The Ornaments of Ionia: Ancient Temple Construction and Commercial Prosperity

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Commerce, then as now, could make individuals wealthy enough to make lavish displays of piety.

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By Dr. Joshua P. Nudell
Assistant Professor of History
Truman State University

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Introduction

The monumental temple came to define ancient Ionia in popular memory.¹ A poem attributed to Antipater of Thessalonica in the Palatine Anthology com-pares the temple of Artemis at Ephesus to other man-made wonders (9.58):

The rocky walls of Babylon on which carts can drive
And the statue of Zeus by Alpheus, I have gazed upon,
And the hanging gardens and the Colossus of Helios,
And the tall pyramids piled with great toil,
And the mighty memorial for Mausolus, but when I looked upon
The house of the goddess Artemis that reached even into the clouds
Those others dimmed, and I thought: excepting only Olympus,
Helios has never illuminated anything such as this!

καὶ κραναᾶς Βαβυλῶνος ἐπίδρομον ἅρμασι τεῖχος
καὶ τὸν ἐπ ̓ Ἀλφειῷ Ζᾶνα κατηυγασάμην,
κάπων τ ̓ αἰώρημα, καὶ Ἠελίοιο κολοσσόν,
καὶ μέγαν αἰπεινᾶν πυραμίδων κάματον,
μνᾶμά τε Μαυσώλοιο πελώριον· ἀλλ ̓ ὅτ ̓ ἐσεῖδον
Ἀρτέμιδος νεφέων ἄχρι θέοντα δόμον,
κεῖνα μὲν ἠμαύρωτο †δεκηνιδε νόσφιν Ὀλύμπου
ἅλιος οὐδέν πω τοῖον ἐπηυγάσατο.

Despite Antipater’s extravagant praise that put the temple of Artemis at Ephesus at the pinnacle of the seven wonders of the ancient world, it was neither the oldest nor the largest such structure in Ionia,² where commercial interaction with Egypt may have contributed to the early development of the colonnaded temple.³

But if Ionian culture was shaped by interaction with the eastern Mediterranean, how did the inhabitants afford these monumental structures? Scholars often suppose that Ionian commerce begat prosperity, which created a surplus that they invested in temples.⁴ Auditing the books of modern sports stadiums would reveal the extent to which they are paid for taxpayer-funded programs, but comparable accounts for Greek temples are rare.⁵ The connection between commerce and temple construction is a logical inference, reinforced by the supposition that Ionia suffered from a deep financial depression throughout the Classical period, the sign of which being that the temples destroyed at the close of the Ionian revolt in 494/3 were not rebuilt, while Pericles decorated Athens with their money.⁶ Since the remaining evidence for the relative pros-perity of Ionia is circumstantial, the resulting argument is a closed loop that depends entirely on the record of temple construction.

Commerce, then as now, could make individuals wealthy enough to make lavish displays of piety, and a unified citizen body with ample resources of stone, workers, skilled artisans, and draft animals was necessary for erecting large, monumental temples. Polycrates (c.538–522), we are told, paid for a series of engineering projects on Samos, including the final phase of construction at the Heraion, through piracy (e.g., Hdt. 3.39; Thuc. 1.13.6), but this is also a testament to his ability to centralize resources and manipulate foreign relationships.⁷ By contrast, the fact that Chios, a polis with a history of commercial prosperity that extended into the Classical period, never built a temple on a scale comparable to those of its peer polities should give us pause. Commercial prosperity was an important part of the story of temple construction, but the economic hypothesis both overstates and misunderstands Ionian wealth in the Archaic period and poverty in the Classical.

Interstate diplomacy of the Hellenistic world often involved royal euergetism, but reverence for Classical Greece as the age of the autonomous city-state obscures that the same held true during the earlier periods in Ionia. Indeed, John Boardman declares, “The great Ionian building programmes owed no little to Lydian gold,” but scholars tend to overlook the implications of this observation for Classical Ionia.⁸ Locating Ionian temple construction in the Classical period within a network of interstate relations reveals that the story of these monuments is not primarily one of commercial prosperity, but rather the intersection of local initiative and external investment.

Monumental Temples in Archaic Ionia

Already in the Archaic period the largest temples in Ionia had a series of reconstructions that represented a form of peer-polity competition, with communities leapfrogging one another in a race to construct the largest and most magnificent edifice. Thus Robin Osborne observes, “It is hard to believe that it is a mere coincidence that the fourth temple of Hera at Samos just surpasses the first temple of Artemis at Ephesos in ground area (6,038 m2 compared to 6,017).”⁹ The temple of Apollo at Didyma also went through multiple phases, including two stone temples in the seventh and sixth centuries, and the intra-mural temples of Aphrodite and Athena at Miletus were both rebuilt shortly before the sack in 494.¹⁰ Competition did not result in a uniform style. While the earliest known Greek peripteral temple was the eighth-century Artemisium at Ephesus, that form was not used at the site on Mount Mycale identified as the Panionion.¹¹ Likewise, instead of the simple fluted columns that were later associated with the “Ionic” order, the Panionion had smooth columns, while the column bases at the temples of Artemis at Ephesus and of Apollo at Didyma were decorated with human figures.¹²

In addition to developing in a milieu of regional competition, Ionian sanctuaries were inextricably linked with their Anatolian setting (e.g., Paus. 4.31.8; 7.2.7–8). Some sanctuaries, including Didyma at Miletus, were set near to sites that show evidence of “Phrygian” cult activity,¹³ while excavations at the Archaic sanctuary at Kato Phano on Chios have turned up numerous Bronze Age finds.¹⁴ More directly, the use of amber at the temple of Artemis at Ephesus and in votive offerings at the sanctuary of Hera at Samos are linked to the continuity of cult practice.¹⁵ The deities themselves also show evidence of being Anatolian. The image of Artemis Ephesia, for instance, was a “many breasted” deity that Christian authors condemned and modern scholars see as a representation of fertility. But these iconic bulbs likely were not breasts. Comparable iconography is found on the images of other Anatolian deities such as a Carian Zeus, leading to skepticism about connecting them simply with gender.¹⁶ The local epithets for Apollo and Artemis also identified them as Anatolian-born, Lycian and Ortygian, respectively, and scholars have speculated since the nineteenth century that the Greek deity Apollo originated as an Anatolian sun god homonymous with the Trojan Appaliunas.¹⁷

This Anatolian context for the extramural sanctuaries complicated the relationship with their associated polis. Take Didyma and Miletus. Both the sanctuary and the oracle predated their later Greek identity (Paus. 7.2.6) and, unique among the sanctuaries in the Greek world, were administered by a single family, the Branchidae. This family became so associated with the sanctuary that in Roman times it was designated by their patronymic even though their relationship with the site had ended in the Archaic period.¹⁸ It is only possible to speculate about the origins of the Branchidae. Joseph Fontenrose proposes that a mixed Hellenic and Carian population calling itself “Ionian” founded Didyma as a sanctuary of Apollo, but Greek genealogies that identify the eponymous Branchus as the beloved of the god only develop in the Hellenistic period.¹⁹ Moreover, the name does not have clear Hellenic parallels, making the most probable suggestion that the name derives from a non-Hellenic Anatolian language and therefore that the family was not Greek. Didyma’s location in the chora also meant that it was ideally suited to unify the Milesia, serving as a common ritual space for the Greek and non-Greek populations, as well as between Miletus and the other urban settlements such as Teichoussa.²⁰ Around the same time that the earliest stone buildings went up in the late seventh or early sixth century Miletus formally took control of the sanctuary, and Apollo Delphinius became the patron god of the polis. However, the subordinated sanctuary still exerted a measure of autonomy even as the oracle began to be a tool in Miletus’ diplomatic toolbox.²¹ Construction continued into the Achaemenid period, possibly continuing until the Ionian revolt, leading Elspeth Dusinberre to suggest that the Achaemenids had taken over patronage of the cult.²² The oracle fell silent with the deportation of the Branchidae in the late 490s,²³ but the unrestored sanctuary continued to fulfill its local political and symbolic roles and was the destination in an annual procession involving the Molpoi.²⁴ The relationship between city and sanctuary was thus not straightforward, once again complicating the economic thesis that draws a causal connection between prosperity and the construction of temples.

Sacred ways between the poleis and the extramural sanctuaries completed the religious topography. The purpose here is not to review the religious and ceremonial functions of the sacred ways or to review their construction and upkeep, but to identify the panorama of features connected to the sanctuaries that contributed to the overall cost and note what can be said about the sources of funding.²⁵ Each route took the procession to rural shrines, tombs, natural sanctuaries, and statues that marked them as monumental arrangements in and of themselves. The route from Miletus to Didyma included two additional sanctuaries from the Archaic period that fell into disuse about the same time as did Didyma.²⁶ Unlike the temple proper, but quite like other aspects of the sanctuary, monuments along the sacred ways did not adhere to a central plan but went up as piecemeal dedications by the community and prominent individuals. The most famous statue from the route to Didyma, the Chares group, proclaims in an inscription “I am Chares, son of Kleisis, archon of Teichioussa. This statue is for Apollo.”²⁷

In short, the operation of a sanctuary and its adjacent features, including upkeep for the staff, constituted an enormous outlay of resources from the Archaic period onward. Before turning to the revenue streams available to a sanctuary, there is one more expense to examine: the temple itself.

