Would you truly like to be famous? What is it worth to have your name spoken around the world? For many, life feels like a long journey into a blind alley: the limitless promise of youth shades into the reality of being nobody much, nowhere special. If a single act could rescue you from obscurity, why not do it?
On this night, 2,365 years ago, a young man of Ephesus found the prospect of permanent anonymity too much to bear. The Greeks of his time put great store by fame, or kleos; having a name among men for some great deed was a kind of immortality, raising the well-known to the rank of demi-gods. "His sons will be conspicuous among mankind and his noble name will never perish."
This man of Ephesus had done no good deeds to immortalize his name; but, he reasoned, a deed need not be good to be memorable - so he set fire to one of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Temple of Artemis, center of pilgrimage for all of Asia Minor.
The sanctuary was a vast and splendid structure. Built by the Amazons before recorded history, it was reconstructed over a period of 120 years by the best architects, using the limitless funds of Croesus, legendarily wealthy king of Lydia. More than three times the size of the Acropolis, it rose sixty feet into the blue Ionian air, its sculpted columns writhing with sacred figures. Men who had seen the hanging gardens of Babylon, the pyramids, and the colossus of Rhodes admitted these paled in comparison with the house of Artemis. But the bigger the temple, the bigger the blaze; all that work, care, and love disappeared in a day.
The Ephesians were dumbstruck; the physical and spiritual center of their city had been scorched out. They were too shocked even to ask who could have been responsible - so the young man took to strolling up and down, hinting that he might know something about it. When they took the bait, he explained that the desire for fame, nothing else, had prompted the deed.
The townspeople did what they thought was the right thing: not just executing the young man, but forbidding that his name should ever be mentioned. This, though, proved too difficult: consigning so notorious a criminal to oblivion was like attempting not to imagine elephants for thirty seconds. Everyone knew the name they were trying so hard to forget. Finally the chronicler Theopompus broke ranks and, by recording his name, "embalmed him in history, like a fly in amber."
The temple was rebuilt, perhaps not so splendidly, and destroyed again in later, more violent times. Some passing Goths – Respa, Veduc and Thuruar – burned it with the city in 262 AD; St. John Chrisostom led a Christian mob that sacked it again in 401. Its very stones were dispersed: a shattered face is occasionally found in the rubble walls of the Turkish town of Efes, but the precinct of the Great Goddess has been given over to the wild thyme and cicadas.
That damned name, though, lives on - so powerful is our taste for notoriety that it has become the one thing most people know about the Temple of Ephesus. The name has become a proper noun for that most modern of phenomena: fame for its own sake.
In the age of heroes, men strove avidly for glory and paid for it with deeds - often with their lives. Now, we have people who are famous for being famous. Famous for killing, or attempting to kill, the better-known. Famous for going to parties, or having too many children, or being on television and subsequently dying. A recent survey of elementary schoolchildren found a third of them hoped for a career as a "celebrity." There is not enough talent of daring in the world to fulfill that ambition; if they want to be well-known, most will have to take the Ephesian route.
Who, then, was this young man of Ephesus? You will have to look him up. It would be quite wrong to name him here.
If you enjoy such stories of the human genius for getting it wrong, you can find a new one every day on my sister site (http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com). See you there.
