Ephesus (?fes??) was a wealthy harbor city on the western coast of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. Many today are familiar with the city because of a religious connection. There was a famous temple that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and the New Testament says the apostle Paul preached there. Legend attributes the city's founding to colonists from Athens. Read about the founders in:

• The Founding of Ephesus

The Changing Fate of the City

Ephesus was one of the Ionian Greek cities that came under the control of the proverbially wealthy Lydian King Croesus c. 560 B.C. It joined the Ionian League, which may have had a religious purpose originally. (Herodotus says the cities united to worship Poseidon Heliconias at the annual Panionia festival.) This league of cities joined together to resist Cyrus, the Persian king to whom Croesus, said to have misunderstood an oracle at Delphi, consequently lost Lydia and the Ionian cities. Ephesus and the Ionian League rebelled against Persian rule later [Roebuck].

The Macedonian leader Alexander the Great took the opportunity presented by Greek grievances suffered before and during the Persian Wars to claim he was trying to revenge the damage done the Greeks by the Persians. With a mixed force of Greeks and Macedonians he waged famous battles (Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela) against the Persians and their Greek mercenaries, and put their king, Darius, on the run.

Darius was killed by one of his own, rather than by the Macedonian/Greek forces, but regardless of who disposed of the ruler, Alexander took control of the Persian Empire. After Alexander's death, Ephesus fell among the areas his successors (the diadochi) disputed, with the diadoch Lysimachus (d. 281 B.C.) ruling as king, constructing Ephesus' famed city walls c. 290 B.C., and building the original theater, whose current manifestation is one of the area's landmarks even today.

In his Strategmata (Strategems), Frontinus (Roman praetor urbanus for the year A.D. 70) describes how Lysimachus used a ruse to gain access to Ephesus. This description reveals one of the sources of Ephesian wealth:

"7 When Lysimachus, king of the Macedonians, was besieging the Ephesians, these were assisted by the pirate chief Mandro, who was in the habit of bringing into Ephesus galleys laden with booty. Accordingly Lysimachus bribed Mandro to turn traitor, and attached to him a number of dauntless Macedonians to be taken into the city as captives, with hands pinioned behind their backs. These men subsequently snatched weapons from the citadel and delivered the town into the hands of Lysimachus.Frontinus Strategems Book III

After the diadochs and Seleucids, monarchs from Pergamum and Pontus took control. The king of Pergamum left his kingdom, which at this point included Ephesus, to Rome in his will. Rome didn't immediately occupy the area, which gave Mithridates of Pontus time to step in. Rome disposed of the Mithridatic problem and then took control of Ephesus. Mark Antony was stationed there before he lost the battle for control of Rome to his rival Octavian (Emperor Augustus) when he lost the Battle of Actium.

Ephesus replaced Pergamum as the capital of the Roman province of Asia. To fit such a prosperous city that became the home of the Asian proconsul, a large theater was built and expanded from the 1st century A.D. to the 4th or 5th century [Sturgeon]. The theater with a spectator capacity of 25,000, a large gymnasium with baths, and a large stadium were located near the harbor. From the theater to the harbor was a marble, colonnaded road laid out under Emperor Arcadius. In the second century, an impressive public building called the library of Celsus was built by the agora to honor a Roman proconsul of the province of Asia, named Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, by his son. It was built to hold 12,000 scrolls in addition to the sarcogphagus of Celsus. In 262, during the reign of the Emperor Gallienus, Goths sacked the city and burned the temple. When Diocletian came to power, he started the restoration process.

Ephesus became an important Christian city and remained prosperous until the 7th century. [Foss]. See Ephesus Chronology for details.

References

• _{"Archaeology and the 'Twenty Cities' of Byzantine Asia"
  Clive Foss
  American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 469-486}
• _{"Dedications of Roman Theaters" Mary C. Sturgeon
  Hesperia Supplements, Vol. 33, ????S: Essays in Honor of Sara A. Immerwahr (2004), pp. 411-429}
• _{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 Cult of Artemis and the Essenes in Syro-Palestine"
  John Kampen
  Dead Sea Discoveries, (2003)}
• _{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:The Cult of the Ephesian Artemis

1. The Founding of Ephesus
2. Ephesus Through Ancient History
3. The Cult of the Ephesian Artemis
4. Theater at Ephesus