The Costs of Temple Construction

The most detailed accounts of temple construction in the Greek world come from the fourth-century Asclepium at Epidaurus.²⁸ The cult had been founded at the end of the sixth century and came into prominence in the 430s or shortly thereafter, but construction at the site did not begin until the 370s.²⁹ Intermittent warfare and limited funding hampered construction, but Alison Burford points to a scarcity of skilled labor during a period of economic depression that resulted in few public works anywhere in the Greek world.³⁰ It is unknown how widely skilled workers traveled, but warfare and recession must have reduced mobility, and surviving ethnonyms for the workers at Epidaurus came overwhelming from elsewhere in the Greek world.³¹ Since much of the cost of building temples was bound up in human and animal labor, it varied widely depending on the distance from the source of the stone to the sanctuary.³²

Despite the accounts at Epidaurus, estimating the cost of construction is an inexact science owing to factors that ranged from the variable costs of materials and labor to fluctuation in currency values to interruptions in the work. At the Asclepium, Burford estimates the total cost between 240 and 290 talents spent over more than a century.³³ The temple went up first, with the contracts showing straightforward payments for services rendered, while later contracts frequently show payments in installments, indicating that project had depleted the initial appropriation.³⁴ The cost of the Asclepium was not exceptional; construction on the sixth-century temple of Apollo at Delphi cost c.300 talents, and the fifth-century Parthenon at Athens, which was larger than the temple at Delphi but less than half the size of the temples in Ionia, between 460 and 500 talents.³⁵

The circumstances for construction at each Greek temple were idiosyncratic and dependent on the relationship with between temple and polis, but interstate politics frequently contributed both positively and negatively to the pace of construction. The Asclepium was famed as a center of healing, which meant that it could count on a stream of offerings.³⁶ The case of the temples at Panhellenic sanctuaries is equally telling. The temple of Apollo at Delphi collapsed in an earthquake in 373/2 and construction needed to begin before the oracle could be active (Xen. Hell. 7.1.27).³⁷ The Amphictyonic commission for the project met annually between 370 and 356 to approve special taxes, and the sanctuary possessed a large amount of collected wealth from oracular consultations and dedicated plunder (e.g., Xen. Hell. 4.3.21; Plut. Ages. 19.3), but the project progressed slowly.³⁸ The picture at Delphi is a consensus that the temple needed to be reconstructed, but since the temple lacked fungible assets, the members of the Amphictyonic Council exploited the crisis for political maneuvering. The pace of construction only picked up after the end of the Third Sacred War in 346, when the Phocian indemnity payments began to arrive.³⁹ The Amphictyonic Council imposed unique conditions on the sanctuary of Apollo that did not exist at sanctuaries that belonged to a single polis, but this case is nevertheless instructive: reconstruction offered an opportunity to articulate or rearticulate the history of the sanctuary.⁴⁰

The Wealth of Sanctuaries

Operating sanctuaries was expensive in ancient Greece, with costs that included maintenance and pay for priestly personnel in addition to the initial outlay for construction. And yet prominent sanctuaries also concentrated wealth such that they served as banks whose resources a polis might draw on in times of need.⁴¹ Beyond civic appropriations, sanctuaries frequently owned land, both in their immediate vicinity and in the chora, from which they received a portion of the profits. Land around the Ionian sanctuaries was often marginal, though likely suitable for animal husbandry and collecting timber.⁴² Gifts from wealthy individuals expanded these holdings, as evidenced by Xenophon’s purchase of land in the Peloponnese, where he created a temple modeled on the cult of Artemis at Ephesus (Anab. 5.3.7–13). Endowed properties, while increasing the holdings of the sanctuary in the long run, also hid taxable assets from the dedicator since there were laws against taxing farmers on sacred land, and sanctuaries frequently leased the land back to the original owner at reduced rates.⁴³

Sale of votive offerings, aparche (first-fruit offerings), and fees from visitors provided additional revenue streams. One stream was the thesauros (offering box). By the Hellenistic period it was common practice for visitors to a sanctuary to make a preliminary offering by dropping coins into the box. Traditionally, this practice was interpreted as a cult fee imposed to make up for budget shortfalls and therefore either repealed when the endowment was restored or kept in place simply to maximize profit.⁴⁴ More recently, however, Isabelle Pafford convincingly has argued that the inscriptions regulating the deposit, storage, and use of the coins drew a distinction between money that would be used for the priestly sustenance and salaries and the income used for religious purposes.⁴⁵ The thesauroi offerings in the Hellenistic period, she argues, standardized the purchase of sacrifices and other religious items such as clothing for the cult statue.

Inscriptions also demonstrate how sanctuaries had broad economic pur-view to collect and manage their resources. At Delos and in the Acarnanian League in the third century there were specific taxes on luxury items such as enslaved people and on harbor commerce for sanctuary use, and a decree from the Acarnanian League specifies that harbor dues were charged during the festival at Anactorium in order to help rebuild the temple.⁴⁶ There is no comparable decree where an Ionian sanctuary received a portion of harbor fees, but it is reasonable to assume that the method of funding sanctuaries nonetheless existed. At early third-century Miletus, Antiochus dedicated a stoa and instructed that the profits be given to Apollo at Didyma (I.Didyma 479; see below, “Kings and Cities”).

The last and, in my opinion, most important source of Ionian temple revenue came from prominent noncitizens. I separate these from private votives as far as the evidence allows for several reasons. First, conspicuous offerings were large enough that ancient authors and Hellenistic inscriptions made note of them. Ionian temples had particularly close ties with the kings of Lydia and Phrygia, for instance, where kings were proverbially wealthy on account of their unusually ready access to gold.⁴⁷ Second, these gifts were not strictly sig-nals of piety, but also demonstrations of power that give some indication of the prominence of that sanctuary in the world.

According to Herodotus, Midas of Phrygia made the first foreign donation to a Greek sanctuary when he dedicated his throne to Delphi (1.14.2–3). Herodotus likely did see Phrygian offerings at Delphi, which, as a prominent oracle, had particular appeal to non-Greeks, but attempts to identify specific material remains with the semimythical donations of Midas are quixotic.⁴⁸ However, the most famous—and likely more historical—offerings at Delphi were those of the Mermnad kings of Lydia. Gyges (c.699–c.644) dedicated heaps of silver and six kraters made from thirty talents’ worth of gold in the seventh century (Hdt. 1.14; Athen. 6.20 [231e–f ]), which Strabo says were melted down during the Third Sacred War of 356–346 (9.3.7–8).⁴⁹ The fourth Mermnad king, Alyattes (c.619–c.560), dedicated a magnificent krater made by the Chian craftsman Glaucus (Hdt. 1.25; Athen. 5.45 [210b]) and his son Croesus dedicated a silver krater made by Theodoros of Samos (Hdt. 1.51.2–3).⁵⁰ But Delphi was not the exclusive recipient of the largesse of the Lydian kings. Alyattes obeyed an oracle to rebuild the temple of Athena at Assessus in Miletus, which he had plundered. Croesus offered two golden cows and columns at the Artemisium at Ephesus (Hdt. 1.92) and, more infamously, made offerings at Didyma to purchase favorable oracles (Hdt. 1.46–56). Some of these dedications were ornamental, and Hecataeus proposed melting down the ones at Didyma to pay for a fleet during the Ionian revolt of 499–494 (Hdt. 5.36), but others were more functional. Excavations at the Artemisium at Ephesus, for instance, have turned up column drums with Lydian inscriptions that speak to the monarch underwriting the costs of construction of the enormous building.⁵¹ Likewise, Elspeth Dusinberre recently suggested that the Achaemenid administration took up the patronage of these cults in the second half of the sixth century based on the intensity of work at both Didyma at the Artemision.⁵²

There is no reason to doubt the evidence for Ionian commerce with Egypt, Lydia, and beyond during the Archaic period, but I am skeptical that individual, private prosperity would have resulted in the concentrated expenditure necessary to create monumental temples, particularly in the absence of inscriptions that show as much. Indeed, sanctuaries were powerful foci for diplomatic activity and royal euergetism during the early phase of Ionian temple construction, even if the vocabulary for these relationships was not as developed as it became in the Hellenistic period. The critical question, however, is whether analyzing temple construction in the Classical period along these same lines changes how we should think about Ionia.

Classical Ionia and Temple Construction: The Artemisium

The prominence of Ionia’s Archaic temples is accentuated by Persia’s violent suppression of the revolt in 494 and an acute absence of new monumental construction throughout the fifth century. J. M. Cook explained this pattern by positing that Ionian “city life” went into eclipse after the Persian wars because the poleis were impoverished on account of paying tribute to both Athens and Persia.⁵³ In a review of Cook’s Greeks in Ionia and the East, John Boardman offered a single-sentence rebuttal, saying, “Cook suggests that there was no substantial new building in Ionia . . . but there seems to be evidence for new temples or significant reconstruction in Chios, Samos, and Didyma,”⁵⁴ but Robin Osborne subsequently observed that if the field at large shared Boardman’s reservations of Cook’s thesis based on archaeological evidence, it did so quietly.⁵⁵ Indeed, while there is evidence of continued construction at some sanctuaries, there were no new colossal temples and only a few stone temples of any sort constructed in Ionia during the fifth century. But monumental temples were rare even in the sixth century, and thus Osborne argues that Cook misinterpreted the contrast between the sixth and fifth centuries and that the decision not to construct or reconstruct monumental temples indicates overall satisfaction with the Athenian empire because the Ionians willingly patronized Delian League cults at the expense of their own.⁵⁶

Osborne is likely correct that “both sixth- and fifth-century patterns of building make more sense in terms of competition within and between communities, of neighborly rivalry and ‘peer polity interaction,’ than in term of economic boom and slump.”⁵⁷ But the Delian League did not eliminate peer-polity competition. Further, the refoundation of Miletus had explicit provisions for the construction of new monumental buildings such as the sanctuary of Dionysus and the intramural Delphinion,⁵⁸ and yet the temple of Apollo at Didyma allegedly lay in ruins.⁵⁹ Closer inspection of Ionian temple construction in the Classical period reveals both the orthodox economic thesis and Osborne’s revision inadequate on their own.

