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• W1987422020 abstract "In 'The Curse of Minerva', Byron has the goddess place a curse on Lord Elgin for his theft of the famous marbles from her Temple in Athens, the Parthenon: Oh, loathed in life nor pardon'd in the dust, May hate pursue his sacrilegious lust! Linked with the fool that fired the Ephesian dome, Shall vengeance follow far beyond the tomb, And Eratostratus and Elgin shine In many a branding page and burning line; Alike reserved for aye to stand accursed, Perchance the second blacker than the first. (199-206) The question is: Who was Eratostratus? Far from shining in many a branding page and burning line, Eratostratus does not appear in any record whatsoever, ancient or modern, other than Byron's poem. Byron is apparently misremembering another name: Herostratus, the man who set fire to the great Temple of Diana (or Artemis) at Ephesus in 356 BC. The standard editions of Byron set the name straight with no further comment. But what made him get the name wrong? Was it only a desire to alliterate it with 'Elgin' along with an aristocratic nonchalance about classical scholarship? Or did he know what he was doing? After turning over the ancient sources about Herostratus, I have felt a pricking in my thumbs: something else may have been at work on Byron, something ancient and uncanny. For what is odd about his mistake is that the original vengeance that was meant to follow Herostratus beyond the tomb was precisely never to shine in the annals, however blackly, but to be erased from all remembrance forever. Byron seems to have forgotten that, too, if he ever knew it. By repeating the name, Byron is effectively breaking ranks with an ancient punishment, a damnatio memoriae of unusual severity. It is also true, however, that by repeating the name half wrongly he is half carrying out the vengeance. One could even say that by substituting a near-name for the true one Byron has repaired the breach in the prohibition around the true one in the best possible way. How better to erase a name than circulate one somewhat like it? The many readers of Byron, at least, will have a rival name running interference in their minds with the original, if they know the original at all, and some readers will confuse it further with Eratosthenes and thus obliterate the original completely. And that was the goal of the Ephesian authorities. As far as it can be reconstructed from the slender survivals of ancient texts, here is what happened in Ephesus. The great Temple of Diana, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, so magnificent that it had been spared by Xerxes when he destroyed nearly all the other temples in Asia, was set afire by an Ephesian named Herostratus in 356 BC. Under torture by the authorities, Herostratus confessed that his motive was to spread his name throughout the world. As his most fitting punishment the Ephesians decreed 'uti nomen eius, qui templum Dianae Ephesi incenderat, ne quis ullo in tempore nominaret', as Aulus Gellius put it five centuries later in Noctes Atticae (2.6.18) - 'that the name of him who burned the Temple of Diana of Ephesus, no one at any time might name'. That is all we have about the deed and its punishment. It sets one pondering. In what sense was it a punishment of Herostratus to ban his name? He was presumably tortured to death. To augment the torture the Ephesian officials no doubt told him his name would be banned. But after they tossed his broken body into an unmarked grave there would be no reason to institute the ban, if punishment is what they sought. 'To the dead fame comes too late', as Martial said (Epigrammata 1.25.8), and so does oblivion. Of course it may have been believed that vengeance could indeed follow far beyond the tomb, and that the shade of the dead would continue to suffer in Hades by knowing that his name has been lost to memory. As each new shade arrived from the upper world, Herostratus' shade would ask how his reputation fared; the new shade would reply, 'Who? …" @default.
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• W1987422020 date "2005-06-01" @default.
• W1987422020 modified "2023-09-26" @default.
• W1987422020 title "The Curse of the Ephesians: A Long Footnote to Byron" @default.
• W1987422020 doi "https://doi.org/10.3828/bj.33.1.5" @default.
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