Hecatombaeon

«Completing the structure were several larger-than-life statues of Artemis herself, the biggest of which was located in the center under a partially opened roof. Today, the Artemisium is known less for its meticulous construction than for its infamous demolition in 356 BC, which happened not — as its architects had feared — because of some natural disaster, but the deliberate actions of one disgruntled citizen known as Herostratus.

Little is known about Herostratus, who by sheer coincidence burned down the world wonder on the same night the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great was born into the world. Historians suspect that he was of low social standing, being either the son of a slave or a former slave himself. The Russian poet Semyon Nadson may have given the best analysis of the arsonist, who upon his arrest claimed that he committed this unthinkable crime because he was seeking kleos: infamy, notoriety. Nadson supposes that Herostratus was driven by the grim realization that he was but a “maggot squashed by destiny, in the midst of the countless hordes,” and that destroying the Temple of Artemis was the only way for him to leave his mark on history.  

The authorities of Ephesus did not feel that the death sentence matched the severity of the crime. To truly punish the fame-seeking felon, it was decided that — in addition to death — Herostratus would be sentenced to damnatio memoriae, meaning that from there on out it would be forbidden to mention his name either in conversation or in writing.

Damnatio memoriae was a common practice in classical antiquity, with the Roman writer and grammarian Aulus Gellius explaining that terms like inlaudatus and inlaudabilis were used to refer to “one who is worthy of neither mention nor remembrance and is never to be named; as, for example, in days gone by the common council of Asia decreed that no one should ever mention the name of the man who had burned the temple of Diana [the Roman name for Artemis] at Ephesus.” The founder of the Roman Empire, Augustus, passed the sentence to his defeated rival Marc Anthony. Joseph Stalin, while not from the ancient world, did the same to his enemies.

Ironically, damnatio memoriae often had the opposite effect, preserving a person’s memory rather than erasing it. Though temporarily ignored, Anthony remains as well-known a figure in world history as Augustus. Herostratus, for his part, is now far more famous than the temple’s talented builders. Overlooked by historians from his hometown, his legacy survives thanks to Theopompus, a historian from the island of Chios who did not fall under the jurisdiction of Ephesus and, in his quest to record events as accurately as possible, mentioned the destroyer of the Temple of Artemis by name in his biography of King Philip II, the Philippica.

The information provided by Theopompus was later incorporated into the accounts of the Greek geographer Strabo as well as that of the Roman historians Plutarch, Valerius Maximus, and Gellius.»

Herostratus: the man who destroyed an ancient wonder of the world - Tim Brinkhof

The Past — September 26, 2023

While this usurper [Procopius] yet lived, whose various deeds and whose death I have described, on 21 July in the year in which Valentinian was consul for the first time with his brother [A.D. 365], fearsome terrors suddenly strode through the whole circle of the world, the like of which neither legends nor truthful ancient histories tell us. 

Slightly after daybreak, and heralded by a thick succession of fiercely shaken thunderbolts, the solidity of the whole earth was made to shake and shudder, and the sea was driven away, its waves were rolled back, and it disappeared, so that the abyss of the depths was uncovered and many-shaped varieties of sea-creatures were seen stuck in the slime; the great wastes of those valleys and mountains, which the very creation had dismissed beneath the vast whirlpools, at that moment, as it was given to be believed, looked up at the sun's rays. Many ships, then, were stranded as if on dry land, and people wandered at will about the paltry remains of the waters to collect fish and the like in their hands; then the roaring sea as if insulted by its repulse rises back in turn, and through the teeming shoals dashed itself violently on islands and extensive tracts of the mainland, and flattened innumerable buildings in towns or wherever they were found. Thus in the raging conflict of the elements, the face of the earth was changed to reveal wondrous sights. For the mass of waters returning when least expected killed many thousands by drowning, and with the tides whipped up to a height as they rushed back, some ships, after the anger of the watery element had grown old, were seen to have sunk, and the bodies of people killed in shipwrecks lay there, faces up or down. Other huge ships, thrust out by the mad blasts, perched on the roofs of houses, as happened at Alexandria, and others were hurled nearly two miles from the shore, like the Laconian vessel near the town of Methone which I saw when I passed by, yawning apart from long decay.

Ammianus Marcellinus - Res Gestae Book 26 10.15-19

in  'Ammianus and the great tsunami', The Journal of Roman Studies (JRS), vol. 94, pp. 141-167. Gavin Kelly 2004, https://doi.org/10.2307/4135013