The Artemisium at Ephesus offers a counterpoint to Didyma (Strabo 14.1.5). The Artemisium’s relationship with non-Greeks was among the strongest in Ionia, and the cult itself shows signs of Persianization. In addition to the Persian items that appear as votives, mirroring the Egyptian goods at the Heraeum on Samos, one of the temple officials took the Persian title Megabyxos (Xen. Anab. 5.3.6), and friezes show figures in Persian garb participating in ritual activity.⁶⁰ Non-Greek clothing is not unusual for figures in temple friezes, but their participation in the rituals is. Moreover, there is evidence that this scene reflects common practice at the sanctuary. There is a record of non-Greek potentates offering sacrifices at Ephesus, including the satrap Tissaphernes (Thuc. 8.109), who also used Artemis as a rallying cry (Xen. Hell. 1.2.5–6), and Cyrus the Younger (Xen. Anab. 1.6.7). Further, the so-called Sacrilege Decree, a late fourth-century inscription from Ephesus that sentenced to death a large number of Lydians for having assaulted emissaries delivering sacred objects to branch of the cult at Sardis, demonstrates its reach (I.Eph. 2).⁶¹ Beyond showing that the Ephesians were empowered to adjudicate the case, the names of the condemned hint at local connections, with the name “Ephesus” coming up in at least two patronymics (ll. 38 and 45) and the name Miletus appearing in one (l. 17). This regional prominence, along with the Ephesian ambivalence toward the Ionian revolt, helped the temple avoid destruction in 494, and its prominence was in turn redoubled by its survival, becoming the home to the Ephesia, an athletic competition that drew contestants from around Ionia (Thuc. 3.104; Dionysius Ant. Rom. 4.25).⁶²

Outside the few references testifying to the continued prominence of the sanctuary of Artemis, there is little evidence for construction from the fifth century. In the fourth century, however, it underwent two building phases. A column drum contemporary to the first phase of construction in the 390s bears an inscription saying that it was dedicated by “Agesilaus”—probably the Spartan king who campaigned in Asia Minor in 397/6.⁶³ This identification is, ultimately, speculative, but accounts of the campaign indicate that Agesilaus paid particular attention to the sanctuary in his diplomatic efforts in the region (Xen. Ages. 1.27; Hell. 3.4.18). Dedications to subsidize repairs already begun plausibly fits into this setting where Agesilaus’ political needs matched the local project.

The evidence for the second phase of construction is clearer, but more controversial. The temple burned in 356, reputedly on the same day that Alexander the Great was born, with the goddess gone to oversee the momentous birth (Plut. Alex. 3.3).⁶⁴ Herostratus took the blame for burning the temple, but the cause of the fire is a matter of debate, with suggestions ranging from a lightning strike (following Aristotle Meteorology 3.1) to deliberate sabotage by the temple administration because the they want to move the sanctuary from the Cayster River floodplain to more solid ground.⁶⁵ The next reference to the construction came in 334 when Alexander the Great allegedly offered to pay all costs for the temple in perpetuity, only to be rebuffed by the Ephesians (Strabo 1.41.22). The king responded by ordering the Ephesians to pay their phoros to the sanctuary (Arr. 1.17.10–12).

Scholars have traditionally placed too much weight on this sentence in Arrian. Since Arrian also explicitly says that Alexander relieved the other cities of their phoros (tribute) payments and began to collect a syntaxis (contribution), the specific provisions for Ephesus seem pregnant with meaning for the interpretation of both Alexander and Alexander’s policy in the first years of his campaign. Ernst Badian, for instance, maintained that when the Ephesians turned away Alexander’s generosity, the fickle king turned hostile, not relieving the phoros and levying a syntaxis in addition.⁶⁶ This thesis resolves the contradiction inherent in allowing the Ephesians to keep their tribute local while requiring the rest of the Ionians to help pay for the campaign, but it rests on shaky foundations.

Badian’s formulation is based on triangulating Arrian’s narrative with a passage in Strabo that paraphrases the first century BCE geographer Artemidorus of Ephesus (14.1.22):⁶⁷

Alexander [he adds] offered to the Ephesians to undertake all costs that had occurred and all those yet to come, in return for an inscription thereupon, but they were unwilling, just as they were unwilling to acquire renown for temple robbery. [Artemidorus] praises the Ephesian who said to the king that it was unseemly for a god to make dedications to gods.

Ἀλέξανδρον δὴ τοῖς Ἐφεσίοις ὑποσχέσθαι τὰ γεγονότα καὶ τὰ μέλλοντα ἀναλώματα, ἐφ ̓ ᾧ τε τὴν ἐπιγραφὴν αὐτὸν ἔχειν, τοὺς δὲ μὴ ἐθελῆσαι, πολὺ μᾶλλον οὐκ ἂν ἐθελήσαντας ἐξ ἱεροσυλίας καὶ ἀποστερήσεως φιλοδοξεῖν: ἐπαινεῖ τε τὸν εἰπόντα τῶν Ἐφεσίων πρὸς τὸν βασιλέα, ὡς οὐ πρέποι θεῷ θεοῖς ἀναθήματα κατασκευάζειν.

Despite its apparent simplicity, this bold declaration hides a murky history. For instance, he rebuts a claim put forward by Timaeus of Tauromenium that the Ephesians had stolen Persian treasures kept at the temple:

ἅπερ ἀγνοοῦντά φησιν ὁ Ἀρτεμίδωρος τὸν Ταυρομενίτην Τίμαιον καὶ ἄλλως βάσκανον ὄντα καὶ συκοφάντην . . . λέγειν ὡς ἐκ τῶν Περσικῶν παρακαταθηκῶν ἐποιήσαντο τοῦ ἱεροῦ τὴν ἐπισκευήν: οὔτε δὲ ὑπάρξαι παρακαταθήκας τότε, εἴ τε ὑπῆρξαν, συνεμπεπρῆσθαι τῷ ναῷ: μετὰ δὲ τὴν ἔμπρησιν τῆς ὀροφῆς ἠφανισμένης, ἐν ὑπαίθρῳ τῷ σηκῷ τίνα ἂν ἐθελῆσαι παρακαταθήκην κειμένην ἔχειν;

Artemidorus says that Timaeus of Tauromenium, being ignorant of these and generally being a slanderous sycophant, . . . says that they achieved the restoration of the temple through the [gold] the Persians deposited there. But in the first place there was nothing deposited there then, and if it had been, it would have burned together with the temple. After the conflagration it was missing a roof, and who would want to deposit such things lying in an open-air enclosure?

Strabo seems inclined to accept Artemidorus’ claim even though he opens the section by detailing how the Ephesians paid for construction:

ὡς δὲ τοῦτον Ἡρόστρατός τις ἐνέπρησεν, ἄλλον ἀμείνω κατεσκεύασαν συνενέγκαντες τὸν τῶν γυναικῶν κόσμον καὶ τὰς ἰδίας οὐσίας, διαθέμενοι δὲ καὶ τοὺς προτέρους κίονας: τούτων δὲ μαρτύριά ἐστι τὰ γενηθέντα τότε ψηφίσματα

When one Herostratus set it aflame they furnished another, better, one, gathering the women’s jewelry and private offerings, and disposing of the earlier columns. Contemporary decrees bear witness to this.

Timaeus was a historian with a particularly poor reputation in antiquity,⁶⁸ but there is no reason to put any more faith in Artemidorus. Artemidorus was concerned with relieving his forebearers of any hint of sacrilege that might have been associated with taking gold at the temple, but παρακαταθήκη, the word Timaeus uses, can mean either dedication or deposit. Artemidorus clearly applied the former definition, but what if Timaeus intended the latter? It is plausible that the gold stored at the temple seized by the Ephesians to pay for repairs was the phoros payment owed to Persia. Taking the passage in Strabo altogether, the Ephesians paid for repairs to the temple through private donations, the sale of old column drums, and redirecting tribute payments at a time when Persian power in the region had waned.⁶⁹ This interpretation also offers a new resolution for Arrian’s apparent contradiction. Rather than punishing a prideful community or curiously rewarding a polis he had little other con-nection to, Alexander’s decision to direct the phoros to Artemis retroactively approved the local initiative that appropriated the tribute in the first place.

Material poverty must have contributed to the pace of temple construction in Classical Ionia, but it was not the defining factor. The sanctuary of Artemis demonstrates that the Ionian temples continued to play an important role in mediating the position of the polis in the larger political arena. Stabilizing southern Ionia might have brought enough prosperity that the Milesians began planning new construction projects, but more important than the hand of market forces in the new construction projects at poleis like Priene was the Hecatomnid dynasty.⁷⁰

Kings and Cities: Hellenistic Reconstructions

The Hellenistic period in Ionia is often presented as a new spring that followed a long, fallow Classical period, with Alexander’s liberation heralding a period of economic revitalization and thus new construction projects up and down the coast.⁷¹ The second half of the fourth century did witness an architectural renaissance in Ionia, but this traditional account buys into propaganda about the oppressive burden of Persian tribute now released by Alexander’s “liberation.” Alexander did formally abolish the phoros, though he soon replaced it with the more generously named, but equally onerous, syntaxis. Even more damning to this thesis than the flawed distinction between Persian and Macedonian rule is that the start of this Ionian construction boom began in the 340s, well before Alexander conquered the region. At Miletus, renovation in the city Delphinium began in the early 330s, and the plans for restoring the oracle at Didyma plausibly formed at the same time.⁷² Similarly, the temple to Apollo that Alexander dedicated at Priene was likely commissioned by Artemisia of Caria (Pliny H.N. 36.30–31; Vitruv. De arch. 1.1.12),⁷³ and the Hellenistic sanctuary of Apollo at Claros appears to have been begun at about this time.⁷⁴ The Ionian renaissance began before Alexander’s conquest, but it flourished after his death by taking full advantage of the competition between the Diadochoi.⁷⁵

The most notable Hellenistic temple-building project in Ionia was the temple of Apollo at Didyma. The new temple would be the largest building in Ionia at 7,115.78 square meters, with monumental steps that served as grand-stands overlooking the processional way and a double row of columns rising to the height of 19.7 meters.⁷⁶ The new temple outstripped the famed temple of Artemis in size, and its interior was unique. The prodomos (entry chamber) led visitors to a wall nearly a meter and half in height, topped by an enormous window through which the naiskos (inner sanctuary) was just visible. The visitor entered the inner courtyard by first going down to an interior room at ground level and from there down a monumental staircase into the heart of the temple. The adyton (the inner chamber of the naiskos) was nearly 5 meters below ground and the inner courtyard, surrounded by solid walls that rose between 22 and 25 meters, contained a grove of bay trees. Although it has been thought that the general appearance was completed in the third century, construction continued for nearly six hundred years until the third century CE.⁷⁷

