Ephesus is usually explained through four or five names: Croesus, Alexander, Hadrian, Paul, John. That is a reasonable spine, but it leaves the city empty. Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand people lived here, and the ruins carry more of them than you would expect.
The very rich, and we know their names
The people who paid for the buildings put their names on them, which is convenient.
Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus was a Roman senator from this province who governed Asia; his son built the library as his tomb, and Celsus is buried in a sarcophagus beneath it. That is unusual — burial inside the city walls was normally forbidden — and it tells you how much weight the family carried.
Scholastica, a Christian woman of the fourth or fifth century, funded the restoration of the bath complex that now carries her name. Her headless statue still sits in the entrance.
The families of the Terrace Houses are less well named but far better known domestically — you can walk above their dining rooms and see what they chose to paint on their walls.
The silversmiths
The best-documented trade in Ephesus, because one of them started a riot.
Demetrius made silver shrines of Artemis for pilgrims — a substantial industry in a city whose temple drew visitors from across the Mediterranean. When Paul's preaching began to hurt sales, Demetrius gathered the guild and the result filled the theatre with a crowd chanting for two hours.
What makes this so valuable is that it is a commercial dispute recorded in a religious text. The Acts 19 riot is the only place in ancient literature where we hear a Roman trade guild's economic grievance in something close to its own voice.
Monuments are easier to photograph than to care about. Our guides work from the inhabitants outward — the guild, the household, the priestess, the gladiator. See the in-depth archaeological day, or the Footsteps of Paul route if the New Testament layer is what draws you.
TÜRSAB 15746 · private only · tickets bought in advance, cost paid separately.
The gladiators
In 1993 a gladiator cemetery was excavated at Ephesus — the only substantially excavated one anywhere — and the bones rewrote a good deal of what was assumed about the trade.
The injuries were specific and rule-bound rather than chaotic. Many showed healed wounds, meaning medical care and repeat careers rather than routine death. Diet analysis suggested a heavily plant-based regime. Some had been buried with inscriptions naming them.
The Ephesus gladiator graveyard is one of the genuinely important finds from this site, and several of the stones are in the Selçuk museum.
The doctors
Ephesus had a serious medical community — there was a physicians' association, and inscriptions record competitions between doctors. Surgical instruments recovered here are on display in the museum and they are unnervingly recognisable: scalpels, forceps, probes, a bone drill.
Rufus of Ephesus, writing in the first or second century, produced work on anatomy and on the naming of body parts that was still being read a thousand years later. More on medicine in Ephesus.
The priestesses and the temple staff
The Artemision was not only a temple; it was a bank, an asylum for fugitives, and a major employer. Priests, priestesses, musicians, guards, and the administrators of what amounted to a financial institution. Wealthy people deposited money there for safekeeping, because a temple was harder to rob than a house.
The goddess herself was not the huntress of Greek myth but something older and local — the Artemis of Ephesus, many-breasted or hung with bull testes depending on which scholar you ask, standing rigid and covered in animals. The two great statues in the museum are the single most arresting objects in the region.
The Jewish community
Substantial, long-established, and well enough integrated that Roman authorities issued rulings protecting its rights. Paul preached first in the synagogue at Ephesus, as he did in most cities, and there are menorah carvings scratched into the steps of the library that you can still find if you know where to look. More on Judaism in Ephesus.
The enslaved
The largest group we know least about. A significant share of the population of any Roman city was unfree — working the docks, the households, the baths, the workshops of the Terrace Houses whose mosaics we admire.
They appear in the archaeology mostly as absences: the service corridors behind the fine rooms, the kitchens, the small unheated spaces. Occasionally as a name on a manumission inscription. Our colleagues' page on slavery in Ephesus deals with it directly, and it is the right corrective to a day spent admiring what their labour paid for.
The philosopher
Heraclitus was born here around 535 BC — the man who said you cannot step into the same river twice, and who reportedly deposited his book in the Temple of Artemis rather than publish it, because he did not think his fellow citizens deserved to read it.
He is a useful reminder that Ephesus was intellectually serious long before Rome arrived. There is a portrait of him, of sorts, in our colleagues' piece on the weeping philosopher.
Where to meet them
On the site: the Terrace Houses for the rich, the theatre for the crowd, the latrines and baths for everyday sociability, the agora for the traders.
In the museum: the statues, the surgical kit, the gladiator stones, the household lamps, and the Artemis figures. An hour in the Selçuk museum after a morning on the site is the closest you will get to meeting the population of Ephesus, and it is the step most day visitors leave out.
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