. The Milesians were not able to undertake
the rebuilding till about 332 B.C., when the oracle revived at the
bidding of Alexander. The work proved too costly, and despite a special
effort made by the Asian province nearly 400 years later, at the bidding
of the emperor Caligula, the structure was never quite finished: but
even as it was, Strabo ranked the Didymeum the greatest of Greek temples
and Pliny placed it among the four most splendid and second only to the
Artemisium at Ephesus. In point of fact it was a little smaller than the
Samian Heraeum and the temple of Cybele at Sardis, and almost exactly
the same size as the Artemisium. The area covered by the platform
measures roughly 360 X 160 ft.

When Cyriac of Ancona visited the spot in 1446, it seems that the temple
was still standing in great part, although the _cella_ had been
converted into a fortress by the Byzantines: but when the next European
visitor, the Englishman Dr Pickering, arrived in 1673, it had collapsed.
It is conjectured that the cause was the great earthquake of 1493. The
Society of Dilettanti sent two expeditions to explore the ruins, the
first in 1764 under Richard Chandler, the second in 1812 under Sir Wm.
Gell; and the French "Rothschild Expedition" of 1873 under MM. O. Rayet
and A. Thomas sent a certain amount of architectural sculpture to the
Louvre. But no excavation was attempted till MM. E. Pontremoli and B.
Haussoullier were sent out by the French Schools of Rome and Athens in
1895. They cleared the western facade and the _prodomos_, and discovered
inscriptions giving information about other parts which they left still
buried. Finally the site was purchased by, and the French rights were
ceded to, Dr Th. Wiegand, the German explorer of Miletus, who in 1905
began a thorough clearance of what is incomparably the finest temple
ruin in Asia Minor.

The temple was a decastyle peripteral structure of the Ionic order,
standing on seven steps and possessing double rows of outer columns 60
ft. high, twenty-one in each row on the flanks. It is remarkable not
only for its great size, but (_inter alia_) for (1) the rich ornament of
its column bases, which show great variety of design; (2) its various
developments of the Ionic capital, e.g. heads of gods, probably of
Pergamene art, spring from the "eyes" of the volutes with bulls' heads
between them; (3) the massive building two storeys high at least, which
served below for _prodomos_, and above f