male priests was secured by the same irrevocable conditions which were imposed on the priesthoods of Cybele and of several other Asiatic goddesses. Strabo says that the priests of the Ephesian Artemis were obtained from all manner of countries; and the name Megabyzus, sometimes given to the high priest, seems to indicate Persia as the country which supplied this emasculate herd. The number of sacred ministers of both sexes employed in taking care of the temple and its dedicated treasures, and in conducting the festivals, sacrifices, processions, and other ritual, must have been very great, as we see by the variety of titles indicating special offices which have been handed down to us either in ancient authors or in Ephesian inscriptions. That relating to Salutaris has added to the list several titles not known to us through any other source; such as the Theologi, who probably expounded sacred legends; the Hymnodi, who composed hymns in honour of the goddess; the Thesmodi, who may have been utterers of oracular responses or interpreters of the traditional rubric of the ritual. The female ministers of the goddess were divided into three classes, the Melliera or novices, the Hiera or priestesses, the Pariera, who, having passed the terms of active service, had to instruct the novices. We do not know whether all these grades were included under the general term Hierodulæ, or whether this name was limited to those who discharged lower menial duties and whose ranks were recruited from fugitive female slaves, as we see by the curious story told in the Romance of Achilles Tatius.* When we gather together the scattered facts which have been ascertained respecting the Artemision and certain other temples in Asia Minor, we see in their internal organisation not a few things which remind us of the monasteries of mediaval Christendom. The great landed estates, the treasures and precious works of art accumulated through many generations of pious dedicators, the time-honoured privileges of the sacred ministers, their social isolation and perpetual celibacy, are features common to both, though the result of very different influences and circumstances. But there is one institution which was probably handed on directly from expiring Paganism to new-born Christianity: that is the right of sanctuary. The asylum at Ephesus is the prototype of our Whitefriars and of the sanctuary at Westminster. This privilege of protect-ing fugitives was very generally allowed by usage to Greek temples, but that which distinguished the Artemision and Achilles Tat., loc. cit. several other great temples in Asia Minor was the extension of this privilege beyond the walls of the fane itself to a precinct round it which varied in extent in different places and in different ages. The abuse of the privilege of sanctuary was so great under the Empire, that in the reign of Tiberius the Roman Senate examined the claims of various temples in Asia Minor to the right of asylum and disallowed several of them. But Ephesus pleaded that the right of their goddess had existed from time immemorial; indeed that it was Dionysos himself who, after conquering the Amazons at Ephesus, had spared those who seated themselves as suppliants on the altar of Artemis. The Ephesians might further have alleged, though Tacitus does not record the plea, that the potentates who had in turn prevailed at Ephesus, had all respected the asylum; that Alexander the Great had increased its area to the distance of a stadium from the temple; that, though Augustus reduced its limits after their undue extension by Mithridates and Mark Antony, he recognised the right of asylum, and fixed its boundary afresh by rebuilding the Peribolos wall round the temple and marking off a certain distance outside it. This last fact we owe to the remarkable inscription already alluded to, which Mr. Wood found in duplicate inserted in the angle of the Peribolos, and the discovery of which enabled him, after another year of weary digging in the deep alluvial plain below Ayasoluk, at length to find there the remains of the Artemision under twenty-two feet of soil. The particulars of this discovery have been so fully and frequently published in various forms that it is hardly necessary to repeat them here in detail, or to follow Mr. Wood step by step and year by year in his painful and difficult exploration of the site. Our business is rather to state the tangible results of this examination of remains of the temple, which, for reasons which those who read Mr. Wood's book will readily understand, took more than four years, during which 132,221 cubic yards of earth were excavated. The restoration of the Artemision which Mr. Wood gives in his work as the result of measurement and study of the architectural remains in situ may be thus stated. The temple was an Ionic edifice, consisting of the usual cella, surrounded by a double row of columns. The length of this peristyle from east to west was 342 ft. 6 in., and its width 163 ft. 9 in. The temple was octastyle, having eight columns in the front. The diameter of the columns was 6 ft. in. at the base, and their height is calculated by Mr. Wood as 8 diameters, which, if the base is included, would amount to 55 ft. 8 in. The inter columniation on the flanks was 17 ft. 1 in., except at each extremity of the temple, where the intercolumniation was increased to 19 ft. 4 in. The reason assigned by Mr. Wood for this