument’s base.

The sheepskin was the final key to the puzzle. It was a dry barrier to protect the charcoal layer from impurities. The result was a marvel of engineering that supported a massive stone monument the size of a modern football field.

The temple retained its structural integrity for nearly two centuries until the events of July 21, 356 BC. Coincidently, the exact same day that Alexander the Great was born.

That night the temple was deliberately set on fire by a man named Herostratus, whose motive, according to ancient sources, was simply to achieve lasting fame through a shocking act of destruction.

I mentioned Herostratus in my episode on Damnatio Memoriae. Authorities reportedly executed Herostratus and attempted to erase his name from history by forbidding anyone to mention it, but historians later recorded it anyway, creating the enduring term “Herostratic fame,” meaning notoriety gained through destructive deeds.

The arson had a profound effect on the marble structure because many of the building’s supports were massive cedar and cypress beams.

The building contained tapestries that allowed Herostratus to saturate the sacred fabric with oil, which slowly burned towards the roof supports. Historical engineers hypothesize that the fires inside reached 800 degrees Celsius (1550 Fahrenheit). At that temperature, a process called calcination occurs.

In scientific terms, the marble’s surface begins to flake, crumble, and turn into a soft, powdery chalk. Even if the column looks intact, its structural integrity is compromised.

The 1st-century Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius analyzed the temple’s destruction centuries after it burned and explained the fire’s effect on the marble structure. He said,

For the secret of this is that, like all other bodies, stones are composed of the four elements… when they are cast into the kiln and are scorched by the fire, they lose their former property of hardness. Their strength being exhausted by the great heat of the fire, they are left with their pores open and void.

The Roman statesman Pliny the Elder is the primary source for the temple’s third iteration, basing his descriptions on personal observations.

Pliny’s records indicate that the construction of the third temple took approximately 120 years. Charred fragments from the second temple formed a stable base for the third. Pliny referred to it as “the most wonderful monument of Græcian magnificence.”

Pliny also provided measurements of its size. The full length of the temple was 425 feet (130 meters), and its width was 225 feet (70 meters).

Perhaps the most impressive feature of the building was its 127 columns; according to Pliny, each was a gift from a different regional king and soared more than 60 feet (18 meters) high.

Pliny was intrigued by the composition of the third temple’s Artemis statue; he noted: As to the statue of the goddess herself, there is some doubt, but it is generally supposed that it is made of ebony. Mucianus, however, who was three times consul and one of the most recent authors to have seen it, states that it is made of vine-wood…

Centuries later, the Temple of Artemis would face destruction once again, this time during the protracted decline of the Roman Empire.

The Goths plundered the site in 262. A clear motive drove the destruction as a Gothic fleet of hundreds of ships, manned by captured sailors and Gothic warriors, squeezed through the Bosporus and into the Aegean.

They weren’t looking for territory; they were looking for the temple that had acted as a bank. The Goths stripped the gold leaf from the ceilings, emptied the treasury, and, in an act of sacrilege, even hauled away the silver staffs of the priesthood.

The destruction of the third temple was perpetrated by thieves and was concluded, again, by the torch.

The Ephesians tried to repair the statue as best they could, but they were no longer an economic power and lacked the backing of an empire as they had during the first construction.

After the Gothic disaster of 262, no benefactor stepped forward. The need to construct a defensive wall to address the city’s heightened susceptibility to invasion severely depleted Ephesian resources. As a result, the subsequent rebuilding efforts could only be modest.

Much of the roof was left incomplete and open to the sky. Nor did the Ephesians replace the damaged columns. Instead, they were braced, much like the modern Parthenon, to halt further deterioration.

Despite the Ephesians’ best efforts, the building faced one final devastating blow. The temple’s final chapter unfolded after the Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.

The construction of the Church of St. Mary in Ephesus marked a significant shift, as the city became one of the first Ionian communities to establish a major Christian landmark, a move that only underscored the Temple of Artemis’s spiritual and physical decline. As the appetite for tolerating Greco-Roman deities waned, funding for the reconstruction of their temples entirely disappeared.

The famed building’s final chapter came with a stroke of the pen of Emperor Theodosius in 391, when he issued an edict banning Greco-Roman practices.

No person at all… shall sacrifice an innocent victim to senseless idols in any place at all or in any city…If any person should attempt to perform such a sacrifice, he shall be reported… and shall receive the appropriate retribution… The temples shall be closed in all places and in all cities, and access to them shall be denied, so that the opportunity for sin may be lost to the guilty.

St. John Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople, is credited with the temple’s final destruction in 401, 10 years after the edict of Theodosius. He carried out this final act of destruction by recruiting a group of monks to act as “foot soldiers” to eliminate what he considered Pagan atrocities.

Cyrill of Alexandria credited St. John with being the “destroyer of the demons and overthrower of the temple of Artemis.“

Armed with sledgehammers, the monks decapitated the statues and used levers and pulleys to topple the columns; those they couldn’t bring down, they scorched with flames.

All that would remain of the Temple of Artemis was a few scattered columns and broken stone.

A monument that had once meant so much to the believers in the Greco-Roman world had vanished into legend.

The race for global antiquities in the second half of the 19th century restored the temple to the world’s collective memory. An enthusiastic archaeologist named John Turtle Wood used the writings of Pliny the Elder and other ancient authors to find what he could of the lost monument.

The monks’ destruction of the temple was so complete that it took six years of digging to find any of the rocks that once made up the structure.

Fragments of the Temple of Artemis, discovered by Wood and his team, are preserved today at the British Museum.

Other fragments of the temple still exist thanks to the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, who used pieces of the surviving stonework to create the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

Today, almost nothing remains of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus but scattered stones and a single reconstructed column rising from the marshy ground where one of the greatest buildings of the ancient world once stood.

It was a symbol of wealth, faith, artistry, and ambition, rebuilt more than once because people believed some places were worth restoring, no matter the cost. Though the temple is gone, it endures in memory as one of the true Wonders of the Ancient World.