You likely already know Artemis as the goddess of the hunt. She lives by a babbling brooke with her animal creatures, often depicted with her bow drawn, an arrow ready to fly. She shows no mercy to men who trespass in her wood.
The Temple of Artemis was destroyed three times in its thousand year history and each time built grander. While we know far more about the last and most impressive temple, much is left to be desired about the first.
The First Temple
The Greek poet Callimachus suggests that the Amazons, an all-female tribe of warrors, built the first temple and dedicated in to Artemis, their patron goddess. Far more likely it was a pre-Hellenistic culture that called Artemis by another name—Cybele.
Cybele was a wild and wonderful creature. An earthy mother goddess to the Anatolians and perhaps more akin to Gaia (mother nature), she nevertheless came to be associated with Artemis when Alexander the Great spread Greek culture and infulence. But when archaeologists unearthed the statue of Artemis that once stood proudly in the temple, they found an animalistic deity. One with copious breasts that represent her fertility, or a necklace of severed testes taken as war prizes (you get to decide). Experts aren’t sure, but I for one get a hoot out of the latter explanation.
The end of the bronze age was marked by a series of cataclysms. Troy burned and the Sea People invaded Egypt. The Temple of Artemis stood. But even it could not withstand the damage of time. By the seventh century BCE, a series of devastating floods had ravaged the temple, leaving only its clay foundation under a swamp of reeds. Around the year 550 BCE, the Ephesians were beginning to rebuild on a much grander scale, raising the temple out of the muck.
The Second Temple
A scream ripped from Olympias’s throat as she pushed against the contractions that rippled across her belly. A midwife pressed a damp cloth to her brow, imploring her to grit her teeth through the pain. While the Queen of Macedonia laboured to bring her first child into the world, high up onMount Olympus, the gods leaned on the edges of their seats. Even Artemis put in an appearance. In a shower of moonlight, she appeared. She slung her bow over her shoulder and gave the wolf pup at her heel a tousle behind its ears before taking a seat next to her twin, Apollo.
Far away from the queen’s birthing chamber, a man named Herostratus approached the Temple of Artemis with a wicked gleam in his eye and a torch in hand. The priests were all asleep on lumpy pallets. Nevertheless, Herostatus padded silently up the sweeping marble steps that hugged the forest of ionic columns so he would not be seen. He clambered up the scaffolding to the roof. Shale tiles supported by a timber structure—the walls would not support a stone roof, and it would be another 1500 years until mankind invented flying buttresses to brace their walls against the load of a stone vault.
Once he was in the rafters, Herostratus gathered a pile of loose straw in a heap and touched his torch to the dry kindling. A blaze leaped to life. The flames licked at the cedar framework. Herostratus grinned at his handiwork before descending the ladder and running swiftly off into the night. The priests woke to the acrid smell of smoke and a fiery orange glow spreading quickly across the rafters. But it was too late to halt the destruction. the second temple burned to the ground. Herostratus hoped his name and his deed would be remembered forever, but both were banned from being spoken upon pain of death.
Surely a petty criminal like Herostratus couldn’t hide from the goddess’s wrath, so why didn’t Artemis stop him? Well, she was presiding at Olympias’s bedside. While nursemaids fussed and cooed over the tiny pink-faced princeling, washed him, bundled him in linen and handed him back to his mother, Artemis watched. The ancients assumed that she turned a blind eye to the destruction of her temple because the prince born that night grew up to be Alexander the Great.
Right: statue of the goddess of the hunt, Artemis. (Personal photo)
The Third Temple
When the grown Alexander conquered Anatolia and rode into Ephesus, he was already aware of the tale of his birth. Perhaps he felt guilty, because he offered to pay for a new temple. The Ephesians refused, but when he moved on, they rebuilt it anyway in his honour. And it’s only fitting that this third temple, built on the auspices of Alexander’s arrival, was the backdrop to another event involving a royal that shook the foundations of the Hellenistic world.
For many years Cleopatra’s younger sister—Arsinoe—lived at the temple as a political prisoner. The teenage princess got herself into hot water when she challenged her elder, more famous sister for the throne of Egypt, growing so bold as to lead an army against the queen. She even gave Julius Caesar a run for his money. For a brief moment, it looked like history could have been recorded quite differently. Unfortunately, Arsinoe was no match for the Roman legions. She was captured and transported to Rome where she was forced to appear in Caesar’s triumph parade, stumbling along behind his chariot in chains, sweat blinding her. Custom dictated that prominent prisoners be strangled at the end of the parade. But the crowd was moved by the sight of Arsinoe holding her head high, and so begged for her to be pardoned.
His hands tied, Caesar sent Arsinoe to Ephesus so she’d be out of the way. She claimed sanctuary at the Temple of Artemis once she was there. But when Caesar died on the Ides of March, Cleopatra turned to another up-and-coming Roman politician to do her dirty work.
On her orders, Mark Antony dragged Arsinoe, kicking and screaming, from her sanctuary, and murdered her on the temple steps. Her death sparked a furor. It was unheard of for anyone to interfere in Artemis’s jurisdiction, and no one dared cross the goddess again.
You can probably guess what happened next. The Roman Empire expanded and engulfed Anatolia. The Romans took their cues from the Greeks and worshipped the same pantheon of gods. Artemis was renamed Diana and her cult flourished. But at the sunset of the Roman Empire, a new religion had taken hold. The Apostle Paul began attacking the cult of Artemis, winning himself many Christian converts. After all, the Artemis worshipped in Ephesus was modelled on the far wilder, more animalistic cult of Cybele.
In the third century, a Christian mob tore down the temple. When the Roman Empire fell to the Ostrogoths, the pillaging continued. Weeds reclaimed the soggy ground on which the temple had been built, leaving behind only the foundation and a single ionic column where there had once been a forest of over a hundred towering marble plinths. The cult of Artemis was well and truly dead, and this time, the people of Ephesus did not mourn her.
