Antipater of Sidon, who compiled the canonical list of the Seven Wonders in the 2nd century BC, described his reaction to seeing the Temple of Artemis: "I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy." The temple was massive - more than four times the size of the Parthenon, with 127 marble columns standing roughly 60 feet tall. It was built and rebuilt over the course of centuries. The version Herostratus burned had been finished in the 6th century BC, partly funded by King Croesus of Lydia. The version that replaced it - the rebuilding the Ephesians refused to let Alexander the Great pay for, even when he offered - took most of the next century to complete and was the one Antipater described.

Artemis at Ephesus was not the slim huntress Greeks knew elsewhere. She was something older, perhaps Anatolian in origin, perhaps tied to a Bronze Age "Great Goddess" whose cult was already ancient when Greek emigrants arrived on the coast and overlaid their own names on the existing worship. The cult statue showed her with what appeared to be many breasts hanging from her chest - though scholars have argued over whether these were actually breasts, eggs, dates, bull testicles offered as fertility tokens, or carved decorative elements. Whatever they were, Ephesian Artemis was not interchangeable with the Artemis of Athens or of Brauron. The Ephesians knew this. They considered her exclusively theirs and resented foreign claims. When Persia conquered the region and tried to insert Persian priests into the cult, the city did not forgive it. When Alexander offered to fund the rebuilding, they declined. She belonged to Ephesus, and Ephesus alone got to honor her.

Each year in March and again in early May, large crowds gathered at Ephesus for the great Artemis Procession. Pilgrims came from across the Greek and later Roman world. Coins, votive offerings, and dedicatory inscriptions accumulated in the temple's treasury until it was one of the wealthiest religious institutions in the eastern Mediterranean. The British Museum holds a portion of what may be the oldest cache of coins in the world - currency from around 600 BC, buried in the foundations of the Archaic temple. The wealth was real and the worship was real, though the relationship between the two remains complicated. The Ephesians believed that each rebuilding of the temple, each disaster overcome, each gift offered to the goddess, brought further prosperity. The cycle of destruction and reconstruction was itself part of the cult. Even Herostratus, in burning the temple, may have inadvertently served Artemis: the rebuilding that followed surpassed what he had destroyed.

The Goth Cniva sacked Ephesus in 268 AD. Whether or not the temple was directly damaged is unclear - some sources say it was, others suggest it remained at least partially in use afterward. By the 5th century AD, with paganism formally banned across the Roman Empire, the temple was officially closed. Ammonius of Alexandria, a Christian author, mentions its closure as early as 407 AD. The marble began to be quarried for other buildings. A medieval legend claimed that columns from the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople had been brought from the Temple of Artemis - the legend is false, but it captures something true about how thoroughly the temple was disassembled and dispersed. By the time the site was lost to memory, very little remained above ground.

John Turtle Wood spent six years searching for the temple. Funded by the British Museum, he combed the marshy ground outside the modern Turkish town of Selcuk, which had grown up over the ancient ruins of Ephesus, and in 1869 he found foundations. Excavations continued until 1874. Wood recovered sculpted columns showing Artemis among the Amazons, fragments of the goddess's worship, and the coin hoard from the foundations. A second campaign by David George Hogarth in 1904-1906 produced more material. All of it went to the Ephesus Room of the British Museum, where it sits today. At the actual site, in a marshy field, a single reconstructed column rises from the ground - cobbled together from miscellaneous fragments to mark where one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World once stood. Storks nest on top of it in summer. Below them, frogs croak in the standing water. The contrast between what Antipater saw and what visitors see now is as severe as anything in archaeology. The temple mounted to the clouds. Now it does not.