Almost nothing remains of the Artemision at Ephesos, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. This monumental temple was an expression of the awesome power attributed to the goddess, the patroness of the city. The plan consisted of an unroofed central court surrounded by an outer phalanx of over a hundred columns, each nearly sixty feet tall. Thirty-six of the columns in the front had bases carved with relief sculptures, a feature inherited from Hittite palace architecture, so that entering the temple was like walking through a gallery of gods and heroes. At the heart of the temple was the famous cult image, mysteriously un-Hellenic in appearance. When Paul of Tarsos (Acts 18:19-20:1) visited Ephesos as a missionary in the first century, he found a thriving city that owed much of its prosperity to the popular cult of Artemis.
The Greek settlers who reached the Anatolian coast about 1000 encountered the deities of the indigenous peoples. Most prominent among these was a mother goddess who held a dominant position in the pantheons of this region. She was worshiped under many local names and in many variations, but is best known as Kybele or the Great Goddess. The Greeks chose to recognize their own Artemis in this foreign deity, in spite of the fact that Artemis was emphatically a virgin, not a mother. Yet like her Anatolian counterpart, Artemis was a mountain-roving goddess and a Mistress of Animals.
It is likely that the Greeks found a pre-existing cult at the site of the later Artemision, for legends attributed the founding of the cult to the native Amazons. According to Callimachus (Hymn 3.237-42), the women warriors set up the goddess’ statue beneath an oak tree and danced around it in their armor. Both Artemis’ early epithet Oupis/Opis and the name Ephesos itself seem to be etymological descendants of the Hittite town Apasa, which occupied the site in the Bronze Age. While there are Mycenaean and ProtoGeometric potsherds at the site, the earliest archaeological remains securely attributed to the cult are those of a hundred-foot eighth-century temple (hekatompedon) with a surrounding colonnade. Following the local practice, the entrance faced west rather than east. By the next century, there was a large altar opposite the entrance with a special base for the cult image; presumably it was brought out of the temple to witness sacrifices at close quarters. Beside the altar was a sacred spring, perhaps the focus of the earliest cult, and the entire site was marshy and wet.
The evidence suggests that a statue of the goddess was an important element of the worship from at least the seventh century onward. We know little about the earliest cult image, but a new statue seems to have been commissioned with the construction of the massive Archaic temple in the sixth century. Literary sources tell us that the sculptor Endoios, who made several other famous cult statues, created the Artemis. It was similar in appearance to the Archaic Hera of Samos: a rigidly frontal standing figure with legs together, swathed in a tight garment. The arms were bent at the elbows and held forward, and the goddess wore a high crown called a polos. This basic wooden image, probably smaller than life-size, was adorned with a variety of objects: from her hands hung long knotted ribbons, she was draped with cloth garments including a veil, and she wore fine necklaces. Eventually, she was given an elaborate chest ornament, a feature characteristic of Anatolian cult images. Covered with globe-like objects, this pectoral was later misunderstood by both ancients and moderns, who thought that the goddess was many-breasted. Votive reliefs depicting the Zeus of Labraunda with a similar pectoral falsify the breast theory, though it was a favorite of early Christian authors, and a few ancient copies of the Ephesian statue actually have nipples, suggesting that the globes seemed breastlike to some pagan worshipers.22 A recent hypothesis holds that the globe-like objects were scrotal sacs from sacrificed bulls, symbols of fertility. More likely suggestions are that they represent the large, globular dates harvested from the date palm under which Artemis was born in Ephesian Ortygia, according to local legend, or that they can be traced back to a leather bag considered a divine attribute in Hittite religion. It is unclear whether the pectoral was added in the Hellenistic period or had Archaic origins. The panels of Artemis’ skirt were covered with a profusion of small relief images. These were a development of early modes of ornamentation for cult statues, in both the Near East and Greece, which involved fixing hammered plates of gold to the statues.23
Figure 8.2 Artemis Ephesia. Roman alabaster and bronze copy of cult statue, original c. 500. Ht 2.03 m. Naples, Museo Nazionale. Alinari/Art Resource.
Beneath the Archaic temple, the original excavators found a collection of valuable objects including ninety-three Lydian coins (the earliest known coinage) and intricately crafted items of gold, ivory, terracotta, and bronze. More recent investigations revealed a cache of jewelry contemporary with the Geometric temple, including many amber beads that may have been used to adorn the cult statue. The Archaic stone temple was constructed with help from the Lydian monarch Kroisos, who had his name inscribed on one of the column drums. It endured until the fourth century, when it was consumed in a fire set by a madman. The Ephesians, men and women, gave their own jewelry toward its restoration, which took more than a century.24
The archaeological remains from the sanctuary include large numbers of animal bones, primarily those of sheep and goats, but cattle, pigs, and a wide variety of wild animals are also attested. Slightly fewer than one hundred deer bones were found around the hekatompedon in the same areas as the ovicaprid bones; this suggests that they were sacrificed. Other bones of wild animals, such as bear teeth, may have been brought to the sanctuary as offerings. A “horn altar” composed of goat horns within a stone casing recalls similar Apolline altars on Delos and at Dreros in Krete.25
We know surprisingly little about the rituals conducted for Artemis at Ephesos in the Archaic and Classical periods; we can only make guesses based on later evidence. A first-century inscription describes a sacred procession including a singer and several individuals specially chosen to carry salt, wild celery, a garment or cloth, and the kosmos, or accessories, of the goddess. A late lexicographer provides context for this inscription, telling of a ritual in which the cult image is brought down to the sea, laid on a bed of wild celery, and given a meal of salt.26 According to the temple legend, Klymene, the daughter of the king, once treated the goddess to this meal as a game, and she responded by demanding an annual reenactment of the ritual. Such rites focused on the dressing and feeding of cult images are not unknown in Greece, but are more often attested in Near Eastern and Egyptian sources.
A typically Anatolian feature of the Artemision, perhaps borrowed from the cult of the Great Mother, was the eunuch priest called the Megabyzos, a word of Persian origin. The Athenian mercenary Xenophon (An. 5.3.6) speaks of his dealings with one of these priests, with whom he deposited money for safekeeping. The Megabyzoi were held in great honor among the Ephesians, though they faded away during the Hellenistic period.27 Like many other ancient sanctuaries, the Artemision was a place of asylum for fugitives and suppliants of all kinds. The inviolate aura of the sanctuary was so strong that according to legend, when the Ephesians came under attack by Kroisos, they stretched ropes about a mile from the gates of their city to the columns of the temple. By remaining in physical contact with the sanctuary, they attempted to extend its protection to the city itself.28
Ephesian Artemis, unlike her mainland counterparts, was a city goddess concerned primarily with the prosperity and safety of the Ephesians, yet her great fame encouraged the spread of her cult. When sending a colony to Massilia (Marseilles) around 600, the people of Ionian Phokaia were instructed by an oracle to bring with them a guide from Ephesos and a copy of the cult image. Meanwhile, an Ephesian woman named Aristarche dreamed that the goddess stood beside her and commanded her to go with the Phokaians. Strabo (4.1.4) tells how she became the first priestess of the goddess at Massilia, where a temple was constructed and the rituals performed at Ephesos were preserved unchanged. Another example shows how the cult could be spread through private devotion. After visiting the Artemision, Xenophon (An. 5.3.4-13) decided to build a miniature copy of the temple for the goddess on his land in Skillous near Olympia. Within it he placed a cypresswood copy of the cult image, and every year he held a banquet in honor of Ephesian Artemis for the people living in the district.
World History
