Most of my guests come to Ephesus thinking about the marble columns, Apostle Paul’s sermons, and the Grand Theater. Very few of them have heard about one single day in the year 88 BC when this magnificent city became the stage of one of the bloodiest events in ancient Asia Minor. Today, historians call this day the Asiatic Vespers, or, because Ephesus played such a big role on that day, the Vespers of Ephesus.
In the first century BC, Ephesus was the capital of the Roman province of Asia. The Romans ruled this region since 133 BC, when the last king of Pergamon, Attalus the third, left his entire kingdom to Rome in his will. On paper this was a peaceful inheritance. But in practice, the Roman tax collectors, who were called publicani, treated the cities of Asia Minor like an open purse. They were lending money to people in high interest rates, taxing them twice when it pleased them, and seizing the lands of those who could not pay. As you can understand, hatred against Rome was building up everywhere from Ephesus to Pergamon, from Tralles to Adramyttium.
This made the perfect opportunity for a foreign king to step in. Mithridates the sixth Eupator was the king of Pontus, on the southern shore of the Black Sea. He was Hellenistic in his culture, very ambitious in his politics, and seeing himself as the natural protector of the Greek-speaking East against Roman greed. By the year 89 BC, Mithridates had already taken much of Asia Minor without much of a fight. The Greek cities, Ephesus among them, opened their gates to him as a liberator and savior.
The Order of Mithridates
Then came the order which made this story so dark!
In the spring of 88 BC, Mithridates sent secret letters to the governors and city councils of the province. The instruction was very simple and very terrible. On one single day, every Roman and Italian person living in these cities, free man or slave, man, woman or even children, was going to be killed. Their property would be shared between the killers and Mithridates’ own treasury. And it had to be done by everyone at the same time, so nobody could run away and warn the next city.
Ancient writers like Appian and Plutarch give us numbers between 80,000 and 150,000 dead across Asia Minor. Even for the standards of the ancient world, this was a number that shocked Rome.
The Massacre at the Temple of Artemis
Ephesus took an active part in this. The Romans and Italians who were living in our city already heard the rumors of what was coming. Some of them did what any Greek or Roman would do in a deadly hour, they ran to the Temple of Artemis. As we know, the Temple of Artemis was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and it was also a sanctuary. We call it asylia in Greek. Anyone who reached the temple boundary, even the worst criminal, was protected by the goddess herself. To take a man from the steps of Artemis was an insult to Artemis.
But it didn’t stop the killers. The Ephesians dragged the Romans out of the temple and killed them on the same streets we are walking today so peacefully. Appian writes about this detail clearly and honestly it is one of the darkest things ever written about our city. The same scenes were happening in Pergamon, in Tralles, in Adramyttium, in many other cities of the province on that same day. The Vespers of Ephesus was not just one massacre, it was a coordinated act across the whole province on a single day.
Why It is Called Vespers?
The name was given much later by modern historians. They borrowed it from the Sicilian Vespers of the year 1282, when the Sicilians rose against their French rulers at the hour of evening prayer. The similarity was the simultaneous killings in many cities at the same time. Some scholars call it the Asiatic Vespers, but because Ephesus was the most important city which took part, many sources call it the Vespers of Ephesus.
After the Vespers
The victory of Mithridates didn’t last for long. Rome sent the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and after a long brutal war Mithridates was forced to retreat back to Pontus. With the Treaty of Dardanos in 85 BC, Mithridates kept his throne, but the cities of Asia paid the price. Sulla put crushing fines and back taxes on Ephesus and on all the other cities of the province as a punishment for what they had done. Ephesus, which had welcomed Mithridates as a liberator only few years before, was bankrupt and humiliated now. It took generations, and the patronage of later Roman emperors like Augustus and Hadrian, for Ephesus to gain her old wealth back.
I find this story important also for another reason. When my guests admire the Library of Celsus, the Temple of Hadrian, Curettes Street, Trajan Fountain, all these monuments are coming from the centuries after Ephesus had to rebuild herself in the shadow of Rome. The marble we walk on today is, in a way, the answer of a city which survived her own worst day.
Visit Ephesus with a Professional Tour Guide
When I do my tours in Ephesus and we stand in front of the foundations of the Temple of Artemis, sometimes I stop and tell this story to my guests. People come expecting to hear about the seven wonders, about the priests of the goddess, about Heraclitus and Androclus the founder of Ephesus. They are always surprised when I tell them that this same sacred place was once attacked by the hands of its own people, who didn’t respect even Artemis herself.
There is much more to discover in Ephesus. Come and unravel the hidden, less told mysteries of Ephesus with me. Contact me through theephesus.com or toursaroundturkey.com to learn more about Ephesus and to hire a professional, licensed tour guide for Ephesus, Turkey. See you soon, Hasan Gülday.
