Temple of Artemis
The Lady of Ephesus
The Great Goddess whom Greeks identified
as Artemis, in the archaic form she retained
at Ephesus, even as late as
the 2nd century AD (the date of this marble)
The Temple of Artemis or Artemisium (440 BC, at Ephesus (present day Turkey)), figured in the classic lists of the Seven Wonders of the World drawn up in Alexandria. It took 120 years to build, and was started by King Croesus of Lydia. Scarcely anything remains at the site.
Artemis was the Greek goddess, the virginal huntress and twin of Apollo, who supplanted the Titan Selene as Goddess of the Moon. Of the Olympian goddesses who inherited aspects of the Great Goddess, Athene was more honored than Artemis at Athens. At Ephesus a goddess whom the Greeks associated with Artemis was passionately venerated in an archaic, certainly pre-Hellenic icon (illustration, right). The original was carved of wood, with many breasts denoting fertility, rather than the virginity that Hellene Artemis assumed. Most like Near Eastern and Egyptian deities and least like Greek ones, her body and legs are enclosed within a tapering pillar-like term, from which her feet protrude. On the coins minted at Ephesus, the many-breasted Goddess wears a mural crown (like a city's walls), an attribute of Cybele). She rests either arm on a staff formed of entwined serpents or of a stack of ouroboroi the eternal serpent with its tail in its mouth. Like Cybele, the goddess at Ephesus was served by eunuch priests— called Megabyzi, and by maidens (korai).
A votive inscription mentioned by Bennett (see link), which dates probably from about the 3rd century BCE, associates Ephesian Artemis with Crete: "To the Healer of diseases, to Apollo, Giver of Light to mortals, Eutyches has set up in votive offering (a statue of) the Cretan Lady of Ephesus, the Light-Bearer."
The Greek habits of syncretism assimilated all foreign gods under some form of the Olympian pantheon familiar to them, and it is clear that at Ephesus, the identification the Ionian settlers made with Artemis was slender.
The sacred site at Ephesus was far older than the Artemisium. Pausanias understood the shrine of Artemis there to be very ancient. He states with certainty that it antedated the Ionic immigration by many years, being older even than the oracular shrine of Apollo at Didymi. He said that the pre-Ionic inhabitants of the city were Leleges and Lydians.
The temple was a widely respected place of refuge, a tradition that was linked in myth with the Amazons who took refuge there, both from Heracles and from Dionysus.
The temple of Artemis at Ephesus was destroyed in 356 BC in an act of arson committed by Herostratus. According to the story, his motivation was fame at any cost, thus the term herostratic fame. The legend affirms that Artemis herself did not protect her temple, because she was too busy tending to the birth of Alexander the Great, which took place that same night. The reconstruction of the great Temple of Artemis was again destroyed during a raid by the Goths in 262 CE, in the time of emperor Gallienus "Respa, Veduc and Thuruar, leaders of the Goths, took ship and sailed across the strait of the Hellespont to Asia. There they laid waste many populous cities and set fire to the renowned temple of Diana at Ephesus" reported Jordanes in Getica (chapter xx, 107)
More details of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus can be found in Pliny, Natural History xxxvi:14; Pomponius Mela, i:17; Ptolemy, 5; Plutarch's Life of Alexander (the burning of the Artemisium).
The temple's location was rediscovered in 1869 by an expedition sponsored by the British Museum, and several artifacts and sculptures from the reconstructed temple, though not the lost Wonder of the World, can be seen there today.
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