Temple of Hadrian

A local benefactor, Publius Quintilius Valens Varius, dedicated it together with his wife and daughter¹.

The porch was one half of a larger gift. Varius planned and built it together with the bath-house behind it⁵. Later generations named those baths after Scholastikia, the Christian woman who paid to renovate them in the 4th or 5th century, so the “Scholastica Baths” of the guidebooks are Varius’s own foundation under a later name⁸. Her statue, now headless, is still seated inside⁹.

Varius chose a prominent address. Curetes Street runs down from the Hercules Gate to the Library of Celsus¹⁰, and because it ignores the orthogonal grid of the rest of the city it is read as very old, a processional route for Artemis¹¹.

Probably not in the sense the name suggests. Ursula Quatember, who led the modern building study, published an article in 2013 whose title asks exactly that question, and many scholars place Hadrian’s official temple elsewhere in the city².

The doubt makes more sense beside the city’s record of imperial temples. Ephesus first held the official title of neokoros, keeper of an imperial-cult temple, from the dedication of the Temple of the Sebastoi in AD 89/90¹³. Hadrian’s reign doubled the honour, and “twice neokoros” is attested by AD 132¹⁴. Near the harbour, meanwhile, the city laid out a vast precinct for Zeus Olympios and the deified Hadrian, whose southern hall alone ran to about 263 m¹⁵. Beside that, a porch paid for by one family and offered jointly to the goddess, the emperor and the people is a modest thing. “Temple of Hadrian” is best taken as a convenient label rather than a statement of what the building was for².

The front is a porch of four supports standing ahead of the inner chamber, a form architects call tetrastyle prostyle. Over the middle the entablature rises into a so-called Syrian arch, and the keystone of that arch carries a bust of Tyche¹⁶, the goddess of the city’s fortune.

In front of the porch stand four inscribed bases. They carried statues of the First Tetrarchy, the four emperors who ruled jointly: Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius Chlorus and Galerius. Maximian’s statue was later replaced with one of the father of Theodosius I¹⁷.

The carved frieze inside the porch is not Hadrianic. It was carved in the 3rd or 4th century, and some of its slabs probably came from a different monument, reused here after a 4th-century earthquake³. The panels in place today are casts, with the originals kept in the museum at Selçuk¹⁸.

Its subjects are the city’s own stories: the foundation legend, gods, Amazons and a procession in honour of Dionysus³. The legend belongs to the early history of Ephesus as the Greeks told it: Androclus, son of King Codrus of Athens, was in their tradition the leader of the Ionian settlers and the founder of Ephesus¹⁹. Behind the boar on the frieze lies an oracle. Androclus had been promised a site marked by a fish and a boar; a fish jumped out of the fire where it was being cooked, the flames caught the undergrowth, and the boar that bolted from it was killed by Androclus where the city would stand²⁰. The Amazons belong to an older strand of the city’s memory: ancient writers credited them with founding the cult of Artemis here²¹.

Of the frieze’s slabs, the fourth is the puzzle. Its figures are often identified as Theodosius I and his family, but that reading is debated, and scholars have also proposed Dionysus, Cybele or an emperor who cannot be named²².

Franz Miltner excavated the building, and it was partly re-erected in 1957–58 under the architect Karl Heinz Göschl⁶. In the same decade Miltner cleared Curetes Street to join the excavated monuments into a single route, the beginning of Ephesus as a landscape of ruins for visitors²³.

The detailed modern study came much later. Ursula Quatember’s building research ran from January 2009 to April 2012 and was published in 2017 as volume XI/3 of Forschungen in Ephesos²⁴. By then Ephesus had been on the World Heritage List for two years²⁵, and this porch was one of the four buildings the listing names under criterion (iii), in company with the Library of Celsus, the Serapeion and Terrace House 2⁷.

Curetes Street is about 210 m long and falls some 20 m from the Hercules Gate to the library²⁶. Directly above it, on the slope of Bülbüldağ²⁷, the Terrace Houses keep a block of Roman homes under a modern roof²⁸.

Further down the street is the Octagon, a marble tomb of the late 1st century BC²⁹, where a 2025 study found the bones of a boy³⁰ and ruled out the old attribution to Cleopatra’s sister³¹. Beside it, a Hellenistic building later made into a fountain carries the name Heroon of Androklos³², although its link with the founder is widely doubted³³.

By the corner with Marble Street, visitors pass a 1st-century public latrine, its marble seats set over a channel of running water³⁴. In 1957 Franz Miltner interpreted the house next door as a public brothel³⁵. Werner Jobst went back over the evidence and ruled out a public brothel on the site³⁶, and a survey in 2000–2001 revealed a large peristyle house³⁷. These and the other monuments down to the harbour are taken one by one in the guide to the ancient city.