Ephesus (Ἔφεσος) -- by Selçuk, in Turkey -- on the western coast of Asia Minor, housed one of the seven wonders of the world: The Artemision or temple of Artemis and its statue.
Located at a great harbor on the eastern side of the Aegean Sea, the building of this coastal region into a city is credited to Androclus, legitimate son of the legendary Athenian king Codrus. Its position as a gateway between Asia and the Mediterranean world led to its great prosperity and importance.
Greek travel writer Pausanias, who lived in the second century A.D., described the founding, according to the 1918 Loeb translation, by W. H. S. Jones:
"[7.2.8] The inhabitants of the land were partly Leleges, a branch of the Carians, but the greater number were Lydians. In addition there were others who dwelt around the sanctuary for the sake of its protection, and these included some women of the race of the Amazons.
But Androclus the son of Codrus (for he it was who was appointed king of the Ionians who sailed against Ephesus) expelled from the land the Leleges and Lydians who occupied the upper city. Those, however, who dwelt around the sanctuary had nothing to fear; they exchanged oaths of friendship with the Ionians and escaped warfare. Androclus also took Samos from the Samians, and for a time the Ephesians held Samos and the adjacent islands.
[7.2.9] But after that the Samians had returned to their own land, Androclus helped the people of Priene against the Carians. The Greek army was victorious, but Androclus was killed in the battle. The Ephesians carried off his body and buried it in their own land, at the spot where his tomb is pointed out at the present day, on the road leading from the sanctuary past the Olympieum to the Magnesian gate. On the tomb is a statue of an armed man."
Pausanias 7
The Augustan Age geographer Strabo, an Asiatic Greek, writes:
"Pherecydes says that the leader of the Ionian, which was posterior to the Aeolian migration, was Androclus, a legitimate son of Codrus king of the Athenians, and that he was the founder of Ephesus, hence it was that it became the seat of the royal palace of the Ionian princes. Even at present the descendants of that race are called kings, and receive certain honours, as the chief seat at the public games, a purple robe as a symbol of royal descent, a staff instead of a sceptre, and the superintendence of the sacrifices in honour of the Eleusinian Ceres."
A very different origin story is told in the Deipnosophists, by Athenaeus. Athenaeus flourished around the time of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. He is known as a Greek rhetorician and grammarian. Lacus Curtius has the Loeb Deipnosophists translation. Explaining the content of the document, its title can be translated as "Scholars at the Dinner Table".
"And Malacus, in his Annals of the Siphnians, relates that some slaves of the Samians colonized Ephesus, being a thousand men in number; who in the first instance revolted against their masters, and fled to the mountain which is in the island, and from thence did great injury to the Samians. But, in the sixth year after these occurrences, the Samians, by the advice of an oracle, made a treaty with the slaves, on certain agreements; and the slaves were allowed to depart uninjured from the island and, sailing away, they occupied Ephesus, and the Ephesians are descended from these ancestors.
References
- Discoveries at Ephesus: including the site and remains of the great temple of Diana
John Turtle Wood
(1877) - "Ephesus, Its Artemision, Its Temple to the Flavian Emperors, and Idolatry in Revelation"
Giancarlo Biguzzi
Novum Testamentum (1998) - The Cults of the Greek States By Lewis Richard Farnell (2010)
- "The Early Ionian League"
Carl Roebuck
Classical Philology, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Jan., 1955), pp. 26-40>
Next: Ephesus Through History
1. The Founding of Ephesus
2. Ephesus Through History
3. The Cult of Artemis of Ephesus
4. The Theater at Ephesus
Photo: As you can see in this picture of the ruins of the marble Artemision, the temple of Artemis has been destroyed and part of its original area is now marshland -- selected originally as proof against earthquake, according to Pliny xxxvi.21.
