Victor Davis Hanson (29:38)
Yes. Remember what we're doing? Trying to. We've done two already. The two in mainland Greece or in the Greek domain, the Colossus of Rhodes, that Hellenistic huge statue that somewhere guided travelers into the harbor at the city of Rhodes on Rhodes. And then we did the Chrysantine, that's a fancy word for gold and ivory statue, gigantic statue of Zeus that was in the temple of Olympian Zeus in Olympia in which you can still see the stylobate, some of the columns. Then we move to two others in Turkey. One was the mausoleum for King Mausolus of Caria. We talked about the grave. The other one is a huge temple of Artemis. You know, everybody knows her from mythology is the Roman goddess Diana of the Hunt, sort of the masculine side of womanhood. Well, the temple was built by the proverbial rich Croesus and then in 550 BC it was the first marble ever built in a temple built in Ionia in marble. Maybe the first temple in the world built of marble. But why is it in the seven Wonders of the World? Remember, the seven Wonders of the World was after or during the expansion of the Greek speaking peoples into Egypt, into Asia Minor and all the way into Afghanistan. Hellenism or the language, literature, art, science of Greece spread and it opened up a new world of both foreign wonders of the world, such as the hanging gardens at Babylon, which we'll talk about, or the pyramids at Giza, but also what Greeks were doing throughout the world. And this was a period of what we call in archaeology gigantism, that things were big. Colossus of Rhodes, the siege works of Demetrius the besieger were larger, the catapults of anything ever seen. Colossus of Rhodes was one of the largest statues, freestanding statues. So it was the idea in Alexander's age, bigger is better. And so they decided to rebuild this temple that had burned down. And how does the temple burn down? It's out of stone. People forget the interior roof is the joist that goes after you have the stone base of the roof and then you have to span the width of the temple with huge timber. And that timber then has joists for the pediment. So the pediment is of stone, but all down the side of the roof you have rafters and joist and they are very flammable. And when they burn then the roof collapses and the pediments can fall inward as well. And the temple as well, it has oil and olive oil votives and it's got drapery and the interior can, if it gets hot enough, it will actually melt the marble which is used for lime. One of the reasons we don't have Greek temples is in the Byzantine and more modern Greek period, villagers would go in and get a block, make a huge fire, put it in there and then drain off the lime for whitewash on their stucco. So any case, this was probably one of the three largest. It's what we call a 400 foot temple. Think about that. A football field is 300, so it's 1 1/3 football. It's about 390ft and it was huge. And there's only two other temples that are comparable in size. It's even bigger than the Olympian Zeus. The great temple in Rome, the Roman temple that sits near Syntagma Square in Athens. Today there's a temple, and I've been there, of Apollo at Didyma near Miletus. It's out in the middle of nowhere. At least it was. It's huge. And then there's the Samayun, the harem, we call it in Samos, the temple to Hera. It's huge. But this was one of the largest, if not the largest temple in the world. It was built during the Hellenistic period from about 330 onward. And it existed somewhere. It's mentioned in literature, Christian literature, from about 200 AD to 400 AD as being in decay. And then the Goths came in and northern raiders came in and destroyed it. Whether they carried off the statuary, I don't know, but there's not much left. So when you go there today, there's the Stylo Bay, which was the foundation. And they. And I was there in 1973 and 1974, and they had reconstructed one column they found. The British had gone in there earlier and found the site of the famous Temple of Artemis. So if you go to Ephesus today, it's a huge site. It's almost, in some ways, like Herculaneum in Italy, the volcanic site. And you can see the largest temple in the Greek world. And it was famous. And we have a lot of contemporary Hellenistic inscriptions, temples that are outside of Greece, tending to be in the islands or on the coast of Asia Minor, even a little bit inward, or Ionic, and the Ionic order, it's a little different. It succeeds the Doric. It doesn't have that Doric severity where there is a scroll for the capital rather than just an abacus like that. And in addition, the columns are not just put on the stile bait. They have a base. And at Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, there's at least 34, 35 columns that were inscribed with beautiful. I shouldn't say inscribed, but they were carved with scenes from mythology on the bases of the columns. And in addition to that, when the columns go up and they taper up, they don't have the points around them, but they have what we call not flutes, but fillets. In other words, they go around and then they're blunted, so they have a flat space, and they look a lot more elegant and they give off shadows better. And then there's a couple of other things. It's what we call a dipteral column. Instead of just having an outside exterior colonnade, it has two. Think of that, two colonnades outside the temple that go around both sides and almost 400ft in one direction. So you have like 123 columns. It was just astounding. It was built on a marsh, and so they kind of. It lasted for so long. So then rather than like the earlier temple, just to try to excavate and push, make a firm foundation, to have it sink when there would be flooding, or more importantly, when they were drawing water out from wells and then it started to sink down, they kind of did what the Venetians did, they made a spongy. They put in sheepskin and other materials, kind of like a garbage, and made it go like this. I'm exaggerating it like this, but it was flexible and it probably would have survived. It would have been like the Temple of Hephaestus and the Agora. It's intact today, but it was in the wrong place and it was looted. But you can see two great things at Ephesus, the temple of Hadrian's library and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. So it's worth seeing. So those are the last two that are on the Turkish mainland, and then we only have three more, and two of those are in Egypt. So next time we'll be talking about the lighthouse of Pharaohs in the harbor at Alexandria. I've been to all of these places, and this one's a little strange, but we'll talk about it. And then the famous pyramids of the pharaohs at Giza, and then the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Someone. When I went there, somebody gave me a block from the U.S. army. I was embedded. And it had. He rebuilt it. And it was a little. Just like, you know, a baked brick or something. And it had Saddam's image on it. Saddam Hussein, every single one. He rebuilt the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But anyway, it was a seven wonder, the Z, A seventh wonder of the world. And it was mostly because of its gigantism. It was so big. Big is better.
