Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/486

Rh 466 E P H E P H imprisonment he intended to visit Macedonia. In so far as these considerations relate to the thought of a place where information as to the state of distant churches could most easily be had, where friends would be most likely to congregate, or in which fugitives would most readily seek refuge, it is obvious that they are better fulfilled by Rome than by Csesarea. The idea again of visiting Macedonia might be fulfilled by its being taken on the way to Asia. No stress can be laid on the omission of the name of Onesi- mus, and the meaning of vi. 21 does not seem to be that ye &quot; also,&quot; in addition to the Colossians, of whom nothing had been said, &quot; may know,&quot; but that ye, of whose state I have spoken freely as one thoroughly acquainted with it, may &quot;also&quot; know my state. The decisive argument, how ever, for Rome rather than Csesarea, as the place whence the epistle was written, arises from the fact that all the epistles known as those of the imprisonment must have been written from the same place, and that this epistolary activity is more naturally connected with Rome than with Caasarea. In the former city the apostle had much greater freedom than in the latter, both to receive intelligence and to write to friends (Acts xxviii. 30, 31). Upon the whole, the commonly entertained belief that our epistle was written at Rome may be received without hesitation. If so, it was written towards the close of the apostle s captivity in that city, 63 A.D. Litera- Literature. In dealing with an epistle such as this it is un- ture. necessary to devote much space to the literature of the subject. Any one desirous to study the epistle will gradually become acquainted with it as he pursues his task. But references may be made to the various Introductions to the New Testament by such writers as De Wette, Bleek, Davidson, Hilgenfeld, Gloag, and to the leading commentaries, those of Ivtickert, Harless, De Wette, Stier, Meyer, Eadie, Ellicott, Schenkel in Lange s B. WerJc, Ewald in an appendix to his Sicbcn Sendschreibcn d. W. T., Bleek. The student will not fail to consult Baur in his Paulus, and the NacJuipost. Zcitaltcr of Schwegler. Nowhere will a larger amount of valuable matter bearing on the epistle be found than in Canon Lightfoot s Commentary on the Colossians, with its introduction and appendices. (W. MI.) EPHESUS, a very ancient city on the west coast of Asia Minor. It was situate on some hills which rose out of a fertile plain near the mouth of the river Cayster, while the temple and precincts of Artemis or Diana, to the fame of which the town owed much of its celebrity, were in the plain itself, at the distance of about a mile. The situation of the city was such as at all times to command a great commerce. Of the three great river basins of western Asia Minor, those of the Hermus, Cayster, and Maeander, it commanded the second, and had ready access by easy passes to the other two, besides being the natural port and landing-place for Sardes, the capital of the Lydian kings. The earliest inhabitants assigned to Ephesus are the mythical Amazons, who are said to have founded the city, and to have been the first priestesses of the Asiatic Artemis. With .the Amazons we hear of Leleges and Pelasgi as in possession. In the llth century B.C., accord ing to tradition, Audroclus, son of the Athenian king Codrus, landed on the spot with his lonians, and from this conquest dates the history of the Greek Ephesus. But here the louians by no means succeeded in absorbing the races in possession or superseding the established worship. Their city was firmly established on Coressus and Prion, between which hills lies the city harbour ; but the old inhabitants still clustered in the plain around the sanctuary of Artemis. When, however, we call the deity of Ephesus Artemis, we must guard against misconception. Really she was a primitive Asiatic goddess of nature of the same class as Mylitta and Cybele, the mother of vegetation and the nurse of wild beasts, an embodiment of the fertility and productive power of the earth. She was represented in art as a stiff erect mummy, her bosom covered with many breasts, in which latter circumstance Guhl sees allusion to the abundance of springs which arise in the Ephesian plain. The organization of her worship, too, of which more below, was totally unlike anything Hellenic. It was only by reason of their preconceived ideas that the lonians found in this outlandish and primitive being a form of Artemis their conductor. The entire history of Ephesus consists of a long series of struggles between Greek and Asiatic manners and religions, between the ideas of the agora and the harbour and those of the precincts of the goddess. This struggle can be traced throughout in the devices of the Ephesian coin, the type of the goddess which appears in it becoming at times Asiatic, at times Hellenic, according to the predominant influence of the period. For centuries after the foundation of Androclus, the Asiatic influences waxed and the Greek waned. Twice in the period 700-500 B.C. the city owed its preservation to the interference of the goddess, once when the swarms of the Cimmerians overran Asia Minor, and once when Croesus besieged the town, and only retired after it had solemnly dedicated itself to Artemis, the sign of such dedication being the stretching of a rope from city to sanctuary. Croesus was eager in every way to propitiate the goddess, and as at this time her first great temple was building on the plans of the architect Chersiphron, he presented most of the columns required for the building as well as some cows of gold. It is probable that policy mingled with his piety, his object being to make Ephesus Asiatic in character, a harmonious part of the empire he was forming in hither Asia, and then to use the city as a port and by such means counterbalance the growing power of Miletus and other cities of the coast. The mother-city of Ephesus, Athens, seems to have counter worked his projects by despatching one of her noblest citizens, Aristarchus, to restore law on the basis of the Solonian constitution. The labours of Aristarchus seem to have borne fruit. It was an Ephesian follower of his, Hermodorus, who aided the Decemviri at Rome in their compilation of a system of law. And in the same genera tion Heraclitus, probably a descendant of Codrus, quitted his hereditary magistracy in order to devote himself to philosophy, in which his name became almost as great as that of any Greek. Poetry had long flourished at Ephesus. From very early times the Homeric poems had found a home and many admirers there; and to Ephesus belong the earliest elegiac poems of Greece, the war songs of Callinus, who flourished in the 7th century B.C., and was the model of Tyrtaeus. And yet that on the whole Croesus was successful in .his schemes seems certain. When the Ionian revolt against Persia broke out in the year 500 B.C., under the lead of Miletus, Ephesus remained submissive to Persian rule ; and when Xerxes returned from the march against Greece, he honoured the temple of Artemis, and even left his children behind at Ephesus for safety s sake. After the great Persian defeat, Ephesus for a time paid tribute to Athens, with the other cities of the coast, and Lysander first and afterwards Agesilaus made it their head quarters. In the year 356 B.C., on the same night on which Alexander the Great was born, an incendiary named Herostratus, wishing only to make his name famous, if even by a monstrous crime, set fire to that temple of Artemis which Chersiphron had planned, and which had been later enlarged or even rebuilt by Pasonius in the 5th century. With the greatest eagerness the Ephesians set about its re construction on a still more splendid scale. The ladies of the city sold their jewellery, and neighbouring cities sent contributions, many of the massive columns being the gift