Library of Celsus

Celsus was a provincial who reached the top of the Roman state. He was one of the suffect consuls of AD 92⁶, and afterwards headed the board in charge of Rome’s sacred buildings and public works¹³. Before that he had held a military tribunate, entered the Senate under Vespasian and Titus, and governed provinces including Bithynia-Pontus and Cilicia¹⁴. He came back to Asia as its governor around AD 105–107; the sources disagree on the exact year¹⁵.

He was not an Ephesian. Celsus came from Sardis, from a local family of hereditary priests of the goddess Roma¹⁶, which makes his burial at Ephesus all the more striking. When he died is not precisely known: around or before AD 114 in one reckoning, before 117 in others¹⁷.

Celsus’s son, Julius Aquila Polemaeanus, himself consul in AD 110¹⁸, raised the building as his father’s memorial. Whether Celsus had planned the library himself is uncertain; the two scholars who later rebuilt the façade thought he probably had¹⁹. The sources even disagree on Aquila’s first name, Tiberius in some and Gaius in others²⁰. Aquila died before the work was done, and the library was completed for his heirs, with Tiberius Claudius Aristion carrying out Aquila’s will²¹.

An endowment of 25,000 denarii paid for upkeep, staff and new books out of its interest²². The building date is less secure than many guides suggest. Construction began in the 110s, and the completion dates proposed run from 113–117 to around 135; no opening date is recorded⁷. The safest statement is that the library was built in the 110s and 120s.

A burial inside the city was an honour normally kept for heroes and founders, and Celsus received it. He was laid in a marble sarcophagus in a small vaulted chamber beneath the apse³. The chamber is under 8 m² and reached by a narrow angled passage, so the sarcophagus must have been lowered in before the floor of the apse was closed over it²³. It is a garland sarcophagus, with garlands hanging from figures of Victory and a Medusa head in the pediment of the lid²⁴.

The excavators of 1904 first saw it, untouched, through two small openings in the podium under the apse²⁵.

The front is built slightly out of true, on purpose. The eight pedestals under the lower columns vary in height from 0.930 m to 1.110 m, tallest at the edges, and the platform they stand on is cambered by 3.6 cm, so the tops of the outer pedestals sit 14.4 cm higher than the central ones²⁶. The architects who studied the blocks concluded that the entablature was curved as well, and that the column sizes were graded to exaggerate the perspective and make the front look wider than it is²⁷.

The composition does the rest. The lower storey has four projecting pairs of columns; the upper storey has three, set over the doors and offset from those below, with a triangular pediment in the centre flanked by curved ones²⁸. The doors and windows face east, which matches Vitruvius’s advice to give libraries the morning light²⁹.

Four niches in the lower storey hold female figures personifying Sophia (wisdom), Arete (excellence), Ennoia (insight) and Episteme (knowledge)³⁰. The statues on the façade today are copies. The originals are in the Ephesos Museum of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, a different institution from the Ephesus Museum at Selçuk¹².

Those originals have a history of their own. Several are older sculptures put to new use: Arete is a late Hellenistic figure with a reworked head, Sophia reuses a Hellenistic statue type known as the “Hera Campana”, and Ennoia reuses a Ceres-type body³¹. The base of Sophia still shows fixing marks for a bronze; the marble figure was put there during a late antique restoration of the façade³². Ennoia’s base names not Celsus but an otherwise unknown Philippos, in a painted rather than carved inscription, perhaps honouring a man who paid for that later repair³³.

A curved pediment block with a Medusa head from the façade is also in Vienna³⁴.

Nine steps lead up to three doors. Behind them was a single hall of 16.7 by 10.9 m, about 178 m², with a 4.5 m apse facing the entrance⁹. Its walls had ten niches on each storey for scroll cupboards, set behind a podium about 1 m high. A second tier with a colonnaded gallery is certain; a third is disputed³⁶.

Between the inner wall of the book hall and the outer wall runs a narrow corridor. The traditional explanation is that it kept damp away from the books. Volker Michael Strocka, who led the rebuilding, rejected that and read it as a channel carrying rainwater off the roofs; the question remains open³⁷.

Its capacity can only be calculated from the shelf space. Those calculations give roughly 10,000 to 12,000 rolls, or as many as 16,000 if free-standing boxes stood in the hall as well¹⁰. That made it a large library but far from the largest: the biggest collections of antiquity held several hundred thousand rolls³⁸.

