After visiting the brief remains of Sardes, the ancient capital of Lydia, inside Asia Minor, we arrived to the place where the ruins of the mythical temple of Artemis rest, lit by a slightly warm sun of early December. The site is fenced and you have to pay a small entrance to enter. The Paktolos river flows quietly close the fence. In the background, imposing itself on the western horizon, the powerful mᴀss of Tmolos Mount rises: the place where Greek mythology located the birth of the god Dionysus.
The great temple of Artemis was built on the site where a sanctuary dedicated to this godess was raised at least from the fifth century BC. In fact, during the excavations some remains of this sanctuary have been found in moderate state of preservation, reason why they have been partially covered. The temple was built to the beginning of the third century BC, in hellenistic times, but it was only half-finished. The building stood unfinished during many years and we can ᴀssume that the earthquake of AD 17 seriously damaged its long-lived walls.
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In the biennium 123/4, Hadrian visits the microasian regions of Phrygia and Lydia. he likely included Sardes, the traditional capital of Lydia, on his route, although it is true that there is no document, neither literary nor archaeological, that explicitly states it. Research suggests that it is at this time when the imperial initiative decides to give a vigorous boost to the construction of the colossal temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis which rose, unfinished, to a mile and a half from the center of the city. The result was a magnificent temple of mixed Greek and Roman style, very celebrated in Antiquity since it occupied the fourth place in the list of the largest sacred buildings of the Empire. In addition to its original dedication to Artemis (the ancestral anatolic mother goddess), the new temple was also dedicated to the cult of the imperial figure, probably responding to the granting of the second neocorate to Sardes, that is the privilege granted by the emperor and the senate of Rome to erect a temple in which to officially honor the emperor. This neocorate was one of the most esteemed distinctions in the whole of the Roman East, for whose obtaining the major cities competed among themselves regardless of expenses.
In pH๏τo 1 we can see an overview of the excavated area. It conserves in good condition the plinth of the temple, constructed with magnificent white marble ashlars united with metal staples (pH๏τo 2). The stairway of the temple (pH๏τo 3) was constructed of equal material and also the walls of the Roman cella (only a pair of layers has been conserved and not in all its perimeter – pH๏τo 4), what allows to differentiate them clearly from the walls of the Hellenistic cella: constructed in a good quality but less showy granite ashlar. See pH๏τo 5 to compare the Hellenistic walls (in the background) with Romans ones (foreground).
The temple, of pseudo-diptera layout, had eight columns in its front and twenty in each long side. The columns of the Hellenistic temple had a slightly smaller diameter than those of the Roman one, were shorter and were fluted (pH๏τo 6). On the occasion of the extension of the Hadrian-Antoninus Pius times they were removed from their original place and reused in the Roman colonnade, for which they had to be placed on pedestals in order to match their height with that of the Roman columns. In pH๏τo 7 you can see two of these Hellenistic columns, flanked by five Roman columns.
The Roman temple was never completely finished either. Abandoned in the fourth century AD, its cella was reused as a cistern intended to store the water to be used by a small rural nucleus that settled there on the occasion of the desacralization of the temple (pipes have been found that confirm this one). Likewise began a period of amortization of its materials, having been detected in the excavations remains of furnaces in which the magnificent marble blocks were surely calcined in order to produce high quality lime mortar. This process continued throughout the Late Antiquity, Middle Ages and probably the Modern Age, being the reason that the temple of Artemis has arrived practically dismantled to the present day and with most of its columns missing or mutilated (only two of them remain intact). In pH๏τo 8 we can see the remains of the colonnade of the eastern front of the temple.
