Ephesus: Ruins of Empire 2

• Memories: the crowds, the beauty of the Roman elite’s terrace houses and sculptured possessions, the monumentalism. Places like this – like Hierapolis, like Ankor Wat – keep making me wonder how created beauty can sit so comfortably in a society whose foundations are also the warrior life , slavery and conquest.
• Let’s get the crowds out of the way, which is to say we moved (uncomfortably) amidst a thronging anthill of cruise ship and bus tour groups, maybe some members of the ‘Italy, Greece and Turkey in two weeks’ clubs, noisy grating chatter, obsessive picture taking of one another in front of every piece of marble, noticeably high levels of disinterest among many: one woman twangs to another about a friend of her son who’s been drafted to some varsity basketball team, two men are exchanging notes on medications. Ah … what the Greek and Romans have to compete with.
• The area near Ephesus might have been settled for some 6,000 or so years, so long ago that the sea, which now sits about 10 kms away across a silted plain, once came to the foot of the hills where the Greeks, then the Romans built a city and port. Through all this, until the arrival of Christians, the area was a centre of worship of the Mother Goddess: the Anatolian Cybele, the Greek’s Artemis, the Roman’s Diana.
• Although today layer upon layer of buildings lay in various states of ruin, the result of recurrent earthquakes across this region, the Roman Ephesus was once a city of some 250,000 people, the centre spectacularly grand and grandiose: a great theatre (seating 25,000); the agora; temples with more beautiful friezes; a gymnasium area complete with playing field, exercise rooms, baths, swimming pool and toilets; monumental gates and (by today’s standards) an almost equally monumental public latrine; sophisticated water and sewage systems, and public walls and streets covered in marble or tile mosaics of flora, birds and other creatures, and colourful geometric patterns. Then there’s the Library of Celsus (said to hold 12,000 scrolls in carefully controlled atmospheric conditions), the two-storey façade now reconstructed in its spectacular glory.
• But of special beauty are the interiors of the elite’s terraced houses: the fine mosaic floors, exquisite frescoes (laurels, birds, philosophers, goddesses and gods), pools and floor-based central heating. Pleasing and sumptuous.
• The fine museum in nearby Selçuk, where we stay, is filled with even more preserved artifacts from Ephesus, mostly associated with the elite or from public buildings.
- Many sculptured renderings of Eros as a youth and adult, including the delightful infant riding a dolphin.
- The statuesque, fecund Cybele/Artemis, with her chest of 30 or so small breasts, her neck and gown covered in fine detail with bees, grapes, garlands, scorpions, crabs and embracing lovers.
- Many friezes, recovered from gladiator tombs, of the boys in training or combat, feet standing on animal and human victims, muscular arms lopping off the head of an opponent (a sneer on the lips).
- Beautiful Aphrodite carrying a large oyster shell resting on her abdomen.
- A small effigy of Priapus, his erect penis almost as large as the man himself (a postcard image that is available across tourist Turkey).
- A gigantic bust, plus forearm and fist, of Emperor Domitian, the thick, Churchillian neck and jaw of a man who was – and perhaps likes to be seen as – a bully, a fit model for Fascism and other gangster isms of our time.
• Puzzling over these remains, like those at Hieropolis, makes me return again to the jarring, unreconciled presence here of such beauty and such barbarism … not what is touted as the beauty of the monumental buildings, plazas and columned streets, but rather the beauty, even tenderness, of the painted and sculpted birds, whispering lovers, Eros and Aphrodite. Part of terrible whole here are the philosopher’s images and the delicate birds on the household walls of the elite, whose privilege is founded on conquest, slavery, domination, feeling always nearby the jutting, bullying jaw of Domitian.
• As I once did at Ankor Wat, I think of those who quarried and hauled and raised high the great stones that support and decorate all this monumentalism, those who set the water and sewer mains, those who fed the mistress and cleaned the master’s rooms.
• Odd that we wonder at and celebrate in ship loads the warriors and bullies of antiquity in the form of the collapsed, stony remains of conquest and privilege. The grand buildings, the martial scenes of violence and conquest. Faced with all this we seem to go dumb, and are well-supported by tourist literature and guides who tell the stories of the remains, which are the stories of the elites, as if they are the only ones to tell. The idealized, laundered (we might say today) past now presented as ‘history’, a ‘wonder of the world’, ‘our shared civilized past’ I heard one guide pronounce. And all the people ‘disappeared’ from this touristic, civilized past? Those whose stories we don’t hear and can’t even imagine or ask about, so naturalized are the official stories. Those we don’t see in the ‘beautiful’ friezes, hear about in these stories of empire? Where are these people?
• The glorious streets mosaics, the delicate, inviting beauty of Aphrodite’s hips, the turn of that bird’s colourful head, every-so-small tile after tile: undeniable, unqualified beauty that also so easily seduces us into forgetfulness.