Ephesus: Where Rome Met the East
Ephesus was the most important city in the Roman province of Asia — which meant it was one of the most important cities in the world. At its imperial peak in the second century AD, its population may have reached 200,000 to 500,000 people, making it one of the three or four largest urban centers in the Roman Empire after Rome itself and Alexandria. It sat at the western terminus of the major trade routes from the Anatolian interior and the eastern Mediterranean, on a harbor that connected it to the Aegean sea lanes, and it possessed in the Temple of Artemis one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. What the site preserves today — the most extensively excavated and partially reconstructed ancient city in the world — is an archaeological window into Roman urban life of a quality available nowhere else.
The city’s origins were Greek, established in the tenth or eleventh century BC by Ionian settlers on the Aegean coast of Anatolia. It passed through Lydian, Persian, Macedonian, and Pergamene control before becoming Roman in 133 BC when the kingdom of Pergamon was bequeathed to Rome by its last king. Roman Ephesus was extensively rebuilt, particularly during the reign of Augustus and his successors, transforming what had been a Hellenistic city into the monumental urban form visible in the ruins today. The library of Celsus, the great theater capable of holding 25,000 people, the agora and commercial markets, the terrace houses of the wealthy with their mosaic floors and frescoed walls — all of this represents the Roman investment in a city that was the administrative, commercial, and cultural capital of one of Rome’s wealthiest provinces.
The harbor determined the city’s prosperity and eventually its decline. Ancient harbors silted up without constant dredging, and Ephesus’s harbor was particularly susceptible to the sediment load of the Kaystros River. The Romans dredged periodically and built infrastructure to manage the problem, but the long-term trend was against them: the harbor shallowed progressively through the imperial period, and by late antiquity the city had effectively lost its sea access. The population declined, the commercial wealth evaporated, and by the Byzantine period Ephesus was a secondary town rather than a major urban center. The ruins that survive are largely from the high imperial period, frozen in the silted landscape like the harbor that killed the city.
The Temple of Artemis — the Artemision — stood several kilometers from the main city center on a site that had been sacred for centuries before the Greek settlers arrived. The version of the temple that existed in the Roman period was the fourth or fifth reconstruction on the site, the result of a rebuilding after the original was burned in 356 BC — on the night of Alexander the Great’s birth, according to an ancient source who clearly found the coincidence significant. The Roman-period temple was 137 meters long and 69 meters wide, with 127 columns eighteen meters high. Pliny the Elder called it the most beautiful building ever constructed. It was demolished for building material in late antiquity, and what remains today is a single reconstructed column standing in a marshy field, surrounded by the scattered fragments of one of antiquity’s greatest structures.
Paul of Tarsus spent two or three years in Ephesus in the 50s AD, and the city appears in Acts of the Apostles as the site of one of the early church’s more dramatic confrontations with established commerce: a riot by silversmiths who sold images of Artemis and whose trade was threatened by Paul’s preaching against idol worship. The story is plausible in its economic logic — Ephesus’s religious tourism was a significant industry — and it illustrates the intersection of commerce, religion, and civic identity that characterized major Hellenistic and Roman cities. The theater in which the riot is set is visible today; its dimensions suggest the crowd scenes described in Acts are not particularly exaggerated.
The Council of Ephesus in 431 AD — one of the major councils that defined Christian orthodoxy — was held in the city because of its continuing metropolitan significance even in a period of demographic and commercial decline. The council’s decision that Mary could be properly called Theotokos — bearer of God — was partly influenced by the city’s tradition of female divine power, since Ephesus had been the site of Artemis’s greatest sanctuary and the population had a long relationship with a powerful goddess. Whether this local religious culture influenced the theological outcome is a matter historians debate without resolution, but the location was not chosen arbitrarily.
What makes Ephesus exceptional as an archaeological site is precisely its silted fate. Cities that continued to be inhabited — Rome, Constantinople, Athens — were built over, torn down, and rebuilt across centuries in ways that destroyed much of the ancient fabric. Ephesus was substantially abandoned while still substantially intact, and the sediment that killed the city preserved it. The excavations, conducted primarily by Austrian archaeologists since the nineteenth century, have revealed not just the public monuments but the private spaces — the terrace houses, with their household equipment and decorative programs — that give the city a human texture beyond the institutional. Walking the marble streets of Ephesus, it is possible to feel the weight of a city that once moved two hundred thousand people through its spaces, which is an experience the ruins of Rome, overwritten by fifteen centuries of subsequent construction, can no longer provide with the same immediacy.