Chambers of the Sun Part 14

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Life Amongst the Dead

Alihan Guesthouse, Selçuk - 20th September, Evening

And so, at last, to Ephesus. The most famous city in Ionia has led such a many-splendoured past that it would be a bit silly to give a potted history; its life is best told by the story of its Temple of Artemis, the seventh of the Wonders of the World. First consecrated, in the latter shadows of the Bronze Age, to an equally shadowy Mother Goddess figure - most probably a conflation of Cybele, the magna mater of antiquity, and an early cult of Artemis - the temple is said by Pausanias to predate the Ionian migrations. The goddess worshipped here took form before the days of the clearly defined Pantheon cults, and is a slightly threatening mixture of mother goddess and huntress, with more breasts than fingers. She made an easy target for the early Christian apologists seeking to persuade the pagan world that they worshipped ridiculous chimerae, and gets a real pasting from Saint Jerome, Cyprian and Minuncius Felix in his Octavia. Indeed, a pious old soul left the following inscription on the site: "Having destroyed the delusive image of the demon Artemis, Demeas has erected this symbol of Truth, the God that drives away idols, and the Cross of priests, deathless and victorious sign of Christ."

This was all good fun, and the Lady of Ephesus probably saw a few blood sacrifices and naked dances in her first incarnation, but sadly the Cimmerians came along and spoiled things with a brutally swift invasion around 650BC, just at the point when the buds of Ionia were shyly opening. Ephesus herself was blessed with a master-poet at the time, a certain Callinus who has rather suffered at the hands of posterity in comparison with his near-contemporary Tyrtaeus of Sparta. Both poets wrote martial songs to try and inflame military passion, and, although they didn't do Ephesus much good at the time, Callinus' elegies are direct and stately. Unlike other early elegists, he does not read like a copyist of Homer, but rather like an excerpt from one of the later books of the Iliad, so imbued is he with Homeric diction and, more importantly, with Homeric spirit. The first, and largest, of his fragments could be a rallying cry in the mouth of a secondary hero:

"How long will you slouch at your ease?
Will you fire up a valorous soul?
Though you think you can slumber in peace,
War has come on this land as a whole..." (tr. Moody)

It was not the Cimmerians but a flood which ravaged the temple in the end, and it was reconstructed with a little help from the bottomless pockets of King Croesus at about 550, although Herodotus delightfully attributes the temple to the Amazons. This version, devoted to an Artemis who would not only have been more recognisable as the virgin moon divinity but would even have contributed to the syncretism of the goddess' cult, was burned down by a certain Herostratus, who is supposed to have received a damnatio memoriae for his efforts. The irony is that the later writers Strabo and Valerius Maximus record that he had set fire to the temple "that his name might be spread through the whole world," and, in spite of the Ephesians, it would seem to have worked.

Still, never a race to be beaten down, the Ephesians set to putting the damage to rights, and must have restored it to something even greater than its former glory, for it earned the following testimony from Antipater of Sidon, who may have compiled the list of the Seven Wonders:

"I have seen the wall of lofty Babylon on which the chariots drive, the statue of Zeus by the banks of the Alpheus, the hanging gardens, the colossus of the Sun at Rhodes, the huge labour of the mighty pyramids, even the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I beheld the temple of Artemis that rose to the clouds, those other marvels lost their lustre, and I said, "apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked upon anything so magnificent."

By this point the reader will be seeing something of a pattern, and along came the Goths in the third century to grind the temple down to its present state. Just why Antipater, writing another two centuries later, added a ruin to his list of the greatest structures of Antiquity escapes me. The temple today is a bit of a disappointment; only the one column of any great stature is still standing, although its immense height gives some feel of what the building must have been. A chaotic blast of pan-pipes fills the air as a hawker tries to dupe yet another American couple, while one of his colleagues offers me what he insists is an "old coin."

"Just how old is that coin?"

"Old. Efes (Ephesus)."

"It's younger than I am."

"Copy. Good copy. Two lira, my friend. You collect?"

No. I was just on the point of leaving, when I saw a sight that warmed the cockles of my heart. Choosing a moment when the tour groups were departing, a couple had snuck down to the column and crouched by the base. They began chanting what could only have been one of the ancient Greek hymns, and then the man took out a water-bottle full of wine and splashed a generous libation over the marble, while his girlfriend sprinkled barley over the top. I watched them, fascinated, and could not but go over to ask them about their ritual. For the singular conversation that follows I direct the reader to the photograph of the sheet of paper we used to try and get over the language barrier.

