cows of gold. That is to say, these gifts were probably paid for out of the proceeds of the sequestration of the property of a rich Lydian merchant, Sadyattes, which Croesus presented to Ephesus (Nic. Damasc. fr. 65). To counteract, perhaps, the growing Lydian influence, Athens, the mother-city of Ephesus, despatched one of her noblest citizens, Aristarchus, to restore law on the basis of the Solonian constitution. The labours of Aristarchus seem to have borne fruit. It was an Ephesian follower of his, Hermodorus, who aided the Decemviri at Rome in their compilation of a system of law. And in the same generation Heraclitus, probably a descendant of Codrus, quitted his hereditary magistracy in order to devote himself to philosophy, in which his name became almost as great as that of any Greek. Poetry had long flourished at Ephesus. From very early times the Homeric poems found a home and admirers there; and to Ephesus belong the earliest elegiac poems of Greece, the war songs of Callinus, who flourished in the 7th century B.C. and was the model of Tyrtaeus. The city seems to have been more than once under tyrannical rule in the early Ionian period; and it fell thereafter first to Croesus of Lydia, and then to Cyrus, the Persian, and when the Ionian revolt against Persia broke out in the year 500 B.C. under the lead of Miletus, the city remained submissive to Persian rule. When Xerxes returned from the march against Greece, he honoured the temple of Artemis, although he sacked other Ionian shrines, and even left his children behind at Ephesus for safety’s sake. We hear again of Persian respect for the temple in the time of Tissaphernes (411 B.C.). After the final Persian defeat at the Eurymedon (466 B.C.), Ephesus for a time paid tribute to Athens, with the other cities of the coast, and Lysander first and Agesilaus afterwards made it their headquarters. To the latter fact we owe a contemporary description of it by Xenophon. In the early part of the 4th century it fell again under Persian influence, and was administered by an oligarchy.
Alexander was received by the Ephesians in 334, and established democratic government. Soon after his death the city fell into the hands of Lysimachus, who introduced fresh Greek colonists from Lebedus and Colophon and, it is said, by means of an artificial inundation compelled those who still dwelt in the plain by the temple to migrate to the city on the hills, which he surrounded by a solid wall. He renamed the city after his wife Arsinoë, but the old name was soon resumed. Ephesus was very prosperous during the Hellenistic period, and is conspicuous both then and later for the abundance of its coinage, which gives us a more complete list of magistrates’ names than we have for any other Ionian city. The Roman coinage is remarkable for the great variety and importance of its types. After the defeat of Antiochus the Great, king of Syria, by the Romans, Ephesus was handed over by the conquerors to Eumenes, king of Pergamum, whose successor, Attalus Philadelphus, unintentionally worked the city irremediable harm. Thinking that the shallowness of the harbour was due to the width of its mouth, he built a mole part-way across the latter; the result, however, was that the silting up of the harbour proceeded more rapidly than before. The third Attalus of Pergamum bequeathed Ephesus with the rest of his possessions to the Roman people, and it became for a while the chief city, and for longer the first port, of the province of Asia, the richest in the empire. Henceforth Ephesus remained subject to the Romans, save for a short period, when, at the instigation of Mithradates Eupator of Pontus, the cities of Asia Minor revolted and massacred their Roman residents. The Ephesians even dragged out and slew those Romans who had fled to the precinct of Artemis for protection, notwithstanding which sacrilege they soon returned from their new to their former masters, and even had the effrontery to state, in an inscription preserved to this day, that their defection to Mithradates was a mere yielding to superior force. Sulla, after his victory over Mithradates, brushed away their pretexts, and inflicting a very heavy fine told them that the punishment fell far short of their deserts. In the civil wars of the 1st century B.C. the Ephesians twice supported the unsuccessful party, giving shelter to, or being made use of by, first, Brutus and Cassius, and afterwards Antony, for which partisanship or weakness they paid very heavily in fines.
All this time the city was gradually growing in wealth and in devotion to the service of Artemis. The story of St Paul’s doings there illustrates this fact, and the sequel is very suggestive,—the burning, namely, of books of sorcery of great value. Addiction to the practice of occult arts had evidently become general in the now semi-orientalized city. The Christian Church which Paul planted there was governed by Timothy and John, and is famous in Christian tradition as a nurse of saints and martyrs. According to local belief, Ephesus was also the last home of the Virgin, who was lodged near the city by St John and there died. But to judge from the Apocalyptic Letter to this Church (as shown by Sir W. M. Ramsay), the latter showed a dangerous tendency to lightness and reaction, and later events show that the pagan tradition of Artemis continued very strong and perhaps never became quite extinct in the Ephesian district. It was, indeed, long before the spread of Christianity threatened the old local cult. The city was proud to be termed neocorus or servant of the goddess. Roman emperors vied with wealthy natives in lavish gifts, one Vibius Salutaris among the latter presenting a quantity of gold and silver images to be carried annually in procession. Ephesus contested stoutly with Smyrna and Pergamum the honour of being called the first city of Asia; each city appealed to Rome, and we still possess rescripts in which the emperors endeavoured to mitigate the bitterness of the rivalry. One privilege Ephesus secured; the Roman governor of Asia always landed and first assumed office there: and it was long the provincial centre of the official cult of the emperor, and seat of the Asiarch. The Goths destroyed both city and temple in the year A.D. 262, and although the city revived and the cult of Artemis continued, neither ever recovered its former splendour. A general council of the Christian Church was held there in 431 in the great double church of St Mary, which is still to be seen. On this occasion Nestorius was condemned, and the honour of the Virgin established as Theotokus, amid great popular rejoicing, due, doubtless, in some measure to the hold which the cult of the virgin Artemis still had on the city. (On this council see below.) Thereafter Ephesus seems to have been gradually deserted owing to its malaria; and life transferred itself to another and higher site near the Artemision, the name of which, Ayassoluk (written by early Arab geographers Ayathulukh), is now known to be a corruption of the title of St John Theológos, given to a great cathedral built on a rocky hill near the present railway station, in the time of Justinian I. This church was visited by Ibn Batuta in A.D. 1333; but few traces are now visible. The ruins of the Artemision, after serving as a quarry to local builders, were finally covered deep with mud by the river Caÿster, or one of its left bank tributaries, the Selinus, and the true site remained unsuspected until 1869.
Excavations.—The first light thrown on the topography of Ephesus was due to the excavations conducted by the architect, J. T. Wood, on behalf of the trustees of the British Museum, during the years 1863–1874. He first explored the Odeum and the Great Theatre situate in the city itself, and in the latter place had the good fortune to find an inscription which indicated to him in what direction to search for the Artemision; for it stated that processions came to the city from the temple by the Magnesian gate and returned by the Coressian. These two gates were next identified, and following up that road which issued from the Magnesian gate, Wood lighted first on a ruin which he believed to be the tomb of Androclus, and afterwards on an angle of the peribolus wall of the time of Augustus. After further tentative explorations, he struck the actual pavement of the Artemision on the last day of 1869.
The Artemision.—Wood removed the whole stratum of superficial deposit, nearly 20 ft. deep, which overlay the huge area of the temple, and exposed to view not only the scanty remains of the latest edifice, built after 350 B.C., but the platform of an earlier temple, now known to be that of the 6th century to which Croesus contributed. Below this he did not find any remains. He discovered and sent to England parts of several
