Episode Details

Antipater of Sidon said the sun never looked on anything so grand as the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, yet today it is a single reconstructed column in a marsh near Selçuk, Turkey. The site sat on a floodplain that Greeks linked to the Amazons and that was used for worship back to the Bronze Age. A clay-floored temple from the 8th century BC was buried by a flood in the 7th, leaving an ivory griffin and drilled amber drops. Around 550 BC the Lydian king Croesus paid for the first Greek temple built entirely of marble, 115 by 46 meters, designed by Chersiphron and his son Metagenes, on foundations Pliny the Elder said were packed with charcoal and wool fleeces against earthquakes.

In 356 BC Herostratus burned it down to make his name immortal, and Ephesus banned anyone from saying his name. Plutarch joked that Artemis was busy attending the birth of Alexander the Great that night, and when Alexander later offered to pay for the rebuild, the Ephesians told him it was not fitting for one god to build a temple for another. They financed a larger third temple themselves from 323 BC, 137 by 69 meters. It survived a silversmiths' riot against the Apostle Paul and a Goth raid in 268 AD, then faded as Christian Rome withdrew support and locals burned its marble for lime. A British Museum expedition found the foundations in 1869, and in 2026 archaeologists found a Byzantine grave of premature twins in an old Roman latrine channel on the site.

• How a fire lit in a timber roof turned marble columns into crumbling lime through calcining
• The theory that temple priests welcomed the fire as a way to rebuild a sinking temple they were forbidden to move
• The Ephesian Artemis: a stiff pillar-like body, a crown shaped like city walls, and black skin
• How amber beads on the original statue were misread for centuries as the goddess's many breasts
• Why the legend of the temple's columns ending up in the Hagia Sophia is false