The interior was lost in the 3rd century, and the cause is argued. The traditional account is a fire around AD 262, blamed either on an earthquake or on the Gothic raid of those years³⁹. The Austrian excavators now attribute the damage to an earthquake around AD 270, after which the library seems to have been abandoned⁴⁰. Either way, the decade was a disaster for the whole city: an earthquake and seaborne Gothic raids under Gallienus wrecked much of it⁴¹.

The shell had a long second life. In late antiquity the roofless hall served as the courtyard of a neighbouring house, and around AD 400 the front was turned into a fountain, with water running over the steps and the standing façade used as a display wall⁴². Relief slabs of the so-called Parthian Monument were found built into that fountain⁴³. The monument itself is of the Antonine era, the mid-2nd century AD; older readings tie it specifically to Lucius Verus’s Parthian War of 161–166⁴⁴.

The façade finally came down, most probably in an earthquake, usually placed in the 10th or 11th century⁴⁵.

The façade has never left Ephesus. It stands on its original foundations and was re-erected on them in 1970–78⁵². What did go to Vienna were the four virtue statues and some architectural pieces such as a curved pediment; copies stand on site⁵³. About 70 m of the Parthian Monument’s frieze survive, and around 40 m are displayed in Vienna⁵⁴.

The mix-up over where the library stands may come from elsewhere in Anatolia. The Roman Market Gate of Miletus, of around AD 100, was excavated by German archaeologists and reconstructed inside the Pergamon Museum in Berlin⁵⁵. That gate travelled; the library did not.

The rebuilding began with a check on Wilberg’s drawing. In 1969 a member of the Austrian team set out to test it and found several hundred façade fragments scattered across the Agora and beyond, some as far away as İzmir⁵⁶. More than 700 pieces were catalogued, fitted together and laid out course by course on a cleared part of the Agora before any stone went back up⁵⁷.

From autumn 1970 to 1978 the façade was re-erected by anastylosis, reassembly from original parts, directed by the archaeologist Volker Michael Strocka and the Viennese architect Friedmund Hueber⁴. Midway through, they reported that a good three-quarters of the original blocks and columns had been recovered⁵⁸. Missing parts were supplied in reinforced concrete, set back behind the surface and faced with coloured artificial stone that echoes marble in form and light but can be told apart from the originals⁵⁹. The engineers designed the structure for an earthquake of intensity 9 on the 12-point Mercalli-Sieberg scale, with no support outside the ancient volume⁶⁰.

Only the front was rebuilt. Just a third of the hall’s wall height and none of its fittings survived, so a rebuilt hall would have been a modern replica⁶¹. History argued for the same choice: from around AD 400 the façade had stood as the display wall of a fountain⁴².

The work was paid for privately by the Viennese builder A. K. Prskawetz, and Hochtief AG donated a 25-tonne mobile crane⁶². The same patron then funded the rebuilding of the neighbouring Gate of Mazaeus and Mithridates in 1980–89, again under Hueber⁶³.

A seven-branched menorah, about 20 by 18.5 cm, is reported carved on the second-highest step of the stair⁶⁴. It was described in print in 1980; one scholar has suggested a date in the late 2nd or early 3rd century, but its date and its meaning remain uncertain⁶⁵.

Ephesus appeared on the back of the Turkish 20,000,000 lira note, issued in 2001 and withdrawn at the start of 2006, and of the 20 New Turkish Lira note in circulation from 2005 to 2010. The central bank describes the image only as the ancient city of Ephesus; the façade shown is the library’s⁶⁶.

Half a century after the rebuilding, the marble needs attention. The Austrian Academy of Sciences has begun a conservation programme on the façade, starting with an inventory, sampling and first safeguarding of cracks, flaking and the “sugaring” of the marble surface. Its planned timetable, as last checked: October 2024 to the end of 2027⁶⁷ (checked on 14 September 2026). While the work lasts, the current opening hours and closures are worth checking before a visit.

Curetes Street comes down to the library from the Hercules Gate¹. A little way up it stands the Temple of Hadrian, dedicated by the man who also built the baths behind it⁶⁸⁶⁹. Beside the library, the triple Gate of Mazaeus and Mithridates of 4/3 BC leads into the Commercial Agora⁷⁰, and Marble Street runs on from the square to the Great Theatre⁷¹.

For the city Celsus’s family built in, from Lysimachus’s refoundation to its abandonment, see the history of Ephesus.