Oracles in antiquity had enormous financial potential. Archaic Didyma had a reputation on par with any in the Greek world, but by the late fourth century it had been dormant for nearly a century and a half. This set of circumstances lay behind their delivery of an oracle to Alexander in 331 proclaiming his divinity, but while the king’s propagandist Callisthenes recorded the message in a list of favorable utterances, there was no financial reward, and plans for construction languished for decades.⁷⁸ Although the oracle had officially been restored by 331, inscriptions recording the offerings at the sanctuary reveal that the new oracle was neither popular nor prosperous. The first signs of a change appear in the last decade of the fourth century. As early as 311 on his return to Babylon, Seleucus reputedly told his soldiers that the oracle at Didyma had predicted his eventual victory, probably in an imitation of Alexander (Diod. 19.90.4).⁷⁹ Seleucus then declared that he found the Archaic cult statue in the Persian palace at Ecbatana and, starting in c.300, he and his family made a series of offerings, which both provided the sanctuary with funds to begin construction in earnest and, equally important, gave public support for the legitimacy of the new oracle. The Milesians took full advantage of this collaboration with Seleucus to rewrite the mythical genealogy of the oracle and cult procedures to bring them in line with the more familiar Delphic practice while simultaneously employing archaizing elements such as an old-style blood altar that made it look like the new oracle was the old one reborn.⁸⁰

Work on the temple at Didyma and the Seleucid relationship with Mile-tus flowered in the years after the battle of Ipsus in 301. Although Seleucus promoted the royal cult of Zeus in imitation of Alexander’s divine parentage early in his reign, Apollo served a similar political purpose by c.305 when the god began to appear on Seleucid coins from Babylonia.⁸¹ In time stories made Seleucus Apollo’s son. When Seleucus founded the sanctuary of Apollo at Daphne near Antioch in 300 he said it was at the urging of the oracle at Didyma.⁸² The years that followed saw a series of gifts from the royal family to the sanctuary. Antiochus donated a stoa and stipulated its revenues were to go to furnishing the sanctuary (McCabe, Didyma 7 = I.Didyma 479, ll. 7–11) and Queen Apame dedicated funds for the construction of the naos (McCabe, Didyma 8 = I.Didyma 480, ll. 8–9).⁸³ Seleucus himself made a lavish offering of sacrificial animals, ornately wrought bowls, and tons of precious spices such as cinnamon, frankincense, and myrrh (McCabe, Didyma 19 = I.Didyma 424). These gifts, which present a cohesive dynastic image, were an established part of Hellenistic diplomacy between kings and cities. The Milesians reciprocated with honors for Apame and Antiochus, including right to consult at the oracle (McCabe, Didyma 7 = I.Didyma 479, ll. 38–41) and an equestrian statue of Antiochus at Didyma (l. 30).⁸⁴ The inscription honoring Apame thanked her for intervening on behalf of Milesian mercenaries (McCabe, Didyma 8 = I.Didyma 480, l. 6), and Demodamas, the proposer of both decrees, entered into Seleucid service, dedicating an altar to Didymaean Apollo in central Asia sometime after 294 (Pliny H.N. 6.49).⁸⁵ Thus, as Paul Kosmin has recently argued, Didymaean Apollo symbolically came to represent the far northwestern and northeastern limits of Seleucid territory.⁸⁶

Evidence for contemporary construction at Claros near Colophon is more problematic. Archaic poetry associates Claros with Apollo from an early date, and its prophets claimed lineage from Teirisias through Mopsus, the son of his daughter Manto, which gave the site both legitimacy and antiquity.⁸⁷ Throughout most the Classical period, however, the site is rarely mentioned and never associated with Colophon.⁸⁸ In fact, H. W. Parke suggests that Claros’ mythic genealogy to an Aeolic prophetic tradition points to an Aeolian rather than Ionian foundation, in turn tying it to Notium rather than Colophon. Notion and Colophon had a strained relationship in the Classical period, with the former generally subordinate to the latter, but also with significant numbers of Colophonians living in Notium. By the middle of the fourth century, likely around the time when its coins began to feature Apollo’s tripod, Colophon annexed both Notium and Claros.⁸⁹

Colophon’s changed relationship with Claros coincided with the wave of monumental construction up and down the coast of Anatolia. It should be of little surprise, then, that the site shows a surge in activity that culminated in the construction of a new Doric temple of a size with contemporary Doric structures elsewhere, if still a fraction of the size of its colossal neighbors.⁹⁰ The only Ionian polis without direct access to the sea, Colophon was not wealthy compared to most of its peers, so the decision to renovate the temple on a monumental scale requires explanation. Parke, for instance, proposes that its genesis belonged in “some burst of prosperity” that followed liberation from Persia, but that the wars of the Diadochoi meant that all available funds were redirected to the construction of a new set of fortifications.⁹¹ Circumstantial evidence at Claros again seems to support thesis of early-Hellenistic prosperity. An inscription dated to 307/6 records a list of contributions to build Colophon’s walls and the late-Hellenistic column drums found at the Kızılburun shipwreck indicate that construction progressed slowly.⁹² Once again, though, chronology intrudes. Much as at Didyma, the plans for new construction at Claros predated Alexander and thus cannot be attributed to a sudden economic swing in his wake. Moreover, Parke undersells Colophon’s poverty in 307. The inscription in question records a long list of contributors to the construction of the wall (McCabe, Kolophon 6 = SEG 19, 698). The largest number of entries are for small donations of twenty or thirty drachmae, and the strain these sums posed is demonstrated by entries that list the donor as an individual and his son or brother (e.g., ll. 375, 393), but these donations are dwarfed by the entries at the top of the list that include large individual contributions of tens of thousands of drachmae, mostly from Macedonians (ll. 134–60). Construction at Claros was not a small project, and Lysimachus’ attempt to incorporate Colophon into Arsinoeia in c.294 temporarily halted construction. When it resumed, the plans were scaled back, probably for lack of funds, and ultimately never completed.⁹³

The sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus again provides a telling counterpoint to the other Ionian sanctuaries. It had served as a locus of diplomatic activity throughout the Classical period, and Ephesian honorific inscriptions were traditionally posted in the sanctuary. However, its continued operation and regional clout meant not only that the sanctuary did not require foreign patronage, but also that the sanctuary resisted subordination to Ephesus the way that the revisions to the mythic genealogy of Didyma changed the relationship between that sanctuary and Miletus. But even famous Artemisium could not maintain its autonomy for long under the new pressures of the Hellenistic period. Guy Rogers has recently shown that coercion worked where flattery and bribes failed. When Lysimachus refounded Ephesus as Arsinoeia in the 290s, he changed the status of the Artemisium, in part because its supporters had sided with Demetrius in 301. Lysimachus could not be seen to commit sacrilege against such a prominent sanctuary, so he instead underwrote the costs of a new temple complex for Artemis Soter at Ortygia, near the border with Pygela.⁹⁴ Patronizing a new cult of Artemis also gave Lysimachus an opening to oversee the Artemisium. He took the final authority for himself but granted the Arsinoeian Gerousia the right to mediate between the two sanctuaries and therefore to oversee the management of the mysteries of Artemis.⁹⁵

Conclusion

In the introduction to his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides compared what future commentators might think of Sparta and Athens if only ruins remained (1.10.2):

Λακεδαιμονίων γὰρ εἰ ἡ πόλις ἐρημωθείη, λειφθείη δὲ τά τε ἱερὰ καὶ τῆς κατασκευῆς τὰ ἐδάφη, πολλὴν ἂν οἶμαι ἀπιστίαν τῆς δυνάμεως προελθόντος πολλοῦ χρόνου τοῖς ἔπειτα πρὸς τὸ κλέος αὐτῶν εἶναι καἰτοι Πελοποννήσου τῶν πέντε τὰς δύο μοίρας νέμονται, τῆς τε ξυμπάσης ἡγοῦνται καὶ τῶν ἔξω ξυμμάχων πολλῶν: ὅμως δὲ οὔτε ξυνοικισθείσης πόλεως οὔτε ἱεροῖς καὶ κατασκευαῖς πολυτελέσι χρησαμένης, κατὰ κώμας δὲ τῷ παλαιῷ τῆς Ἑλλάδος τρόπῳ οἰκισθείσης, φαίνοιτ ̓ ἂν ὑποδεεστέρα, Ἀθηναίων δὲ τὸ αὐτὸ τοῦτο παθόντων διπλασίαν ἂν τὴν δύναμιν εἰκάζεσθαι ἀπὸ τῆς φανερᾶς ὄψεως τῆς πόλεως ἢ ἔστιν.

If the city of the Lacedaemonians should be laid to ruin, leaving only the foundations of its temples and permanent fixtures, I think there would be much disbelief in its power compared to its fame among those in the distant future. For, although it has two of the five parts of the Peloponnese, and leads all the rest and has many allies, all the same the city is not united and is furnished with neither temples nor expensive buildings but arranged in unwalled villages after the fashion of ancient Greece, making it seem deficient. But if Athens were to suffer the same, one would conclude from the visible appearance that the city’s power was twice what it was.

Thucydides was commenting on the crude power of political and military force, but his warning to not judge a city by its ruined temples is instructive: we would do well not to judge the power or, in this case, wealth, of a city from its ruins alone.

Every Ionian polis constructed temples and sanctuaries, but only three, Ephesus, Miletus, and Samos, erected the enormous temples for which the region was known. These were among the largest and wealthiest Ionian poleis, but Erythrae and Teos regularly paid as much in phoros as Miletus and Ephesus on the Athenian Tribute Lists and Chios was arguably as wealthy as Samos. And yet, excepting only the Panionion, the most prominent sanctuary outside the big three was the oracle of Colophon’s Apollo at Claros. Peer-polity competition drove the successive phases of temple construction, and commercial prosperity shaped the landscape of religious offerings in each polis, but neither adequately explains the record of Ionian temple construction.

Taken in a broader perspective, the Ionian sanctuaries were not Greek in an isolated sense at least until the Hellenistic period, when there was a conscious effort to link Didyma to Delphi. Instead, these sanctuaries were part of Anatolian religious networks that included Caria, Lydia, and Phrygia, and were absorbed by the Persian administration. Viewed in this light, foreign gifts and regional influence that extended up the river valleys facilitated temple construction. The political environment that encouraged donations from foreign kings dried up during the fifth century but returned in earnest in the second half of the fourth century when the sanctuaries took on renewed importance as a locus of political interaction. Negotiating a balance between dependence and autonomy, the sanctuaries were a microcosm of Ionia itself.

