WOOD'S DISCOVERIES AT EPHESUS.* EPHESUS is in many ways a

name of note in the history of the world. It has an interest not only for scholars ; every one, we suppose, has pictured to himself the scene of tumult and uproar which the city of the great goddess Diana presented when one Paul dared to proclaim, in that stronghold of Paganism, that "they be no gods which are made with hands." And every one, too, has doubtless had his sense of humour tickled by the saga- cious, though rather worldly advice of the town-clerk, whose prompt adroitness got the excited citizens out of what threatened to be a serious scrape with the Roman authorities. It was, so Christian tradition assures us, the last home and resting-place of St. John, the Apostle, who may be almost said to have suryjsed the apostolic age. From having long been the heart and °entre of one of the leading heathen worships, it passed into a vigorous Christian community, and was numbered with the Seven Churches of Asia. It fell a prey to the Goths in A.D. 262, and from that time up to the recent researches of the author of the volume

• Simoreries at Ephesus, including the Site and Remains of the Great Temple of Diana By J. T. Wood, F.S.A. London: Longmans and Co. before us, the remains of its once famous and magnificent temple have been hidden from the world. But its existence and even, importance were by no means extinguished by this calamity. It witnessed, in the fifth century, two remarkable and very stormy ecclesiastical Councils, which fought, physically, it is said, not merely spiritually, over some obscure questions of theological metaphysics- There are those. perhaps, to whom this is the most attractive period of Ephesian history. However, general opinion will account the palmy days of Ephesus to have been its Macedonian and Roman eras. In the first of these it became, in the hands of Lysimachua, one of Alexander's famous Generals, a thriving commercial city. In the latter, it was, in fact, the metropolis of the Roman province of Asia, and was adorned by Augustus with a number of public buildings, among which tbe.the theatre was the most conspicuous.. It was in this building, capable, Mr. Wood thinks, of containing 24,500 spectators, that the mob which Demetrius and his crafts- men had lashed into fury shouted for two hours, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" The Romans, it would seem, destroyed most of the old Greek structures, utilising, however, in some cases,. their foundations. At any rate, according to Mr. Wood, com- paratively little Greek masonry could be traced in the excavations.. Still the city was always treated with marked respect by its con- querors; its temple and its worship found special favour, So much so, indeed, that when in the reign of Tiberius an attempt was made, in the cause of law and order, to get rid of those rights of sanctuary under which rogues and criminals of all sorts took refuge, a deputation from Ephesus was allowed to plead before the Senate for what had been an immemorial privilege of not merely the temple itself, but of a considerable space around it. We may probably take it for granted that after the capture of the city by the Goths, portions of the temple ruins were carried away for the adornment of the churches of Constantinople, and it has been conjectured that the green jasper columns of St. Sophia may have once supported the great heathen structure which was accounted one of the seven wonders of the world. At present, under Moslem rule, the grandeur of the past has. dwindled down into a shabby little village known as Ayasalouk, which, however still contains the remains of a great but roofless mosque. The plain of the Cayster, it appears, is now dan- gerously unhealthy and haunted by malaria fever. The site of Ephesus is thus by no means an eligible place of residence. It is, however, beautiful and picturesque, and during a sojourn of eleven years Mr. Wood tells us that he never once became weary of its mountain scenery, the loveliness of which quite reconciled him to the dreariness and desolation of the spot.

