History
Ephesus enters history in the mid-7th century bc, when it was attacked by the Cimmerians. Unlike its neighbour, Magnesia, it survived the attacks. For part of the early 6th century the city was under tyrants. Though allied by marriage to the kings of Lydia, its people could not hold back the Lydian Croesus, who asserted a general suzerainty over the city. He did, however, present many columns and some golden cows for a new and splendid rebuilding of the Artemiseum (Temple of Artemis). At this time, according to Strabo, the Ephesians began to live in the plain; and to this period, too, should be allotted the redrafting of the laws, said to have been the work of an Athenian, Aristarchus. Ephesus soon submitted to Cyrus of Persia. Early in the Ionian revolt (499–493 bc) against the Persians, Ephesus served as a base for an Ionian attack on Sardis; but it is not mentioned again until 494, when the Ephesians massacred the Chiot survivors of the Battle of Lade. The massacre may have occurred because Ephesus was a commercial rival of the chief rebels, Chios and Miletus. Ephesus maintained friendly relations with Persia for about 50 years: in 478 Xerxes, returning from his failure in Greece, honoured Artemis of Ephesus, although he sacked other Ionian shrines, and left his children for safety in Ephesus; and Themistocles landed there in the 460s on his flight to Persia. But after 454 Ephesus appears as a regular tributary of Athens. Great Ephesians up to this time had been Callinus, the earliest Greek elegist (mid-7th century bc), the satirist Hipponax, and the famous philosopher Heracleitus, one of the Basilids.
Ephesus shared in a general revolt of 412 bc against Athens, siding with Sparta in the Second Peloponnesian War, and remained an effective ally of Sparta down to the end of the war. Threatened by Persia after 403, Ephesus served in 396 as the headquarters of King Agesilaus of Sparta. In 394 the Ephesians deserted to Conon’s anti-Spartan maritime league, but by 387 the city was again in Spartan hands and was handed by Antalcidas to Persia. There followed the pro-Persian tyranny of Syrphax and his family, who were stoned to death in 333 on Alexander the Great’s taking the city. After 50 years of fluctuating fortune, Ephesus was conquered by the Macedonian general Lysimachus and resettled around Coressus and Pion (286–281 bc). Lysimachus introduced colonists from Lebedus and Colophon and renamed the city after his wife, Arsinoo—a name soon dropped. This was the beginning of Ephesus’ Hellenistic prosperity. It became conspicuous for the abundance of its coinage.
After the defeat of Antiochus the Great, king of Syria, by the Romans in 189 bc, Ephesus was handed over by the conquerors to the king of Pergamum. Attalus III of Pergamum bequeathed Ephesus with the rest of his possessions to the Roman people (133 bc). Thenceforth, Ephesus remained subject to Rome, except for a brief time beginning in 88 bc, when, at the instigation of Mithradates the Great of Pontus, the cities of Asia Minor revolted and killed their Roman residents. The Ephesians even killed those Romans who had fled for refuge to the Artemiseum; notwithstanding which they returned in 86 bc to their former masters. Their claim, preserved on an extant inscription, that in admitting Mithradates they had merely yielded to superior force was rudely brushed aside by Sulla, who inflicted a very heavy fine. Although it twice chose the losing side in the Roman civil wars and although it was stoutly opposed by Pergamum and Smyrna, Ephesus became under Augustus the first city of the Roman province of Asia. The geographer Strabo wrote of its importance as a commercial centre in the 1st century bc. The triumphal arch of 3 bc and the aqueduct of ad 4–14 initiated that long series of public buildings, ornamental and useful, that make Ephesus the most impressive example in Greek lands of a city of imperial times.
Meanwhile the Christian Church began to win converts. A famous protest in the theatre against the teachings of St. Paul, described in Acts 19, is dated about ad 57. According to local belief Ephesus was the last home of the Virgin, who was lodged near the city by St. John and died there. The tradition that St. Luke also died there seems to be less strongly supported. Ephesus was one of the seven churches of Asia to which the Revelation to John was addressed.
The Goths destroyed both city and temple in ad 262, and neither ever recovered its former splendour. The emperor Constantine, however, erected a new public bath, and Arcadius rebuilt at a higher level the street from the theatre to the harbour, named after him, the Arkadiane. A general council of the church, held at Ephesus in 431 in the great double church of St. Mary, condemned Nestorius and justified the cult of the Virgin as Theotokos (Mother of God). A few years later, according to legend, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (a group of 3rd-century Christian martyrs) were miraculously raised from the dead. They too became the object of a famous cult. The emperor Justinian built the magnificent basilica of St. John in the 6th century. By the early Middle Ages, the city was no longer useful as a port and fell into decline; late Byzantine Ephesus, conquered by the Seljuqs in 1090, was merely a small town. After brief splendour in the 14th century, even this was deserted, and the true site of the Artemiseum remained unsuspected until 1869.