Endnotes

1. Most cults had small temples or rural shrines like the ones detailed in the Molpoi Decree at Miletus (Milet I.3, no. 133). The Molpoi Decree is preserved in a Hellenistic inscription erected in the late third or early second century BCE professing to detail the annual procession from the intramural Delphinion to the sanctuary at Didyma. Although scholars have long assumed that the inscription celebrated and preserved archaic rituals, Anja Slawisch has recently suggested instead that the inscription belongs in the set of invented traditions about Didyma that legitimized new ideas by casting them into the Archaic past. On the decree, see, particularly, Alexander Herda, Der Apollon-Delphinios-Kult in Milet und die Neujahrsprozession nach Didyma (Darmstadt: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2006); Alexander Herda, “How to Run a State Cult,” in Current approaches to religion in ancient Greece, ed. Matthew Haysom and Jenny Wallensten (Stockholm: Stockholm Universitet, 2011), 57–93; Anja Slawisch, “Epigraphy versus Archaeology: Conflicting Evidence for Cult Continuity in Ionia during the Fifth Century BC,” in Sacred Landscapes in Anatolia and Neighboring Regions, ed. Charles Gates, Jacques Morin, and Thomas Zimmermann (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), 29–34.
2. Ionian monumental temples underwent multiple phases of construction and reconstruction in what Robin Osborne, “Cult and Ritual: The Greek World,” in Classical Archaeology, ed. Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 256, characterizes as a process of local competition; see below, “Classical Ionia and Temple Construction.” The Heraion on Samos was probably the earliest of the monumental temples, though the cult of Artemis may have predated it, and the Heraion’s fourth iteration just surpassed the temple of Artemis (6,038 m2 to 6,017 m2). The Hellenistic temple of Apollo at Didyma surpassed both at 7,115.78 m2. Nevertheless, the sanctuary of Artemis was particularly famous, as indicated by the silversmith Demetrius in the biblical book of Acts, who boasts: “Who among men does not know that the polis of Ephesus is the custodian of this temple for the great goddess Artemis?” (Ἄνδρες Ἐφέσιοι, τίς γάρ ἐστιν ἀνθρώπων ὃς οὐ γινώσκει τὴν Ἐφεσίων πόλιν νεωκόρον οὖσαν τῆς μεγάλης Ἀρτέμιδος, 19.35).
3. This connection was identified already by the nineteenth century, e.g., A. Marquand, “Reminiscences of Egypt in Doric Architecture,” AJA 6, nos. 1–2 (1890): 47–58, and has largely persisted since. L. H. Jeffery, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 30, who also sees overseas trade as the vector for the “archaic style” of sculpture, though see Whitney M. Davis, “Egypt, Samos, and the Archaic Style in Greek Sculpture,” JEA 67 (1981): 69 n. 31. J. J. Coulton, “Towards Understanding Greek Temple Design: General Considerations,” ABSA 70 (1975): 77–82, and J. J. Coulton, Ancient Greek Architects at Work: Problems of Structure and Design (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 31–50, caution that the Egyptian influence may have been to “accelerate” developments already underway in the Aegean. On the intersection of Ionian temples and the Mediterranean world, see Kenan Eran, “Ionian Sanctuaries and the Mediterranean World in the 7th Century B.C.,” in SOMA 2011, vol. 1, ed. Pietro Maria Militello and Hakan Öniz (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2015), 321–27.
4. See Jack Martin Balcer, Sparda by the Bitter Sea: Imperial Interaction in Western Anatolia (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1984), 365; Pericles Georges, “Persian Ionia under Darius: The Revolt Reconsidered,” Historia 49, no. 1 (2000): 3–4; Alan M. Greaves, Miletos: A History (New York: Routledge, 2002), 126; Carl Roebuck, “The Economic Development of Ionia,” CPh 48, no. 1 (1953): 9–16. Slawisch, “Epigraphy versus Archaeology,” and Anja Slawisch and Toby Christopher Wilkinson, “Processions, Propaganda, and Pixels: Reconstructing the Sacred Way between Miletos and Didyma,” AJA 122, no. 1 (2018): 102, implicitly accept this connection. Brian Rutishauser, Athens and the Cyclades: Economic Strategies, 510–314 BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 229–35, reverses the causation by arguing that the fiscal demands of construction monetized Aegean economies.
5. Inscriptions recording temple inventories are rare before the Classical period; see David M. Lewis, “Temple Inventories in Ancient Greece,” in Pots and Pans, ed. Michael Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 71–81. The only one from Ionia comes from a series of stelae at Didyma dated to 177/6; see Beate Dignas, Economy of the Sacred in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 238, with n. 37.
6. J. M. Cook, “The Problem of Classical Ionia,” PCPhS 187, no. 7 (1961): 9–18; repeated in The Greeks in Ionia and the East (London: Thames and Hudson 1962), 122. Isocrates 4.156 praises the Ionians for leaving the destroyed temples as memorials to barbarian impiety, which offers an oblique, if likely fictional, commentary about the economic state of Ionia in the fifth century. On the Periclean building program, see below, “Classical Ionia and Temple Construction.”
7. Jens David Baumbach, The Significance of Votive Offerings in Selected Hera Sanctuaries in the Peloponnese, Ionia, and Western Greece (Oxford: Archeopress, 2004), 152. Some Egyptian dedications found at the sanctuary date to this period; see Philip Kaplan, “Dedications to Greek Sanctuaries by Foreign Kings in the Eighth through Sixth Centuries BCE,” Historia 55, no. 2 (2006): 134; Sarah P. Morris, “The View from East Greece: Miletus, Samos and Ephesus,” in Debating Orientalization, ed. Corinna Riva and Nicholas C. Vella (Sheffield: Equinox, 2006), 72–74. Only two small new temples went up at the sanctuary in the fifth and fourth centuries.
8. Persia and the West: An Archaeological Investigation of the Genesis of Achaemenid Persian Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 37.
9. Osborne, “Cult and Ritual,” 256; cf. Robin Osborne, “Archaeology and the Athenian Empire,” TAPhA 129 (1999): 328. Peer-polity competition in this context was first articulated in Anthony M. Snodgrass, “Interaction by Design: The Greek City-State,” in Peer Polity Interaction and Socio-political Change, ed. Colin Renfrew and John F. Cherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 47–58.
10. On the Archaic temple of Apollo, see Joseph Fontenrose, Didyma: Apollo’s Oracle, Cult, and Companions (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1988), 31–34. On the temples of Aphrodite and Athena, see Volkmar von Graeve, “Funde aus Milet XVII: Fragmente von Bauskulptur aus dem archaischen Aphrodite-Heiligtum,” AA, no. 2 (2005): 41–48; Alan M. Greaves, The Land of Ionia: Society and Economy in the Archaic Period (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 175, with n. 30, and Greaves, Miletos, 84; Win-ifried Held, “Zur Datierung des klassischen Athenatempels in Milet,” AA, no. 1 (2004): 123–27.
11. Greaves, Land of Ionia, 176; Hans Lohmann, “The Discovery and Excavation of the Archaic Panionion in the Mycale (Dilek Daglari),” Kazı Sonuçları Toplantısı 28 (2007): 575–90. In addition to the controversies about the identification of the Panionian sanctuary, analyzing construction of a regional cult site introduces additional difficulties. On the Panionion and Ionian League gener-ally, see Appendix 1.
12. J. M. Cook, The Greeks in Ionia and the East (London: Thames and Hudson 1962), 81–82; Greaves, Land of Ionia, 175–76. However, the Ionic volute capital does appear; see, e.g., Aenne Ohnesorg, and Mustafa Büyükkolanci, “Ein ionisches Kapitell mit glatten Voluten in Ephesos,” MDAI(I) 57 (2007): 209–33.
13. Greaves, Land of Ionia, 174, 195–96. On the Phrygian connection at Didyma, see Walter Burkert, “Olbia and Apollo of Didyma: A New Oracle Text,” in Apollo: Origins and Influence, ed. Jon Solomon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 51. The earliest archaeological find, a Mycenaean pottery fragment, dates to the fourteenth century; see Alan M. Greaves, “Divination at Archaic Branchidai-Didyma,” Hesperia 81, no. 2 (2012): 178. Excavations at the Heraion on Samos show multiple phases of occupation as early as c.2650 BCE, when this community served as a node in commercial networks that connected Anatolia, Crete, and the Cyclades; see Ourania Kouka and Sergios Menelaou, “Settlement and Society in Early Bronze Age Heraion: Exploring Stratigraphy, Architecture and Ceramic Innovation after Mid-3rd Millennium BC,” in Pottery Technologies and Sociocultural Connections between the Aegean and Anatolia during the 3rd Millennium BC, ed. Eva Alram-Stern and Barbara Horejs (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2018), 119–42. Recently, Abdulkadir Baran, “The Role of Carians in the Development of Greek Architecture,” in Listening to the Stones: Essays on Architecture and Function in Ancient Greek Sanctuaries in Honour of Richard Alan Tomlinson, ed. Elena C. Partida and Barbara Schmidt-Dounas (Oxford: Archaeo-press, 2019), 233–44, has argued that Caria influenced the trajectory of Greek architecture, both through its own contact with the eastern Mediterranean and with Carian craftsmen working on Greek projects; cf. Alexander Herda, “Greek (and Our) Views on the Karians,” in Luwian Identities: Culture, Language and Religion between Anatolia and the Aegean, ed. Alice Mouton, Ian Rutherford, and Ilya Yakubovich (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 452–60, who recalls a story from Vitruvius (10.2.15) where a shepherd with the Carian name Pixodarus received honors at Ephesus for locating the marble quarry for the sanctuary of Artemis of Ephesus.
14. Excavators have suggested, though, that the location may have been a lookout rather than a site of ritual significance; see Lesley Beaumont et al., “Excavations at Kato Phano, Chios: 1999, 2000, and 2001,” ABSA 99 (2004): 201–55. This sanctuary also had extensive retaining walls that protected it from flooding and created a monumental sacred space; see Lesley Beaumont, “Shaping the Ancient Religious Landscape at Kato Phana, Chios,” in Listening to the Stones: Essays on Architecture and Function in Ancient Greek Sanctuaries in Honour of Richard Alan Tomlinson, ed. Elena C. Partida and Barbara Schmidt-Dounas (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2019), 182–90.