It was in the May of 1863 that, with the countenance of the Trustees of the British Museum, and what was even still more important, the authority of a firman from the Turkish Govern- ment, that he set about his arduous and somewhat unpromising work, his tentative excavations, as he calls them. If he had not had the genius and ardour of a true explorer, he never would have stuck to his diggings as manfully as he did, under the un- favourable conditions with which he was surrounded. At first he lived in a village near Smyrna, and had to go thence by a tedious railway-train to Ayasalouk, returning the same day, and travelling about 100 miles. After a while he got possession of a room in a rickety tenement in Ayasalouk, which at last totally collapsed, but luckily not before he had been able to quarter him- self in a little chalet among the neighbouring mountains. He could not, as may be imagined, pursue his work without diffi- culties and even dangers. He had to deal with lazy, squabbling workmen of different nationalities, with provoking and unreason- able landowners and farmers, who wanted to be paid exorbitantly for the tentative holes he made on their properties, and with Turkish officials. Now and then, however, he seems to have had a really useful and intelligent man in his service, as on one oc- casion his ganger contrived to satisfy a troublesome farmer, who. asked whether many more ugly holes were to be cut on his land, by the ingenious, if not truthful, answer that his master, having paid a large sum of money to the Government for the privilege of. digging on the spot, had a stronger right than the occupier, who had paid only a few piastres for the right of occupation. In the beginning of 1864, the Turkish authorities put a stop for a time to Mr. Wood's excavations. There appears to be in these parts a widely-spread craze on the subject of treasure-trove, and there really is, Mr. Wood says, reason to believe that there is a deal of hidden treasure in Asia Minor. A Greek merchant had dreamt a dream, and a Turkish official believed it, and in his eagerness to possess himself of sudden wealth, he persuaded the Pasha of Smyrna to interfere with Mr. Wood's researches. It is satisfactory to find that the man was disappointed, but Mr. Wood, though

allowed to resume his work, had been put to expense which, it is almost needless to say, the Pasha did not make good. Of Turkish honesty, indeed, which we sometimes hear lauded to the skies, Mr. Wood's experience gave him a by no means favourable idea. His Turkish workmen would not only pilferanything of value found in his excavations, a perhaps comparatively venial offence, but would practise heartless robberies on their fello w- workmen. The class of Turks for whom he can say the best word are the porters. Their merit, as porters, can hardly be exaggerated, if we are to believe that many of them carry habitually from four hundred to six hundred pounds' weight on their backs. Bat even this valuable speciality can hardly be considered to make up for the Turk's many vexatious shortcomings, which sadly try the patience of any one who has been accustomed to a moderate degree of civilisation.

Mr. Wood's search for the site of the Temple was long and laborious, and it was only in the spring of 1869 that he was at last succesful. He had, indeed, a clue, but it was not a very simple one. It should be understood that the temple was some -distance from the city. Its position is somewhat vaguely indicated by Pausanias and Philostmtus. The first, writing in the second -century A.D., speaks of the tomb of Androclus, the Ionian founder of Ephesus, "as situated on the road leading from the Temple past the Olympium and the Magnesian Gate." The latter, whose lives of the Sophists was probably published in the third century A.D., says that a rich Roman, Damianus, of the time of Marcus Aurelius, " joined the temple to the city by a covered portico or colonnade, stretching along the road which descends through the Magnesian Gate." Again, in a long inscription found in the great theatre, mention is made of the procession of images from the temple to the theatre, as passing in through the Mag- nesian gate. This gate, from which a road led towards the city Magnesia, on the Mmander, south of Ephesus, was discovered and opened up by Mr. Wood in the latter part of the year 1867. His next step was to endeavour to find traces of the tomb of Androclus and of the portico of Damianus, and this done, he would know that he must be on the right track. But this was not easy. At about 140 feet from the Magnesian Gate, the road just mentioned parted into two ways, one of which led to Magnesia and gave the gate its name, while the other wound round Mount Coressus in the direction of Ayasalouk. This latter was 35 feet in width, and was deeply worn into four well-marked ruts. This looked promising, and at about 500 yards from the gate were found on this same road the stone piers of a portico which it seemed reasonable to believe must have belonged to the work of Damianus. In the February of 1869, Mr. Wood came upon the sepulchre of Androclus, distant about half a mile from the gate, and in the following April, by which time he had received a further advance of £200 from the Trustees of the British Museum, he was fortunate enough to hit on an angle of the peri- bolos or enclosure-wall of the temple. Here were two large stones, with inscriptions in Greek and Latin, recording that the wall was built by order of Augustus, in the twelth year of his consulate, or B.C. 6, and that it was to be paid for and maintained out of the revenues of the Artemisium and Augusteum, temples, that is, of Artemis and Augustus. The contractor, it seems, bad stamped his work, as Mr. Wood says that it was a disgraceful piece of building, which, but for the inscriptions, he could not have believed was executed in the time of Augustus. On the last day of 1869 was found, at a depth of twenty feet below the surface, a thick pavement of white marble of Greek workmanship, and belonging, it would seem, to the most ancient of the three temples which rose suc- cessively in Diana's honour on the same site. Dr. Scbliemann, who had now come to see the excavations, was, Mr. Wood tells us, very enthusiastic when he set his foot on the veritable pave- ment of the famous temple. Colouring, it is certain, was used to add to its splendour, as fragments of cornices were found with -clear traces of blue, vermilion, and gold. The bases of the -columns, too, seem to have had a red tint spread over them, as was observed on the first column discovered in its original position in the February of 1871. Its base is now to be seen, with other remains of the temple, in the British Museum, and from it one can get some notion of the massiveness of the structure. It is worth noticing, by way of confirmation of the genuineness of these discoveries, that Mr. Wood, in digging below the pavement, came on a layer of charcoal, and that Pliny speaks of the foundation of the first temple having been built on such a layer, as being impenetrable to the damp which would rise from the marshy site on which, with a view of safety from earthquakes, it is said, the great edifice was built.

