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PHESUS is the one place that ninetenths of the travellers who touch at Smyrna want to see. The famous temple, to be sure, has been wiped out, but the very ground is hallowed by the footsteps of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. Then, too, Ephesus was for centuries the intellectual and moral capital of the region, the seat of great church councils.

Luckily the desire is easily gratified. All you have to do is to catch the eight o'clock train, and not so very long after ten, you are there. Thirty years ago it took two days to make the journey of about forty miles. The train leaves Teos, the home of Anacreon, at quite a distance to the west and hidden by hills; but just before arriving at Ephesus one sees the site of Colophon, from which came the brigand band of Ionians which terrorized and took Aeolic Smyrna in time of peace.

The poor village at which the train

halts and which has the honor of representing great Ephesus, is called Ayasoluk. The form of the name gave rise to the tradition that St. Luke resided at Ephesus; but it is beyond doubt that the name comes from Agios Theologos (the sacred theologian) a name applied to the Apostle John, who dwelt a considerable time at Ephesus.

When we arrived, toward the end of May, it was already very hot at the hour of our arrival, and our first thought was of comfortable quarters and something to eat and drink-and this in Ephesus! Hard by the station is one of the most comfortable of inns kept by a Greek-we will call him so, though who can tell the composition of anybody's blood in these parts?-who is quite a character. He meets you at the station, but he does not buttonhole you. You are his as a matter of course. Where else would you want to go? To go to Ephes

us and not see Mr. Karpouzi, which in modern Greek means Mr. Watermelon -and he is shaped like one-would be to lose an important part of the show. His prices do seem a little high when you look at his unpretentious bedrooms; but when you sit down at his table, you forgive him. You would almost rather lose some of the ruins than his hospitality.

But we had not made all the long journey from Europe to be tempted by Mr. Watermelon's lotus fruit. The ruins were in two groups, one near the inn, and the other far away. We would at least see the near group before luncheon; and we addressed ourselves to it at once. Passing along by the impressive pillars of a ruined Roman aqueduct, each one surmounted by a stork's nest with a stork solemnly standing guard over it, we went up to a fortress-crowned hill which has sometimes, probably falsely, been considered to be the original acropolis of Ephesus. There was no trace of a wall there that could be dated back of the middle ages. But the entrance gate, an enormous structure, was made of marble blocks, plain and carved, which had seen earlier service elsewhere. The view over the plain of the Caÿster, which formed the territory of Ephesus, was reward enough for the climb.

At the foot of this hill on the side towards the sea, is a splendid marble structure which has lost little except its roof. It was, perhaps, once a Christian church, but in its later form it is a mosque. Our admiration for it was curtailed by the evident fact that most of its material was stolen from the great Ionic temple of Artemis which once stood close by, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, four times as large as the Parthenon. This stood on the border of an inner harbor artificially made on the Cayster at some distance from an outer harbor, which opened out upon the sea. This inner harbor is now low but rather firm ground.

In 1863-1875 an Englishman, Wood, undertook the excavation of this temple for the British Museum, and published a thick book giving the results of his work. Both the excavations and the book are a disappointment to one who comes to them with great expectations. A famous British archæologist once said to me, "When I was in Ephesus, I had Wood's dragoman, and he offered to shoot Wood for five shillings; and I have always been sorry that I didn't accept his offer." Wood's trouble came from the fact that he began work before the times of scientific excavations. He is accused of having smashed up most of the little that barbarians had left of the temple. We do those things. better now. It is reported that the British are intending to take up the work again and finish it with credit. The Austrians, who have from the Portethe concession of excavating Ephesus, and who have in the last seven years uncovered much of the old city, would like to complete the excavation of the temple also; but the land is British property.

What Wood's excavations have left is a big hole in the ground, where one sees nothing which throws much light on the plan or the structure of the temple. The whole area of the "hole" is so covered with vegetation that one gets little satisfaction from his visit. On the banks surrounding the hole thistles of the height of a man are a severe impediment to one who tries to explore Wood's outlying trenches. I can speak feelingly on that subject.

But Wood brought to the British Museum some precious objects. Chief among these is a sculptured column drum of the famous temple. Pliny had recorded that thirty-six of the columns of the temple had sculpture on their lowest part, and coins of Ephesus-and coins generally leave out unimportant details -represent the eight-column front of this temple, with absolute fidelity to

this report, with all the lower drums. sculptured. It would appear that below this drum there was a cubical base which also had its faces sculptured. This striking peculiarity of sculpturing the lowest drum seems to have been inherited from the older temple on the same spot which was burned down on the night in which Alexander was born, by the crazy Herostratos, to make his name remembered. Wood found one drum of this venerable temple partially preserved bearing the inscription, "King Croesus made the offering." There is now no doubt that Pliny told the truth, incredible as the story seemed.

The scene portrayed on the drum from the later temple is generally interpreted as Alcestis being conducted to the realms of death, "a pensive though a happy place," by the gentle Hermes who turns her over to Death, a figure with drooping wings. The gates of Hades may well have rung with applause when she came

in.

Pliny also recorded that one of these drums was sculptured by Scopas, a statement that used to be received with considerable incredulity. But the Hermes of the drum in question is certainly of a Scopasian type, especially in the deep set eye which expresses pathos. Since it is recorded that at the time when this temple was being built, Scopas was occupied at Halicarnassus on the famous Mausoleum, which means that he was near at hand, this statement of Pliny also is probably correct.

Work on the new temple was begun immediately after the destruction of the old one; but Alexander the Great came to maturity and passed that way long before it was finished. He is said to have offered to pay all the expenses of its completion as well as to reimburse the city for all former expenses, if he might inscribe his name on it, an offer which was proudly refused. This independent attitude of the city is most admirable, and

in striking contrast to the servility of the Athenians in the same generation, when they gave up the Parthenon to the vile uses of Demetrios Polyorketes.

The great image of Artemis housed in this temple was so unlike the Artemis elsewhere known among the Greeks, that had Apollo walked in majesty over from Miletus on a visit he would hardly have recognized his twin sister, the virgin goddess, in that monstrous shape with some twenty breasts, typifying the exuberant fertility of Mother Earth, Such was "Diana of the Ephesians,' as much an Asiatic goddess as Kybele who held such sway a little way back of the coast. There was probably a considerable Asiatic element in the make-up of Ephesus from the start. The worship of the great goddess was, unlike the usual Greek rites, accompanied by orgies. While Miletus, Greek in bone and fibre, sent out eighty colonies which dotted the shores of the Euxine, Ephesus was content to keep her population at home.

To the worship of the great goddess the whole city was devoted; the slightest encroachment upon her domain was enough to set the whole city in an uproar. Little silver images of the goddess were multiplied and sold to the throngs who came to visit Ephesus, as well as to those who dwelt there. So great was this traffic that the silversmith's trade was most important and lucrative. When Christianity appeared on the scene, there was war to the knife. The new faith not only attacked the sanctity of the goddess, but proposed to cut off the revenue of the skilled craftsmen of the city. It is not often that a man's pocket and his religion are so violently assailed at the same time.

The embittered attack of idolaters and silversmiths upon the Christians did not, however, take place in or at the temple, but in the theatre, more than a mile distant, not in a straight line, but as