15. Ulrike Muss, “Amber from the Artemision from Ephesus and in the museums of Istanbul and Selçuk Ephesos,” Araştirma Sonuçları Toplantısı 25 (2008): 13–26; Baumbach, Significance of Votive Offerings, 149–50.
16. On the history of interpretation of these images, see Morris, “View from East Greece,” 70–71; Sarah P. Morris, “Artemis Ephesia: A New Solution to the Enigma of Her ‘Breasts’?,” in Das Kosmos der Artemis von Ephesus, ed. Ulrike Muss (Vienna: Österreiches Archäologisches Institut, 2001), 135–51; Lynn R. LiDonnici, “The Images of Artemis Ephesia and Greco-Roman Worship: A Reconsideration,” HThR 85, no. 4 (1992): 389–415. Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre, Empire, Authority, and Autonomy in Achaemenid Anatolia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 213–15, notes that the Artemis Ephesia also might have syncretized with other Anatolian mother goddess cults.
17. Speculation takes Apollo all the way to Çatal Hüyük. Michel Mazoyer, “Télipinu et Apollon fondateurs,” Hethitica 14 (1999): 55–62, and Michel Mazoyer, “Apollon à Troie,” in Homère et l’Anatolie, ed. Michel Mazoyer (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 151–60, identified cultic links between the Trojan Apollo of the Iliad and the Hittite divinity Telipinu, an idea that met with resistance on methodological and evidential grounds; see Hatice Gonnet, J. D. Hawkins, and Jean-Pierre Grélois, “Remarques sur un article recent relative a Telibinu et a Apollon Fondateurs,” Anatolica 27 (2001): 191–97. For a recent survey of the scholarship and evidence that the name Artemis also has Anatolian roots, see Edwin L. Brown, “In Search of Anatolian Apollo,” in ΧΑΡΙΣ: Essays in Honor of Sara A. Immerwahr, Hesperia Supp. 33, ed. Anne P. Chapin (Athens: American School of Classical Stud-ies, 2004), 243–57, who follows Walter Burkert, Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1977), 225–33, in seeing multiple strands coming together to form the Greek deity, but emphasizes that the Anatolian contribution is not merely iconographic.
18. A disconnect noted by H. W. Parke, “The Massacre of the Branchidae,” JHS 105 (1985): 59.
19. Fontenrose, Didyma, 8; cf. Parke, “Massacre of the Branchidae,” 60, with n. 7. In the Hellenistic iteration of the myth, Branchus was the son of Smikros, the son of a Delphian man and a Milesian woman who, while pregnant, dreamed of the sun entering through her mouth and exit-ing through her genitals. Branchus was so named for her throat (Conon FGrH 26 F 133). Conon’s version represents a manufactured genealogy for the new Hellenistic oracle to derive legitimacy through a link to Delphi; see Greaves, “Divination,” 181–83.
20. The accounts of the Ionian Migration at Miletus are particularly violent and preserve memories of rape that link the conquerors to the land, though I believe “Greek” and “non-Greek” are not useful categories of analysis in Ionia (see Appendix 2). On Didyma as a locus of ritual unification, see Greaves, Miletos, 122–23.
21. Herodotus links Didyma to Miletus, but also specifies the Branchidae (1.46, 1.92, 2.156, 6.19). One of the goals of the Hellenistic revisions to the foundation myths was to bind the sanctuary more clearly to the city; see below, “Kings and Cities.” The extent to which the polis managed the sanctuary in the Archaic period is a matter of some debate. Klaus Tuchelt, “Die Perserzerstörung von Branchidai-Didyma und ihre Folgen-archäologisch bettrachtet,” AA, no. 3 (1988): 427–38, argues that while Didyma belonged to Miletus in name it fell under its administrative diktat only after its reconstruction in the fourth century, while Norbert Ehrhardt, “Didyma und Milet in archaischer Zeit,” Chiron 28 (1998): 11–20, argues for a closer connection. I side with Tuchelt. On the oracle’s importance to Miletus’ relationships with other states, see Greaves, Miletos, 124–27; Catherine Morgan, “Divination and Society at Delphi and Didyma,” Hermathena 147 (1989): 17–42; H. W. Parke, The Oracles of Apollo in Asia Minor (New York: Routledge: 1985), 14–19.
22. Dusinberre, Empire, Authority, and Autonomy, 220–21.
23. The date at which the Branchidae “betrayed” Miletus is a matter of debate. The communis opinio places it at the close of the Ionian revolt (e.g., Greaves, “Divination,” 179; Parke, Oracles of Apollo, 21), but N. G. L. Hammond, “The Branchidae at Didyma and in Sogdiana,” CQ² 48, no. 2 (1998): 339–41, proposes a date of 479.
24. See Chapter 2.
25. For a survey of the sacred ways in Ionia, see Greaves, Land of Ionia, 180–88. We have little evidence for either the road surfaces, which leads Slawisch and Wilkinson, “Processions, Propaganda, and Pixels,” to propose that the term “the sacred way” is a misleadingly anachronistic. They deconstruct the sacred way between Miletus and Didyma into its component parts, revealing an assemblage with discrete chronological and spatial clusters that suggests an absence of a fixed processional route until perhaps as late as the Roman period.
26. On the archaeological evidence for these sanctuaries falling into disuse, see Slawisch, “Epigraphy versus Archaeology.”
27. Χαρῆς εἰμι ὁ Κλέσιος Τειχιόσης ἀρχὸς, | ἄγαλμα το Ἀπόλλονος (I.Didyma 6). John Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 96; Fontenrose, Didyma, 166; Greaves, Land of Ionia, 186–87; Herda, Der Apollon-Delphinios-Kult, 332–50; Slawisch and Wilkinson, “Processions, Propaganda, and Pixels,” 125–27. On comparable statue groups in Ionia, see Cook, Greeks in Ionia, 103–6.
28. In this section I follow Alison Burford, The Greek Temple Builders at Epidaurus (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969), who analyzes the phases of construction at the Asclepium at Epidaurus.
29. Burford, Greek Temple Builders, 32, connects the international prominence to the plague at Athens, but a date in the 430s puts it somewhat earlier.
30. Burford, Greek Temple Builders, 33–35, also noting that the lack of evidence for an uptick in offerings in the 370s.
31. John Salmon, “Temples the Measures of Men: Public Building in the Greek Economy,” in Economies beyond Agriculture in the Classical World, ed. David J. Mattingly and John Salmon (New York: Routledge, 2001), 204, contra Coulton, Ancient Greek Architects, 26–27, who argues that architects and workers largely stayed within their regions under ordinary circumstances.
32. On the labor costs, see Salmon, “Temples the Measures of Men,” 200–201. Ionia had few local sources of stone, and a late-Hellenistic shipwreck carrying a column drum that matches those of the temple of Apollo at Clarus suggests the need to move building materials by sea; see Deborah N. Carlson and William Aylward, “The Kizilburun Shipwreck and the Temple of Apollo at Claros,” AJA 114, no. 1 (2010): 145–59.
33. Burford, Greek Temple Builders, 35; cf. Salmon, “Temples the Measures of Men,” 100–101.
34. Burford, Greek Temple Builders, 109–18, discusses the differences in the inscriptions.
35. The accounts for the construction of the Propylaea and Parthenon together totaled about two thousand talents; see RO 145 = IG I³ 449 and ML 60 = IG I² 366. IG I3 449 is a well-preserved example of inscriptions (IG I³ 433–97) that record accounts for public works in the fifth century, so the total expenditure could have been higher. For the temple at Delphi: Michael Scott, Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 145–62; the Parthenon: Burford, Greek Temple Builders, 81–85. The Parthenon was 2,147.55 m2, with columns rising just over 10 meters, compared to 6,038 m2 and 18.3 m at the Artemisium and 7,115.78 m2 and 19.71 m at Didyma.
36. Burford, Greek Temple Builders, 18–39.
37. Scott, Delphi, 147–48; John K. Davies, “Rebuilding a Temple: The Economic Effects of Piety,” in Economies beyond Agriculture in the Classical World, ed. David J. Mattingly and John Salmon (New York: Routledge, 2001), 214.
38. The largest contribution, just over three talents, came from the Dorians of the Peloponnese; see Davies, “Rebuilding a Temple,” 219. The commission included delegates from Athens, which was then boycotting the Pythian games.
39. The Phocians plundered the temple to pay for the war; see Diod. 16.23.1. Davies, “Rebuilding a Temple,” 219, notes the increased speed of construction, though Scott, Delphi, 156–57, argues that the influx of funds caused a corresponding growth of ambitions for the magnificence of the sanctuary. The sanctuary of Apollo prominently features an altar dedicated by the Chians that was already a reference point for Herodotus (2.135), but that was rebuilt in the later Classical and Hellenistic periods.
40. Scott, Delphi, 162; cf. Joshua P. Nudell, “Oracular Politics: Propaganda and Myth in the Restoration of Didyma,” AHB 32 (2018): 44–60.
41. The treasury of Athena, for instance, funded the Athenian expedition against Samos in 440/39; see IG I³ 363, 454, with G. Marginesu and A. A. Themos, “Ἀνέλοσαν ἐς τὸν πρὸς Σαμίος πόλεμον: A New Fragment of the Samian War Expenses (IG I³ 363 + 454),” in ΑΘΗΝΑΙΩΝ ΕΠΙΣΚΟΠΟΣ: Studies in Honour of Harold B. Mattingly, ed. Angelos P. Matthaiou and Robert K. Pitt (Athens: Greek Epigraphical Society, 2014), 171–84. On that expedition, cf. Chapter 3.
42. Though the details varied from case to case, the use of sacred land was subject to regulation. A fourth-century inscription from Chios, for instance, records a prohibition against sheep and pigs from entering the sanctuary to prevent them from defecating there, while a first-century one from Samos prohibits collecting timber in the vicinity of the sanctuary. See Franciszek Sokolowksi, Lois sacrées des cités grecques (Paris: De Boccard, 1969), 116.5–6, 11–12; Matthew P. J. Dillon, “The Ecology of the Greek Sanctuary,” ZPE 118 (1997): 120–22, 125.
43. Dignas, Economy of the Sacred, 39; Dillon, “Ecology of the Greek Sanctuary,” 117. On the relationship between endowments and taxation, see Joshua D. Sosin, “Endowments and Taxation in the Hellenistic Period,” Anc. Soc. 44 (2014): 43–89.