In 1871 the site was purchased for £160, and soon afterwards some treasure was really discovered, in the shape of 2,000 mediaeval coins, which were at once forwarded to the British Museum. For a time Mr. Wood's work was stopped by heavy autumnal

rains. Next year he had the luck to be helped with a

grant of no less than £6,000, which Mr. Lowe, much to his credit, contrived to get voted by the House of Commons. We must say that it had been fairly earned by Mr. Wood's indefatigable labours, and fully justified by the success already attained. He was now able to bring to light

portions of the frieze and fragments of sculptured drums of columns—columnae caelatae, as the Romans called them—

and to send off a valuable cargo in the Swiftaure,' to be stored in the British Museum. The temple, so it clearly ap- peared from some of its discovered remains, in its original state

glittered with gold, the use of which is noticed by Pliny in refer- ence to a delubrum, or small temple, at Cyzicus, in which he says

there was a thread (fi/um) of gold in every joint of the marble.

We may conclude that the ornamentation of the temple generally was rather suited to the Oriental than to the simpler and severer Greek taste. Ephesus, it must be borne in mind, was an Asiatic as well as a Greek city, and two somewhat diverse types of civilisa- tion were there fused together. The goddess herself was hardly the huntress-queen of virgin purity such as Greek imagination pictured to itself ; she, too, was rather of an Oriental character, and her image, with its many breasts, instead of answering to the Greek Artemis, symbolised the fertility of nature. It is certain that there was a richness and profuseness about the sculptures of the temple, the sculptural columns especially, which did not properly belong to Hellenic art. Some of the fragments of the

frieze may, in Mr. Newton's opiuion, be referred to the sixth century B.C., and they may possibly have been the work of

Rhoecus, a famous sculptor of Samos, the founder of a school of artists, and the architect, according to Herodotus, of a very grand temple of Hera at Samos. A bronze statue, on the altar, which the Ephesians called Night, still existing in the time of Pausanias, was commonly attributed to his workmanship. It would thus seem that the earliest temple was anterior to the time of Croesus, and we may presume that it was one of the most ancient rallying-points of the Ionians in Asia Minor, and that the city of Ephesus gradually grew up around it. What Mr.

Wood calls the second temple was this first temple en- larged and beautified, and it thenceforth took rank among the grandest specimens of Greek art, though it was still, according to Herodotus, inferior to the temple of Hera in Samoa. It was burnt down in 356 B.C., on the night on which Alexander was born, by an Ephesian citizen, Heros- trans, who frankly confessed that an ambition for immortality had prompted him to the deed. The third and last temple was raised on the old site by the offerings and contributions of the Ephesians. who seem to have been devoted heart and soul to the worship of their goddess. One can well understand the furious enthusiasm about it which St. Paul's preaching provoked. The three temples were on the same ground and of the same dimen- sions, and Mr. Wood observed that the remains of the moat ancient formed the foundations of the two last. This, he says, must be the explanation of Pliny's rather singular statement that

the temple was 220 years building. It was a vast structure, but not so large as several of our cathedrals, its length being 342 feet

and its width 164 feet. Its columns, which were 127 in number, and twenty-seven of which were said by tradition to be the gifts of kings, were, including the base, nearly fifty-six feet in height.

