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natural port of Sardes, and it was probably to strengthen commercial relations that Alyattes married his daughter to the Ephesian Melas, a descendant of the royal house of Androklos, and of high repute among his fellow-citizens. The issue of this marriage was a son called Pindarus, who, in the reign of Croesus, became the principal citizen in Ephesus. In the course of his invasion of Ionia, Croesus laid siege to Ephesus, and then it was that Pindarus is said to have saved the city by a singular device. He attached a rope from the Temple of Artemis to the city wall, from which it was distant nearly a mile. After this Croesus allowed the Ephesians to capitulate on honourable terms. The meaning of this curious story probably is that this was a solemn form of dedication by which the Ionian colony was placed under the protection of the Asiatic goddess, and such an act seems to have brought about a closer amalgamation between the Greek city in Coressus and the native community dwelling round the temple. More than one reason may have combined to induce Croesus to grant such favourable terms to the Ephesians. He is said to have raised money in the time of his father by means of a rich Ephesian merchant, and he may have thought that his commercial relations would be most securely developed by favouring one Ionian city at the expense of the rest. Again, the Ephesian Artemis, as an Asiatic deity, was to him an object of special reverence, and hence the protection of the goddess which Pindarus invoked for the city by the solemn act of dedication would not be without its influence on the conqueror. Herodotus states that some time during his reign, Croesus dedicated most of the columns in the Temple of Artemis, and also some golden bulls. We know therefore that it must have been in course of construction between B.C. 560 and 546. The date of its commencement is approximately fixed by the fact that it was Theodorus, the celebrated architect and sculptor of Samos, who recommended the laying the foundations on fleeces of wool and charcoal, because the site was marshy. The date of Theodorus is a matter of dispute, but he probably lived not earlier than B.C. 600.

The sixth century before the Christian era was a teeming age when Greek commerce and navigation were being largely developed, and much of the wealth thus suddenly accumulated was employed in building temples and in costly dedications. It was then that solid and sumptuous edifices built of marble and stone were substituted for the wooden structures of the earlier generations, or for the rude altar and time-hallowed idol, sometimes preserved in a hollow tree. The Heræum

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at Samos, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, and the Artemision at Ephesus were all begun between B.C. 600 and 500; and it was in the latter part of the same century, according to Pliny, that marble was first employed in sculpture by two Cretan artists. The first architect of the Ephesian temple was Chersiphron, and it was continued by his son Metagenes, who is said by Vitruvius to have made an ingenious contrivance for transporting the huge architrave stones from the quarry to the temple. After these great blocks had been rough-hewn into beams, a wheel was so fixed to either end that the whole mass with each revolution of the wheels moved forward clear of the ground. The architrave stones were then lowered into their place on the building by means of paniers of sand placed under them. As the sand ran out, the gradual collapse of the paniers gently lowered the stones on their beds. One block, however, which formed the architrave over the principal doorway, was too unwieldy for the mechanical ingenuity of the architect. In the vexation and perplexity of his spirit he had an illness, in the course of which the goddess appeared to him in a nightly vision, and said, Be of good cheer, for I myself will see to the placing of 'the architrave;' and in the morning, behold, the great refractory mass had, proprio motu, subsided with the utmost nicety into its appointed place. This temple, according to Pliny, took 120 years to build, and was finished on an enlarged plan by Pæonius, the architect of the Temple of Apollo at Branchida, and Demetrius. All the Ionian cities are said to have contributed to the building of the Artemision, which Brunn supposes to have been completed about 460 B.C.* The long delay in finishing it is accounted for when we consider the momentous revolutions which troubled Asia Minor in the space of time between its founding and completion. In that interval took place the destruction of the Lydian monarchy and the subjugation of Ionia by Cyrus, the revolt of the Ionians under Darius Hystaspes, the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, and the maritime ascendency of Athens, which was its result, and through which most of the cities of Ionia were finally reduced to a state of vassalage. On reference to the record of tribute lists in Attic inscriptions, we find the Ephesians paying tribute to Athens about the time when their temple was completed. This dependence lasted till the great Athenian disaster in Sicily, after which Ephesus sided with the enemies of Athens. The

* H. Brunn, 'Geschichte d. Griech. Künstler,' ii. P. 383. VOL. CXLV. NO. CCXCVII.

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sympathies of the city had been more with Persia than with Greece ever since the time of Darius Hystaspes.

It was the aim of Mardonius to make Ephesus the chief port of Persia on the west coast of Asia Minor; it was to the Ephesians that Xerxes entrusted his children during his expedition to Greece; and the Artemision was the only temple in Ionia which he did not plunder and destroy, probably because it was dedicated to an Asiatic goddess. Thus again, when the Athenians invaded Ephesus in the latter part of the Peloponnesian War, the Persian satrap Tissaphernes made a sumptuous sacrifice at the Temple of Artemis, and levied an army in her defence against the Greek invaders.

Ephesus continued to yield more and more to Asiatic influence till Lysander, and afterwards Agesilaus, made it the headquarters of their armies, and revived Hellenic spirit in the city. After this the struggle was not between Persian and Greek influence, but between the oligarchical party ruling by the aid of Sparta, and the democratic party who invited the interference of Philip of Macedon. These parties contended with varying fortune till the invasion of Alexander put an end to the struggle.

