Herostratic fame

In the outskirts of of Selcuk, in Turkey, on the way to the nearby ruins of the city of Ephesus, you can visit the meager leftovers ofthe ancient Temple of Artemis. 

Not much stands of what was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world: a lone columns reconstructed by the remains found at the site is a poor witness to its greatness. I visited the site in 2014. Besides the fascination of standing at a place with such a history (the Greek scholar from the Library of Alexandria, Callimachus said that the earliest temple at the site was started by the Amazons and was destroyed by a flood in the 7th century BC), the demise of the second Temple of Artemis remains a relevant story, as it is about the human narcissism that seems to have reached its peak nowadays!

The Second Temple of Artemis was constructed around the 6th Century BC, under a Cretan father-son architectural team: Chersiphron and Metagenes. The building was at the forefront of architecture and justly considered a wonder. It was the first temple built purely of marble and its proportions were enormous: 115 meters long, 46 meters wide, and with massive 13-meter high columns. 

The temple was destroyed by a fire on July 20th 356 BC, on the birth day of Alexander the Great. In an act of arson, a young man set fire to the temple wanting his name to be remembered forever! The young narcissist was captured, confessed, and was executed for his crime, and to punish him for all time, the Ephesians forbid anyone to ever pronounce his name under the penalty of death. 

The Ephesians reconstructed the temple. It stood for more than 600 years until it was seriously damaged by a Goth army in 256 AD, and then slowly decayed into oblivion with the ascent of Christianity in the 5th Century AD (only in 1869 the site was rediscovered by a British expedition). On the other hand, the young man was not condemned to oblivion: more than 2000 years later his name, Herostratus, still lives on. In fact, the term "Herostratic fame" refers to people's urge to be famous at any cost, a tendency that seems very alive today!