Of these, according to Pliny, thirty-six were sculptured (caelatae), but how far the sculpture was carried we Cannot say with certainty. A medal of Hadrian, exhibiting the front of the temple, which had eight columns, exhibits only one tier of figures.

In the course of his work, Mr. Wood discovered several in- scriptions, and these are given, both in the original and in trans-

lations, in the appendix of his splendid volume. Three from the peribolas or enclosure-wall are of the time of Augustus, and as we have had occasion to note, one expresses that the cost of the wall is to be defrayed out of the revenues of the temple of the

goddess. Several are decrees recording grants of citizenship to men who have shown good-will and devotion to the people of the city. One man obtained the privilege by import- ing a quantity of corn, which he sold under the market price. Another was an envoy from the kings Demetrius and Seleucus, and congratulated the citizens on the establish- ment of friendly relations, and on the good-will which those kings continue to bear towards the Hellenes. We get occasion- ally from these inscriptions a little light on the constitution of the city, which seems to have had both a Senate and a popular Assembly. There were also officers called ix-ear:1d, which is

anglicised into " privy counsellors." Ephesus, under the Roman dominion, was a free city, and so retained its old municipal institutions. In one of the inscriptions we have a request from the Emperor Hadrian to the magistrates and to the Council of the Ephesians that a certain person may, if nothing stands in the way, and if he appears deserving of the honour, be admitted to the Council, the expenses of the admission and election being guaranteed by the Emperor. Three are letters from Hadrian's successor, Antoninus Pius, to the people of Ephesus, and in one of them they are told that they had not accepted in a right spirit the proposals made by one Vedius Antoninus, who was sufficiently public-spirited to offer to execute some works for their benefit. The most interesting, perhaps, is one we have referred to already. A rich Roman knight, Vibius Salutarius, is thanked by the Council and public Assembly for his munificent gifts to the goddess of the city, and though the inscription is very fragmentary, there remains an enumeration of some of these gifts. It seems that they comprised a number of gold and silver images, which were to be carried in procession ; and there was also a sum of money set apart for the temple, the yearly interest of which was to be expended on the preservation of these images in a proper state. There was a bequest too for the Theologi, whoever they were, attached to the temple, and to the singers of the goddess's praises, and it would appear that Salutarius made a charge on his landed property in Asia Minor for the general honour and glory of the Ephesian tutelary divinity. Any one who tried to disturb his arrangements, which had been sanctioned by the Council and people, was to be liable to pay 25,000 denarii, or about £900, towards the adorning of the mighty goddess Artemis, and the same sum to the Imperial privy purse. It is to be noted that in these inscriptions Ephesus is spoken of as the first and greatest metropolis of Asia. The city is also designated iubaopoc, that is, temple-guardian or temple- warden, both to Artemis and to the Emperors. It thus clearly held under the Empire a specially favoured position. It was, too, a renowned place of education. Among the inscriptions from tombs is . one to Lucius Calpurnius Calpurnianus, who, it appears, was born by the river Rhine, and came to Ephesus to study philosophy, which he did for five years, and then died, at the ago of twenty. Mr. Wood has bestowed considerable pains on these inscriptions, and has done his best to make them intel- ligible, and he has fortunately had the help of several distinguished scholars. Inscriptions are generally found in a mutilated state, and they often contain obscure terms and phrases, which one can but guess at. Possibly Mr. Wood would have done better, as has been suggested, if he had had all his inscriptions edited by one scholar. He would thus have avoided the awkwardness of now and then varying the English equivalent by which some official designation, such as itpsi3gepxoc, is rendered. But as to the precise meaning of such terms, we have often no clue whatever. If these inscriptions do not give us much fresh historical light, they at least afford glimpses into some curious phases of the life and the worships of the old world. Ephesus and its antiquities are indeed a worthy subject of study, and out of his successful researches Mr. Wood has put together a volume which is not only outwardly superb, but which is also rich in interesting matter.