We have now brought the history of Ephesus down to the period of the burning of the temple by Herostratus, B.C. 356. The building of the new temple was probably commenced immediately after this catastrophe. Some money was raised by the sale of the columns of the old temple and by the voluntary contributions of Ephesian ladies, who even sold their jewels for this holy purpose. Many of the columns of the new temple were the gift of kings. When Alexander the Great passed through Ephesus after his victory at the Granicus, he re-established the democracy, and after assigning to Artemis the tribute previously paid to the Persian king, tried to conciliate the goddess with a great sacrifice, which was accompanied by a procession of his whole army in battle-array.

It was probably on this occasion that he offered to defray the entire expenses of rebuilding the temple, provided the Ephesians would allow him to inscribe his name on it as dedicator. The priests, who probably still secretly favoured the cause of the Persian king, declined this munificent offer, replying with an adroit cunning, that it was not meet for a god to make dedications to the gods. No such scruples occurred to the priests of Athene Polias at Priene. On the walls of that temple Alexander set his name as dedicator, probably immediately after his visit to Ephesus. The block of marble on which this is engraved may be seen in the Mausoleum Room

at the British Museum.

the day they were cut.

The bold clear letters are fresh as

Deinokrates, to whom Alexander entrusted the building of his new city Alexandria, was also the architect of the new temple at Ephesus, and one of the columns was sculptured by Scopas, one of the four artists employed on the Mausoleum.

How long the new Artemision took to build is not recorded, but, if Pliny's statement that the roof, which was of cedar, was 400 years old when he wrote his Historia Naturalis,' about A.D. 77, is to be taken literally, the temple must have been finished about B.C. 323. It was probably on its completion that the celebrated picture was dedicated, in which Apelles painted Alexander the Great holding a thunderbolt in his hand. The sum which the painter is said to have received from the king for this picture is of fabulous amount.

After the death of Alexander the Greek cities in Asia Minor were the bone of contention among his successors. Above all they coveted the possession of Ephesus; the security of its harbour, only to be approached from the sea by a long narrow canal full of shoals at the entrance; its central position on the west coast of Asia Minor, so convenient either for fitting out naval expeditions, or for the defence of Ionia; its great trade and accumulated wealth ill-guarded by a population too prone to luxury to be formidable in war; all marked out Ephesus as the prize of successive victors in the great contest for the possession of the Macedonian empire. Already, before the battle of Ipsus, B.C. 301, it had passed from Antigonus to Lysimachus, and then back to Antigonus and Demetrius. We find it again in the possession of Lysimachus, B.C. 295. His short occupation of Ephesus forms an epoch in the history of the city. He forced the inhabitants to abandon the plain round the temple, where they had gathered ever since the time of Croesus, and concentrated them on the original site of the colony of Androklos. The hill which former topographers call Prion, but to which Mr. Wood gives the name Coressus, was probably the acropolis of the city which Lysimachus rebuilt, and to which he gave the name of his wife Arsinoe. To him may with probability be attributed the line of walls which may still be traced on the summit of this hill, and the magnificent fortification which following the heights of the higher mountain ridge on the south (Mr. Wood's Prion and the Coressus of former topographers), completely enclosed the Lysimachian city. It was thus that the peculiar connexion between the Hellenic city and the temple which had existed ever since the time of Croesus was finally severed. The sword

of the Macedonian conqueror cut through the tie of dependency by which priestcraft had attached the city to the temple of the Asiatic goddess; and it is a significant fact in reference to this political change, that about the time of Lysimachus the silver coins of Ephesus have for the first time the type of the Greek huntress-goddess, instead of the bee of her Asiatic namesake.

We will not here attempt to follow the chequered fortunes of Ephesus as it passed like a shuttlecock, backwards and forwards, from the Seleucide to the Ptolemies, then back to the Seleucidæ. After the fall of Antiochus the Great, it was added by the Romans to the dominions of Eumenes, king of Pergamus, and it was in the reign of his successor, Attalus II., that we first hear of that silting up at the mouth of the Cayster which, though very slow and gradual in its operation, ultimately destroyed the harbour of Ephesus. The mole by which Attalus tried to correct this tendency to silt up and which only aggravated the mischief, has been recognised by Mr. Wood in a massive stone embankment on the north bank of the Cayster, of which he traced the remains to a distance of within 400 yards of the present sea-board.

In the war between Mithridates and the Romans, B.C. 88, the Ephesians actively sided with the king of Pontus, not so much, according to Appian, through fear of that formidable monarch, who for the time being was master of nearly all Asia Minor, as through hatred of the Romans, whom they ruthlessly massacred, even when they had invoked the protection of their own goddess. Soon, with the political inconstancy which characterises their history from the beginning, they changed sides and became adherents of the Romans. It is curious to turn from Appian's statements to the plea put forth by the Ephesians themselves in an inscription now at Oxford, which once probably formed a part of the cella walls of the Artemision. In this manifesto, in which the Ephesian people leclare war against Mithridates, they state that they sided with him only by compulsion, having always secretly cherished in their hearts their preference for the Roman alliance.*

This decree must have been passed after the great defeat of Mithridates at Charonea, and its date is probably about B.C. 36. The conqueror of Mithridates was not to be cajoled by the elaborate rhetoric of such documents, and Sylla made the Ephesians atone for the massacre of so many Roman citizens. by a heavy fine.

Here the history of Ephesus as an autonomous Greek state

Lebas, Voyage Archéologique: Ionia,' p. 56, No. 136 a.

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