They were a Greek couple, G- and N-, and they were the closest thing that the Peleponnese has to druids. Not in the least shy about their faith, they patiently explained the ley-lines that run throughout the Ancient Greek world between the greatest of the old sites, each with a line of particular power running back to Mount Olympus. They have been to Delphi, Taygetus, Bassae, Epidaurus, the Temple of Poseidon by the Piraeus, Olympia, in fact pretty much every point of any religious significance in the country, and are embarking on the Greek colonies. Only when all the cults are propitiated, they tell me, will the world's problems end. "Do you know the White Brothers?" asks G-. "Uh...no?" Another explanation. A twelve-sided pyramid on top of Olympus. Zeus. The White Spirit.

It turns out that they were singing the Orphic hymn to Artemis; he produces a copy and we chant it together, their graceful modern Greek making my laborious scansion sound deeply ungainly, and then they sing me a song, whose lyrics I will add to this entry later, in mournful voices full of feeling. Don't laugh. These are the first people I have met in Turkey for whom the ruins are animated by anything greater than a Dorling Kindersley guidebook, and they are charming and very grave about their duty. G- gives me a copy of the Orphic hymns as a parting gift, and they leave for the Temple of Dionysus at Teos.

A little later, at the main archaeological park of Ephesus, I came across a busfull of Spaniards holding a service in the "Double Church" of the Virgin, where the Ecumenical Council met to charge Nestorius and Pelagius with heresy. It does not quite have the same eccentric fascination as the rites of Artemis, but it is good to see people who can find life and relevance where so many see only stones.

I am starting to maintain it as an axiom that the larger sites in Turkey disappoint, but Ephesus doesn't quite. The entry fee is outrageous, half the site is roped off and the other half is swarming, but it is hard not to be impressed by the state of the remains. The facade of the Library of Celsus is well worth the two years of restoration work that has gone into it, and it looks as astonishing in reality as it does in the photographs, while the Augustan gate next to it has also been turned out very well. There are also the mausolea of Memmius, the patron of Catullus and Lucretius, and Pollio, who, if I have the right man, helped Vergil recover his farm and earned the best of the Eclogues in gratitude.

The best thing about the city is the feeling of presence, not as in some vague numen but as in a closeness of vulgar life to the surface. In the monumental baths, I can picture Encolpius quarrelling with Ascyltus over the pretty slave-boy Giton, Sybaris lying girlishly in the shade, stricken with love for Glycera, and Marrucinus stealing napkins. Despite the magnificence, Ephesus is a city where the muck shines through the brass; a famous piece of graffiti in the Gate of Augustus reads "woe upon those who piss here." This filth has been in Ephesus for far longer than much of the city in its present state; it found its most notorious form in that other native poet, Hipponax.

Hipponax is best described by Schmidt in The First Poets: "...it is refreshing to come upon the thoroughly urban disenchantment of Hipponax, his world of textures and smells, in which the human body at its most gross finds its laureate in the privy...among the first poets to defecate in verse." He did not amuse the nineteenth century; his verse is scatological, biting, deliberately repulsive in sound and subject. He invented a new metre, the scazon or "limper," the better to be vulgar. "Take my cloak," he says in one of his more presentable fragments, "so I can hit Boupolus one in the eye." This is the voice of the streets, where life is harsh, short and irredeemably dirty. With antiquity's belief that the poet's form must have echoed his verses, Pliny the Elder says that Hipponax, "notoriously ugly," "snarled even at his parents." One text has him stealing up on an old mother while she sleeps and "violating her sea-urchin." Schmidt sticks his tongue in his cheek: "Scholars have conjectured that the sea-urchin may be her daughter's." The idea of a convocation of Oxford dons discussing such a subject is hilarious in the extreme.

Why, then, do we read a poet "whose verse has the repulsive fascination of toilet-wall graffiti?" Not just because we are compelled by the same quality that makes us watch soap operas; there is something greater at work here. In his epitaph on the poet, Theocritus writes:

"Behold Hipponax' burial place,
A true bard's grave.
Approach it not, if you're a base
And base-born knave.
But if your sires were honest men
And unblamed you,
Sit down thereon serenely then,
And eke sleep too."

He was probably a member of the Ephesian nobility - at least, his family were important enough to be exiled. He must have made a conscious decision, in a world of courtly poets and elegant loves, to write down to his subject. In Hipponax's world, no man is shown to be greater than he is; this is brutal honesty in its most literal form. The same spirit - although decanted into the most vile form conceivable - is active here that is active in Plato, and in all of the very highest achievements of the Classical intellect: the constant questioning of assumptions, the need for truth (though normally for its beauty rather than its ugliness) and above all, to borrow Matthew Arnold's phrase, the impulse "to see the object in itself as it really is." Whether you loathe him or grudgingly admire him, you must concede this to Hipponax: where there's muck, there's brass.

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