ver in fact succeeded in {36} affecting the thoroughly Asiatic and
oriental character of a worship which had nothing Greek about it except
the name. The interest of Ephesus as an Asiatic city centred about
that ancient worship which had its home in the plain below the Greek
settlement. It was there before the Greeks came, it held its own
throughout and in spite of all Greek and Roman influences; all through
the history of Ephesus it gave its main character to the city--the
noted home of superstition and sorcery.

The Artemis of Ephesus was, as Jerome remarks[37], not the
huntress-goddess with her bow, but the many-breasted symbol of the
productive and nutritive powers of nature, the mother of all life, free
and untamed like the wild beasts who accompanied her. The grotesque
and archaic idol believed to have fallen down from heaven was a stiff,
erect mummy covered with many breasts and symbols of wild beasts. Her
worship was organized by a hierarchy of eunuch priests--called by a
Persian name Megabyzi--and 'consecrated' virgins. It was associated,
like other worships of the same divinity called indifferently Artemis
or Cybele or Ma, with ideals of life which from the point {37} of view
of any fixed moral order, Roman or Greek no less than Jewish or
Christian, was lawless and immoral.

It is very well known how the Asiatic nature-worships flooded the Roman
empire, and even at Rome itself became by far more popular than the
traditional state religion. And among these Asiatic worships none was
more popular than the worship of Artemis of Ephesus, whose temple was
the wonder of the world, and who not only was worshipped publicly at
Ephesus, but was the object of a cult both public and private in
widely-separated parts of the empire. Such a temple and such a worship
would naturally collect a base and corrupt population; but what would
in any case have been bad was rendered worse by the fact that the area
round the temple was an asylum of refuge from the law, and that, as the
area of 'sanctuary' was extended at different times, the collection of
criminals became greater and greater. It had reached a point where it
threatened the safety of the city, and not long before St. Paul's time
the Emperor Augustus had found it necessary to curtail the area. The
history of our own Westminster is enough to assure us that a religious
asylum brings social degradation in its train.

{38}

Such was the commercial and religious imp