Temple of Artemis Burns: Ancient Wonder Destroyed

A man whose name the ancient world tried to erase succeeded in becoming immortal anyway. Herostratus, an otherwise unremarkable citizen of Ephesus, set fire to the Temple of Artemis on the night Alexander the Great was reportedly born, destroying one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World for the sole purpose of ensuring that history would remember him. The Temple of Artemis stood as the largest marble structure in the Greek world, roughly four times the size of the Parthenon in Athens. Built over 120 years and funded partly by King Croesus of Lydia, the temple featured 127 Ionic columns standing sixty feet high, elaborate sculptural friezes, and a cult statue of the goddess Artemis that drew pilgrims from across the Mediterranean. Ephesus derived enormous economic and political prestige from the sanctuary, which also functioned as a bank, a marketplace, and a place of asylum. Herostratus confessed under torture that he had no grievance with the temple or its priests. He simply wanted to be famous. The Ephesian authorities executed him and passed a decree forbidding anyone from speaking his name, a punishment the Greeks called damnatio memoriae. The historian Theopompus recorded the name anyway, and so did Valerius Maximus centuries later, ensuring that the very act of prohibition preserved what it sought to destroy. The Ephesians rebuilt the temple on an even grander scale, completing the new structure around 323 BC. This second temple endured for nearly six hundred years before the Goths damaged it in 262 AD and early Christians eventually dismantled what remained. Archaeological excavations in the nineteenth century uncovered fragments of both versions, now housed in the British Museum. The paradox Herostratus created has never been resolved: punishing attention-seekers by erasing their names only guarantees the story gets told.