When he visited the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Antipater of Sidon described it as follows. He wrote:
“I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, ‘Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand.’”
Clearly, Antipater was impressed. What did the Temple of Artemis look like, and what can we learn from it? I’ll admit that when I began this series of posts on the Seven Wonders of the World, this is the wonder that I knew least about.
Who Built the Temple of Artemis?
This question has multiple answers. More than one version of the temple existed historically. An architect named Chersiphron, from Crete, gets credit as the designer of the most famous second version of the temple. This was the version that brought the temple fame throughout the Classical World. (The temple is also known as the Artemisium or the Temple of Diana, incidentally.)
Construction began during the reign of the Lydian King Croesus, circa 550 BCE. Lydia was an independent kingdom on the Asian shore of the Aegean Sea. Greek in culture by 550, it came under Persian rule when Persia expanded in the second half of the 500s BCE.
The size of the temple was stupendous. Reportedly, it was 115 meters long and 46 meters wide. This is roughly a modern football field, if one includes the end zones. The height was 20 meters, according to the Roman writer Pliny. The temple’s 127 marble columns upheld the roof. A structure this vast took decades to complete. As a result, sources seem unsure of exactly when workers completed the Temple of Artemis.
Like many Greek temples, statuary and sculpture adorned the marble used to construct the temple. Only a little of this has survived. One can see pieces of the Temple of Artemis in the British Museum, for instance.
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Fire!
At least according to some accounts, this second version of the Temple of Artemis burned down in 356 BCE. The fire might have been an act of arson. Legend holds that it burned on the same night Alexander the Great was born. The goddess Artemis, distracted by Alexander’s birth, could not save her own shrine.
True or not, the Ephesians immediately set to work on rebuilding this massive edifice. They weren’t done when Alexander the Great arrived on his campaign against Persia in 334 BCE. It seems he offered to pay to finish rebuilding the temple, but the Ephesians declined. They told Alexander it was not right for a god to pay tribute to another god.
The more practical reason seems to be that, although Artemis was a Greek goddess, the Ephesians claimed a special relationship to her. The temple brought in such wealth from trade, visitors, and a yearly festival (the Artemesion) that they wanted to keep their exclusive relationship with the Temple of Artemis and not share credit with Alexander. This third version of the temple, it seems, was the largest yet.
Why is the Temple Enigmatic?
The interesting thing is the statue of Artemis contained within the temple. Although extant only in copies made by the Romans, this statue apparently did not resemble most Greek statuary. (The original, reportedly, was made from ebony, gold, silver, and stone.) Instead, she stands upright, stiffly, almost like a mummy, with both arms outstretched, palms upward.
Both this Artemis and the standard Greek depictions associate Artemis with fertility. In fact, the statue in the Temple of Artemis wore a lower garment decorated with bees and animals. The upper half of her body, however, had more than a dozen breasts, usually interpreted as a sign of fertility. (Although maybe not. Some experts dispute that the torso’s bulbous coverings are breasts. They may be eggs or bull testicles. Experts also associate these with fertility, however, as they do the grain measure worn on Artemis’s head.)
In any event, it seems unusual that a famous temple, designed in classic Greek style, would house a statue so stylistically rare in Greek art. The answer may be that the site of the Temple of Artemis was already dedicated to a fertility goddess at the time Ephesus adopted Artemis as its patron deity. The new image inherited some characteristics of the old one.
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Who Destroyed the Temple of Artemis?
The most common belief is that Gothic invaders destroyed this magnificent structure in 262 or 268. By that time, the city lacked the resources to rebuild. Other accounts believe that the temple came down after Christianity became the sole accepted religion of the Roman Empire during the reign of Theodosius the Great. The individual most associated with the destruction of the Temple of Artemis in this account is John Chrysostrum (“the Golden Mouthed”), who was Patriarch of Constantinople from 397 to 403.
In any case, one thing I find very interesting about the Temple of Artemis is how the Lydians acquired the wealth to start work as early as 550 BCE. This is prior to the Classical Age of Greece. Yet, even at that early date, the wealth of some of these Greek cities must have been immense—immense enough to build a temple sixty feet tall and as large as a modern football field from beautiful marble. We like to think of these people as ancient. They were—chronologically. But when it came to artistic talent, imagination, and technical skill, the reputation of their achievements have stood the test of time.
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