The giant Temple of Artemis overlooked the Mediterranean and was the pride of the city of Ephesus. It had taken 120 years to build and was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—until the day in 356 BC when a young Greek named Herostratus burned it down.
The catastrophe shocked Ephesus, as did the arsonist’s motive: After his arrest, Herostratus said he set the temple on fire so his name would be remembered forever. He is the namesake of herostratic criminals, lawbreakers who act solely for the purpose of achieving notoriety.
Herostratus’s target was carefully chosen. The Temple of Artemis, dedicated to the goddess of childbirth and the hunt, was larger than the Parthenon in Athens. Its construction had been funded by the legendarily wealthy King Croesus. “The Temple of Artemis in Ephesus is the only house of the gods,” wrote an admirer, Philo of Byzantium. “For whoever examines it will believe that the gods exchanged the heavenly regions of immortality to have a place upon the earth.”
Little is known about Herostratus’s life before the fire. After his arrest, he was subjected to torture on the rack, a penalty usually inflicted only upon noncitizens—suggesting that he may not have been a native Ephesan, or may have been a slave.
After his execution, officials in Ephesus imposed an additional punishment on Herostratus. Seeking to deprive him of the glory he had sought, they barred the very mention of his name. Although the ban was widely observed for hundreds of years, one ancient writer violated the prohibition—ensuring that Herostratus’s name would survive and acquire the eternal infamy he had desired.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Ephesus is now Efes, Turkey. The city’s extensive Greek ruins, including the remains of the Temple of Artemis, were excavated beginning in the nineteenth century.
- The torching of the temple was the basis for “The Lunacy of Herostratus,” by the German poet Georg Heym (1887–1912), and for a Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) short story, “L’Érostrate.”
- Stratos means “army” in Greek; Herostratos means “army hero.”