increased intercolumniation is that these end columns were sculptured in relief, which in some cases projected as much as 13 in. The central intercolumniation in the fronts was much wider than the rest, which Vitruvius states to have been usual in Greek temples, in order that the statue of the deity might be well seen through the open door. Mr. Wood assigns 28 ft. 8 in. for this central intercolumniation; certainly a great length to be spanned by a single block of marble, which must have been strong enough to carry the chief weight of the superincumbent pediment. If the central intercolumniation was equally wide in the earlier temple built by Chersiphron, we can well understand why it was necessary for Artemis herself to contrive the adjustment of the vast architrave stone. Mr. Wood spaces off the remaining columns in the fronts with a gradual diminution of intercolumniation from the centre to the angles, so as to reconcile the eye more readily to the great width of the middle space. This arrangement is also followed in the great temple at Sardes. The eighteen columns at either end of the Artemision, which are severally marked with a dot on Mr. Wood's plan, are ornamented on part of their shafts with sculptures in relief, shown in the elevation. The cella Mr. Wood states to be nearly 70 ft. wide. The temple was raised on a platform formed by fourteen steps; the length of this platform measured on the lowest step was 418 ft. 1 in. by 239 ft. 4 in. Thus far Mr. Wood. Let us now compare what the ancients say as to the plan and structure of the Artemision. Vitruvius notices it as an octastyle, dipteral temple of the Ionic order. The Byzantine writer Philo states that it stood on ten steps. Pliny gives as the length of the universum templum 425 ft. by 225 ft.* These dimen. sions are irreconcilable with those of the peristyle, 342 ft. 6 in. by 163 ft. 9 in., as measured in situ by Mr. Wood; but his dimensions for the base of the platform, 418 ft. 1 in. English, is not very far off Pliny's 425 ft. for the length of his universum templum, if we suppose that measurement is in Roman feet. His dimension, 225 ft. for the width of the same templum, is however hopelessly irreconcilable with the actual width of the platform, 239 ft. 4 in., as given by Mr. Wood. Here, as constantly happens in texts of ancient authors when numerals are given, a clerical error in the MS. has probably been repeated by *This is Sillig's reading. Some MSS. have ccxx. successive scribes. In the same passage Pliny states the height of the columns to have been 60 ft. Roman, which is not far off Mr. Wood's calculation of 55 ft. 8 in. English. Pliny states that thirty-six of the columns were calata, sculptured in relief, and Mr. Wood found portions of five drums so sculptured. In the same passage Pliny gives the whole number of columns as 127, each the gift of a king. Mr. Wood, being unable to arrange so large a number of columns within his peristyle, by inserting a comma in the original text, makes Pliny say that the number of columns in the peristyle was one hundred, of which twenty-seven were the gifts of kings. But by no ingenuity can such an interpretation be extracted out of the passage in Pliny.* Here again, if the passage is not corrupt, we must suppose that Pliny, writing from memory or from ill-digested notes, has given as one total the columns dedicated through all time in the successive temples. We have already noticed that Croesus dedicated many of the columns of the temple which was building in his time. Between his date and that of the completion of the latest temple by Deinokrates, an interval which we may reckon as at least 250 years, there would have been time for many successive dedications by kings. The general fact that the columns of the temple were dedicated is proved by the fragments of votive inscriptions found by Mr. Wood, and given in his Appendix, No. 17.† These inscriptions were deeply incised on the torus at the foot of the fluted columns of the peristyle. One of them is a dedication by some lady of Sardes; a confirmation of Strabo's statement that, after the temple had been burnt by Herostratus, the Ephesian women contributed their ornaments to the fund for rebuilding it.‡ In the explanatory remarks which accompany Mr. Wood's restoration of the temple, he would have done well if he had given a clear statement, once for all, of the data on which his restoration is based, and which we only know by gathering up scattered incidental notices. Thus we find, p. 178 and p. 217, that his intercolumniation for the flanks was obtained by observing the buttresses which united the steps of the platform * The passage stands thus in the original text :-'Columnæ centum 'viginti septem a singulis regibus facta LX pedum altitudine, ex iis XXXVI cælatæ una a scopa. (Plin. Hist. Nat. xxxvi. 14 § 21.) p. 1. First published by Röhl, Scheda Epigraphicæ.' Berlin, 1876, At Iakly (Euromos) in Caria still remain standing the columns of a temple of the Roman period, on each of which the name of the dedicator is inscribed on the shaft. See 'Ionian Antiquities,' part i. p. 57. with the foundation piers of the columns of the peristyle, and upon them. We have now noticed the principal points in Mr. Wood's restoration which rest on sure or probable evidence. We have no intention of criticising his arrangement of the interior of the cella, for which the remains he discovered gave him hardly any |