9 entries in the world of The Kept Flame.
One of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis stood a mile and a half outside Ephesus — and was far more than a sanctuary. It was the safest bank in the Aegean, holding deposits for private citizens, cities and…
Ephesus lived by its harbour. A colonnaded avenue half a kilometre long ran from the theatre down to the wharves, and the whole trade of Roman Asia came up it. But the Cayster River never stopped laying down silt, and the last serious…
Dedicated around AD 89 to the Flavian emperors, the Temple of the Sebastoi stood on the upper terrace of Ephesus and made the city twice neokoros — twice temple-keeper — its proudest civic distinction. With the honour came the festivals…
The largest theatre in the Roman world at the time: some twenty-five thousand seats carved into the hillside where Marble Street meets the road to the harbour. It held plays and games, public proclamations, and the citizens' assembly…
Patmos is not the bare prison rock of legend. It is a small, populated Aegean island south-west of Miletus, with villages, terraced fields, temples and a working harbour — the sort of place to which Rome sent a man it wanted out of the way…
The seven cities of Roman Asia were strung along a real road — the postal circuit that ran Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea, in exactly the order Revelation names them. Some 475 kilometres, seventeen to…
A modest, respectable house in the streets above the State Agora — not one of the painted terrace houses of the rich, but a comfortable place with a courtyard at its heart, water off the city's aqueduct, and olive-oil lamps for the…
A small scroll-copyist's workshop in the craftsman quarter of Ephesus, with the living rooms above it and an inner stair between. One high, narrow window keeps the street's dust off the bench and lets the morning in over a working man's…
The Christians of Ephesus had no church building. They met in houses — dining-room gatherings of a dozen or so across the whole city, lamp-lit, with a shared meal at the centre and "peace to you" as the greeting that marked them out. What…