Temple of Artemis Sardis
Roman, 1st–2nd century CE
The relief shows part of a scene of a venatio (a series of games in the theater or circus comprising fights between men and animals or between different types of animals). At the bottom is what remains of a Greek inscription, indicating that the scene represents the third day of the games. The relief may have decorated a monument set up to honor the magistrate or other leading citizen who paid for the games. The slab was found during the American excavations at Sardis in 1912, near the Temple of Artemis, where it had been reused in a Byzantine tomb.
Relief with Artemis-Cybele and two goddesses, possibly from Kula.
Ca. 400 BC, Late Lydian (Persian)
Howard C. Butler
Sardis sits on the northern foothills of the Tmolos Mountains in western Anatolia. It served as the capital of the Lydian kingdom until its conquest by the Persians in 547 BCE, and became the western capital of the Seleucid Empire around 280 BCE. The Lydian city was strongly fortified and terraced. Hellenistic and Roman Sardis retained the predecessor’s organic, topography-driven plan and never adopted a regular grid. The city’s principal monument is the Temple of Artemis — the largest known pseudodipteros — begun under the Seleucids (ca. 280–260 BCE) and completed under Hadrian.
Located between the Tmolos range and the Hermus Plain, east of the Pactolus valley, the ancient site is enclosed by a massive late-Lydian stone-and-mudbrick fortification wall some 18–20 m thick. This wall descends from the acropolis (a northern spur of Tmolos) toward the plain and encloses about 108 hectares. According to Herodotus, Herakles was the city’s legendary founder and the origin of the Heraklid dynasty (Herodotus I.7). Croesus, the last Lydian king, fell to Cyrus in 547 BCE. Persian rule lasted roughly two centuries until Alexander the Great liberated Sardis in 334 BCE (Arrian, Anabasis 1.17.3–6). After Seleukos I defeated Lysimachus at Kourepedion in 281 BCE, Sardis became part of the Seleucid realm; Seleukos’ son Antiochus I and queen Stratonike established a western court there until the Seleucids were defeated at Magnesia in 189 BCE. Construction of the Artemis temple likely began soon after Seleukos’ conquest, possibly under Stratonike’s patronage.
Sardis’ urban layout follows the terrain rather than imposed orthogonal planning. A major east–west road — the course of the Persian Royal Road linking coast and interior — divided the site, effectively creating an “upper city” on the acropolis slopes and a “lower city” on the plain. The upper city appears to have housed the wealthier neighborhoods. Lydian terrace walls of fine limestone, preserved up to 6–7 m high and probably connected by stairs, ramps, and tunnels, have been uncovered on the acropolis slopes. These terraces likely supported large residences or palaces, one candidate being the so-called “Lydian Palace” (mentioned by Pliny and Vitruvius as Croesus’ palace later used as a gerousia: Pliny, NH 35.172; Vitruvius 2.8.9–10).
Major Hellenistic additions include the theater, later enlarged with a two-story columnar skene frons in the Roman period, and a stadium added roughly contemporaneously, extending west beyond the stage. Inscriptions and ancient sources record an agora and stoa, a gymnasium, and a mint from Lydian and Hellenistic phases, though their exact locations remain unknown. Settlement also existed outside the city walls in most periods (partly removed during the Persian era), especially along the Pactolus valley, where a gold-refining workshop/sanctuary with a sixth-century BCE Lydian altar of Kybebe has been identified.
Roman Sardis was reshaped in part by the catastrophic earthquake of AD 17, after which Rome granted fiscal relief. Roman-period architecture at Sardis often features large vaulted structures typical of Roman engineering, exemplified by the stadium. Notable Roman monuments include a mid-first-century CE Imperial cult temple (the Vadi-B temple: an octastyle Corinthian pseudodipteros) set on a vast rectangular colonnaded enclosure approached by an axial monumental staircase; an early second-century bath–gymnasium complex of symmetrical imperial type with a ceremonial hall framed by two-story colonnaded aediculae; and an east–west marble colonnaded avenue later given a monumental gate in late antiquity. For scale and cultural significance, the Temple of Artemis remained the outstanding monument of Greco-Roman Sardis.
The cult of Artemis was introduced from Ephesus in the late sixth century BCE, when a monumental altar was erected in the sanctuary against the acropolis backdrop. The temple, begun ca. 280–270 BCE, may originally have been intended as a dipteros in the Ionian tradition; ultimately only the long all-marble cella, oriented west, was completed. Work resumed after the visit of Hadrian and Sabina in AD 123/24, an event that brought Sardis its second neokoros honor. The resumed program produced an Ionic peripteros: the cella was divided, with Artemis occupying the western chamber and imperial cult images placed in the new eastern chamber. The eastern side appears to have been finished with its columns, while the western Artemis side remained incomplete. The temple’s plan — a cella with an unequal pteroma and spacious six-column pronaos porches at the ends — does not follow the standard pseudodipteral model of Hermogenes at Magnesia or its later Hellenistic and Roman imitators.