44. Franciszek Sokolowski, “Fees and Taxes in the Greek Cults,” HThR 47, no. 3 (1954): 153–64.
45. Isabelle Pafford, “Priestly Portion vs. Cult Fees—the Finances of Greek Sanctuaries,” in Cities and Priests: Cult Personnel in Asia Minor and the Aegean Islands from the Hellenistic to the Imperial Period, ed. Marietta Horster and Anja Klöckner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 51.
46. Tulia Linders, “Sacred Finances: Some Observations,” in Economics of Cult in the Ancient World, ed. Tulia Linders and Brita Alroth (Stockholm: Almquist and Wicksell, 1992), 9–12; cf. Davies, “Rebuilding a Temple,” 218–19.
47. Boardman, Persia and the West, 37. On the gold of Lydia and Phrygia, see Strabo 14.5.28; Ovid Met. 11.85–90. The proverb “wealthy as Croesus” appears at Archilochus F 22; Plato Rep. 2.359c–360b. The traditional thesis that gold and silver coinage entered the Greek world from Lydia has been supported by finds that firmly situate the coins before the Persian conquest: Nicholas Cahill and John H. Kroll, “New Archaic Coin Finds at Sardis,” AJA 109, no. 4 (2005): 589–617, and an analysis of the facilities for minting coins: Andrew Ramage, “King Croesus’ Gold and the Coinage of Lydia,” in Licia e Lidia prima dell’ellenizzazione, ed. Mauro Giorgieri (Rome: Consiglio nazionale Della Richerche, 2003), 285–90.
48. On the development of the Midas myth, see Lynn E. Roller, “The Legend of Midas,” CA 2, no. 2 (1983): 299–313; Kaplan, “Dedications to Greek Sanctuaries,” 130.
49. For discussion of these offerings, see Kaplan, “Dedications to Greek Sanctuaries,” 130; Jon D. Mikalson, Herodotus and Religion in the Persian Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 115–16. All dates for the Mermnad kings are rife with problems; see Anthony J. Spalinger, “The Date of the Death of Gyges and Its Historical Implications,” JAOS 98, no. 4 (1978): 400–409. I accept Spalinger’s argument that the date of Gyges’ death in the Classical sources is too early but have left the dates as approximates because they do not change my argument.
50. Kaplan, “Dedications to Greek Sanctuaries,” 139; H. W. Parke, “Croesus and Delphi,” GRBS 25, no. 3 (1984): 209–12.
51. See L. H. Jeffrey, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 339, for discussion of these inscriptions.
52. Dusinberre, Empire, Authority, and Autonomy, 218–21.
53. Cook, “Problem of Classical Ionia,” 9–18; cf. Balcer, Sparda, 414–17. Rutishauser, Athens and the Cyclades: 233, likewise identifies Athenian tribute demands behind the absence of Cycladic temple construction in the fifth century. Without dismissing the stress that Athenian tribute imposed on Ionia, this alone is insufficient explanation. Construction projects began to appear in the fourth century at a time when they still owed tribute first to Persia and then to Alexander. If tribute were the limiting factor, then the absence of construction at Chios, which was never a tributary ally, once again stands out.
54. John Boardman, “Eastern Greeks,” CR 14, no. 1 (1964): 83.
55. Osborne, “Archaeology and the Athenian Empire,” 320.
56. Osborne, “Archaeology and the Athenian Empire,” 329–31.
57. Osborne, “Archaeology and the Athenian Empire,” 328.
58. See Alexander Herda, “Copy and Paste? Miletos before and after the Persian Wars,” in Reconstruire les villes: Modes, motifs et récits, ed. Emmanuelle Capet, C. Dogniez, M. Gorea, R. Koch Piettre, F. Mass, and H. Rouillard-Bonraisin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 100; Sotiris G. Patro-nos, “Public Architecture and Civic Identity in Classical and Hellenistic Ionia” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 2002), 58–60, 103–4. Similarly, the refoundation of Priene in the fourth century made provisions for the construction of new temples.
59. Herda, “Copy and Paste?,” 101, with n. 62, recently challenged the literary orthodoxy that the temple was destroyed by pointing out the absence of evidence for fire from the Archaic level of the temple and instead suggests that the temple was only demolished to clear the space for the Hellenistic temple.
60. Margaret C. Miller, “Clothes and Identity: The Case of Greeks in Ionia c.400 BC,” in Culture, Identity and Politics in the Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. Paul J. Burton (Canberra: Australasian Society for Classical Studies, 2013), 29–30. Cf. Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre, Aspects of Empire in Achaemenid Sardis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 59–79, on the syncretism of Achaemenid rituals with the worship of Artemis. Despite Xenophon’s implication to the contrary, Megabyxos is not a name, but a title given to wardens at the sanctuary who oversaw financial management. The earliest reference to the Megabyxos may be Craterus’ comedy TolmaiF 37, while inscriptions from after Priene 334 offer honors to the Megabyxos of Ephesus for his support of the construction of the temple of the temple of Athena and name him “Megabyxos son of Megabyxos” (I.Priene 3 and 231). Jan Bremmer, “Priestly Personnel of the Ephesian Artemision: Anatolian, Persian, Greek, and Roman Aspects,” in Practitioners of the Divine: Greek Priests and Religious Figures from Homer to Heliodorus, ed. Beate Dignas and Kai Trapedach (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2008) plausibly suggests that the Ephesians adopted the name Megabyxos because of the Persian conquest, though he attaches the nebulous date of c.500 BCE. The early adoption, perhaps even several decades earlier, helps explain the apparent lack of controversy around acculturation at this cult, where a fourth-century frieze includes figures in Persian court dress participating in the procession; see Miller, “Clothes in Ionia,” 29–33. Evidence from the Roman period suggests that the Ephesians sought Megabyxoi from abroad because men in the position were castrated (Strabo 14.1.23). Artemis Ephesia had a distinctly Anatolian flavor (see especially Morris, “View from the East Greece,” 70–71), but the lack of early evidence for castrated Megabyxoi makes it difficult to determine whether this was part of the cult already in the Classical period, as Bremmer argues, or a development of the Hellenistic period, perhaps in tandem with the rising prominence of the cult of Magna Mater. Dusinberre, Empire, Authority, and Autonomy, 218–19, suggests that the Megabyxos was a Persian.
61. Franciszek Sokolowski, “A New Testimony on the Cult of Artemis of Ephesus,” HThR 58, no. 4 (1965): 427–31; Guy Maclean Rogers, The Mysteries of Artemis of Ephesos: Cult, Polis, and Change in the Graeco-Roman World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 6. On the implications of this inscription for Sardis in the Persian Empire, see Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. Peter T. Daniels (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002), 702. The cult of Artemis at Sardis has long been thought to date to Croesus because of the king’s patronage of the sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus, but, despite a Lydian phase of activity in and around the so-called Lydian Altar, which Dusinberre, Empire, Authority, and Autonomy, 226–30, posits belongs to the Achaemenid period, there is little evidence for a temple before the Hellenistic period; see Nicholas Cahill and Crawford H. Greenewalt Jr., “The Sanctuary of Artemis at Sardis: Preliminary Report, 2002–2012,” AJA 120, no. 3 (2016): 492–98. Its prominence at the end of the fifth century is revealed in Xen. Anab. 1.6.7 when Cyrus mentions it as a place where Orontas allegedly repented while quizzing this man who had again betrayed him.
62. P. J. Stylianou, “Thucydides, the Panionian Festival, and the Ephesia (III 104), Again,” Historia 32, no. 2 (1983): 245–49, contra Simon Hornblower, “Thucydides, the Panionian Festival, and the Ephesia (III 104),” Historia 31, no. 2 (1982): 241–45, who argues that Thucydides’ mention of the Ephesia meant a temporary relocation of the Panionion festival, and Irene Ringwood Arnold, “Festivals of Ephesus,” AJA 76, no. 1 (1972): 17–18, who sees a permanent relocation of the Panionion to Ephesus. Cf. Chapter 6 and Appendix 1.
63. The context of the inscription is disputed, with Christoph Börker, “König Agesilaos von Sparta und der Artemis-Tempel in Ephesus,” ZPE 37 (1980): 69–70, arguing for an otherwise unattested building phase. Burkhardt Wesenberg, “Agesilaos im Artemision,” ZPE 41 (1981): 175–80, challenges that interpretation, though not the identification of the name. The repairs need not have been to the columns, despite the location of the inscription. On Agesilaus’ expedition, see Chapter 5.
64. In point of fact, the two events did not coincide.
65. See Dieter Knibbe, Ephesos-Ephesus: Geschichte einer bedeutenden antiken Stadt und Portrait einer modern Großgrabung (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998), 88–89; Muss, “Amber from the Artemision,” 51; Rogers, Mysteries of Artemis, 33 n. 6.
66. Ernst Badian “Alexander the Great and the Greeks of Asia,” in Collected Papers on Alexander the Great (New York: Routledge, 2012), 127–31 (= “Alexander the Great and the Greeks of Asia,” in Ancient Society and Institutions: Studies Presented to Victor Ehrenberg, ed. Ernst Badian [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966], 37–69).
67. The quoted Artemidorus fragment is criticizing Timaeus. Translation adapted after H. L. Jones in volume 6 of the Loeb edition of Strabo’s Geography.
68. Polybius dedicated an extended portion of his twelfth book to an extended ad hominem attack against Timaeus where he tears down the latter’s qualifications as a historian. Christopher A. Baron, Timaeus of Tauromenium and Hellenistic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 58–88, offers a thorough assessment.
69. On the ebb tide of Persian power, see Chapter 6.
70. For Mausolus and Caria, see Chapter 6.
71. E.g., Parke, Oracles of Apollo, 129, “a burst of prosperity.”
72. Walter Voigtländer, Der jüngste Apollotempel von Didyma: Geschichte seine Baudekors (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1975), 14–28, argues that the plans dated to the 340s, based on a stylistic analysis of the decorations and the alleged careers of the architects who worked on the project, but J. M. Cook, “Review: Der jüngste Apollotempel von Didyma,” JHS 96 (1976): 243–44, rightly notes that this chronology relies on evidence for the interrelationship of monumental construction that is speculative at best. For the dating of the Delphinium, see Patronos, “Public Architecture and Civic Identity,” 65.
73. I follow an earlier chronology for the “refoundation” of Priene that places it during the reign of Mausolus (c.377–353). Architectural genealogies are as problematic as literary and mythical ones in the ancient world, but the architect for the temple of Athena, Pytheus, the primary architect on the project, was said to have also worked on the Mausoleum in Halicarnassus. Other scholars have suggested that Alexander refounded the polis. The date of the inscription at Priene is controversial; the inscription reads Βασιλεὺς Ἀλέξανδρος, and it is commonly thought that he did not adopt the royal titulature in his correspondence with the Greeks until taking the mantle of the King of Asia after the battle of Gaugamela in 331. For a recent reevaluation argues against the possibility of the early dating in 334, see Emiliano Arena, “Alessandro ‘Basileus’ nella Documentazione Epigrafica: La Dedica del Tempio di Atena a Priene (‘I.Priene’ 156),” Historia 62, no. 1 (2013): 48–79. S. M. Sherwin-White, “Ancient Archives: The Edict of Alexander to Priene, a Reappraisal,” JHS 105 (1985): 69–89, argues that Lysimachus made the dedication in honor of Alexander. While it was common for the Diadochoi to compete in making performative dedications to Alexander, the placement of this one in a location that hid its visibility does not quite fit the bill. I believe the inscription attests to an actual donation in the first years of Alexander’s campaign.
74. Jean-Charles Moretti, “Le Temple D’Apollon à Claros: État des Recherches en 2007,” RA 21 (2009): 172.
75. Pierre Debord, L’Asie Mineure au IVeSiècle (412–323 a.C.) (Pessac: Ausonius, 1999) shows how the Hellenistic period accelerated political changes in Ionia that had begun in the fourth century.
76. On the monumental steps, see Mary B. Hollinshead, Shaping Ceremony: Monumental Steps and Greek Architecture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 69.
77. Parke, Oracles of Apollo, 53. Greaves, Miletos, 136, offers a parallel between Hellenistic Miletus and Didyma in terms of shared visions of grandeur that never came to pass. Slawisch and Wilkinson, “Processions, Propaganda, and Pixels,” 130–31, associate the first series of inscriptions that mention a sacred way at the end of the third or start of the second century BCE, with the near-completion of the temple and complete recovery of Miletus from its destruction in 494.
78. For how Alexander became inextricably linked with the restoration of Didyma, see Nudell, “Oracular Politics.”
79. E.g., the “prophecy” came in a mistaken address, like one Alexander received at Siwah; see Nudell, “Oracular Politics,” 51–52. On the legend of Seleucus, see Daniel Ogden, The Legend of Seleucus: Kingship, Narrative, and Mythmaking in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 70–84.
80. Ulf Weber, “Der Altar des Apollon von Didyma,” MDAI(I) 65 (2015): 5–61.
81. On early Seleucid religious iconography, see particularly Kyle Erickson, “Seleucus I, Zeus and Alexander,” in Every Inch a King: Comparative Studies on Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, ed. Lynette G. Mitchell and Charles Melville (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 113–18.
82. On Didyma and Daphne, see Andrea De Giorgi, Ancient Antioch: From the Seleucid Era to the Islamic Conquest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 150–54; Ogden, Legend of Seleucus, 57, 138–51, 272.
83. The inscription for Apame appeared at the sanctuary of Artemis at Didyma, rather than at the one for Apollo, where a second inscription testifies to honors made on her behalf (McCabe, Didyma 182 = OGIS 745), as well as for Seleucus’ second wife, Phila (McCabe, Didyma 183 = I.Didyma 114), and Ptolemy I’s daughter Philotera (McCabe, Didyma 186 = I.Didyma 115).
84. For the diplomatic function of sanctuaries, see particularly Hugh Bowden, “The Argeads and Greek Sanctuaries,” in The History of the Argeads: New Perspectives, ed. Sabine Müller, Tim Howe, Hugh Bowden, and Robert Rollinger (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017), 163–82.
85. The traditional date for the altar aligns it with Seleucus’ failed expedition to the Indus in 306–303 (App. Sy r. 55); see Elias Bikerman, Institutions des Séleucides (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1938), 73; Bernard Hausoullier, Études sur l’histoire de Milet et du Didymeion (Paris: Librairie Emile Bouillon, 1902), 48–49; Andreas Mehl, Seleukos Nikator und sein Reich, part 1, Seleukos’ Leben und die Entwicklung seiner Machposition (Leuven: Peeters, 1986), 166–81; Louis Robert, “Documents d’Asie Mineure,” BCH 108, no. 1 (1984): 471–72; Ivana Savalli-Lestrade, Les philoi dans l’Asie Hellénistique (Paris: Librairie Droz: 1998), 5; Gillian Ramsay, “The Diplomacy of Seleukid Women: Apama and Stratonike,” in Seleukid Royal Women: Creation, Representation and Distortion of Hellenistic Queenship in the Seleukid Empire, ed. Altay Coskun and Alex McAuley (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016), 89–90, but this date is unsatisfactory because of the reference to the two kings; see Nudell, “Oracular Politics,” 54–55, with citations. Demodamas became a philos in the Seleucid court, but his role there is unknown. Hausoullier, 36, argues that he had relatives in the Seleucid court, but he is often thought to have been a mercenary general. Marie Widmer, “Apamè: Une reine au coer de la construction d’un royaume,” in Femmes influents dans le monde hellènistique et á Rome, ed. Anne Bielman Sánchez, Isabelle Cogitore, and Anne Kolb (Grenoble: UGA Éditions, 2016), 25–27, rightly notes he could have served to build relationships with local aristocracy; cf. Ramsay, 95–96, but these are not mutually exclusive. Jeffrey Rop, Greek Military Service in the Ancient Near East, 401–330 BCE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), has shown how recruitment and service were inextricably linked to patronage networks. Recent work has seen a more expansive role for Demodamas, including the transition from Zeus to Apollo as a tutelary deity; see Krzysztof Nawotka, “Seleukos I and the Origin of the Seleukid Dynastic Ideology,” SCI 36 (2017): 31–43, and Krzysztof Nawotka, “Apollo, the Tutelary God of the Seleucids, and Demo-damas of Miletus,” in The Power of the Individual and Community in Ancient Athens and Beyond, ed. Z. Archibald (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 261–84. Cynzia Bearzot, “Demodamante di Mileto e l’identità ionica,” Erga-Logoi 5, no. 2 (2017): 143–54, takes a different approach to a similar end in suggesting that Demodamas worked to promote Ionian identity in the early Hellenistic world.
86. Paul J. Kosmin, The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 61–67, while Bearzot, “Demodamante,” 151, suggests that the altar might have been in service of a Milesian community in the region.
87. There is only one, likely apocryphal, prophecy attributed to Claros in the fourth century, associated with the founding of Smyrna, but Parke, Oracles of Apollo, 125–26, rejects the notion that the oracle only developed in the Hellenistic period on the strength of the legendary material that associated the site with Mopsus and Manto. This does not mean that the oracle was active. Recent finds have revealed Bronze Age material; see Nuran Şahin and Pierre Debord, “Découvertes récentes et installation du culte d’Apollon pythien à Claros,” Pallas 87 (2011): 169–204.
88. Herodotus mentions Colophon on five occasions, but never Claros. Thucydides (3.33.1–2) says that the Spartan fleet put in at Claros in 427 but uses the name only as a landmark.
89. Parke, Oracles of Apollo, 123.
90. Claros had a footprint of 1,027.68 m2, which was roughly the size of the temple for Zeus at Nemea and the temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus and half the size of the Parthenon; see Moretti, “Le Temple d’Apollon à Claros,” 172. The footprint of the Hellenistic temple was adjusted during the Augustan period; see Parke, Oracles of Apollo, 128–29.
91. Parke, Oracles of Apollo, 129.
92. For Colophon inscription, see Benjamin D. Merrit, “Inscriptions of Colophon,” AJPh 56, no. 4 (1935): 358–97, and Léopold Migeotte, Les souscriptions publiques dans les cités grecques (Paris: Editions du Sphinx, 1992), 337. On this shipwreck and the identification of the drums with Claros, see Carlson and Aylward, “Kizilburun Shipwreck.”
93. Moretti, “Le Temple d’Apollon à Claros,” 173.
94. On the contentious relationship between Ephesus and Pygela, see Chapter 3 and Chapter 6.
95. For the development of the cult of Artemis in this period, see particularly Rogers, Mysteries of Artemis, 61–67, 80–88. The hypothesis of a cult reorganization in the early third century comes from a second century CE inscription (I.Eph. 26) that says as much (ll. 1–3), though Kevin Clinton, “Mysteria at Ephesus,” ZPE 191 (2014): 117–19, cautions that the identification of Lysimachus with the changes is an uncertain reconstruction. Clinton also distinguishes between the two aspects of Artemis, calling into question Rogers’ thesis that competing cults gave an opening for oversight. In a review of Rogers’ book, Jennifer Larson, “Review: The Mysteries of Artemis of Ephesos,” AHR 120, no. 2 (2015): 692, expressed skepticism that the Artemisium ever had the autonomy that Rogers imagines, comparing it to the sanctuary at Eleusis. It is necessary to consider the sanctuary and the city as having a symbiotic relationship, but Didyma is a more apt parallel than is Eleusis, despite the rites in question being mysteries.

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Chapter 9 (182-207) from Accustomed to Obedience?: Classical Ionia and the Aegean World, 480-294 BCE, by Joshua P. Nudell (University of Michigan Press, 03.06.2023), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.