Aphrodisias

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Aphrodisias sits about 100 kilometers inland from the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, hidden in the folds of a landscape that has swallowed and preserved cities for thousands of years. Named after Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, it was not just a place of worship. It was a provincial capital, a marble powerhouse, and a school of ideas that outlasted the empire that gave it its greatest glory.

  Before it bore the name Aphrodisias, the city carried at least three earlier Greek identities: Lelégōn Pólis, meaning the City of the Leleges; Megálē Pólis, the Great City; and Ninóē. Then, sometime around the 3rd century BC, it took the name tied to the goddess. In the Late Antique period, a new name arrived: Stauropolis, City of the Cross. The renaming tells you nearly everything about what the city survived.

  What made Aphrodisias exceptional was not simply its temples or its statues, though both were famous across the Roman world. It was the particular chain of luck and strategy that kept it wealthy: a local man who had been a slave rose to become a benefactor whose choices shaped the city's future. The marble beneath its feet fed workshops whose craftsmen were known across the empire. And an earthquake, when it finally came, ended a prosperity that centuries of political upheaval had not.

  This is the story of a city that carried the name of love through wars, earthquakes, religious revolutions, and a slow settling into dust, until photojournalist Ara Güler and a series of archaeologists began to bring it back to light in the 20th century.

• 2. The Marble and the Sculptors

  ›

  White and blue-grey Carian marble ran through the slopes adjacent to Aphrodisias, and its presence shaped what the city became. Quarried extensively through the Hellenistic and Roman periods, that stone fed a school of sculpture whose reputation spread across the Roman world.

  Full-length statues were recovered in the area around the agora, and trial pieces alongside unfinished works confirmed that a genuine teaching institution operated here, not merely a cluster of individual workshops. Sarcophagi were found across the site, most decorated with festoons and columns. Pilasters carried what excavators described as "peopled scrolls": figures of people, birds, and animals twisted through acanthus leaves.

  The reach of Aphrodisian work was remarkable. Representations of the city's particular cult image, the Aphrodite of Aphrodisias, have been found as far away as Pax Julia in Lusitania, on the western edge of the Roman world. The stone the sculptors shaped in this inland Anatolian valley eventually stood in cities separated from Aphrodisias by the entire width of the Mediterranean.

  Much of what survives from those workshops is now held in the Aphrodisias Museum, which stands on or near the ancient site. The proximity of raw material to trained hands to patronage created a concentration of output that the earthquakes of the 7th century interrupted but could not entirely erase.

• 3. Gaius Julius Zoilos

  ›

  Among the freedmen of the ancient world, Gaius Julius Zoilos stands out for what he did when he came home. He had been a slave of Gaius Julius Caesar, and after Octavian freed him, he returned to his native Aphrodisias carrying both wealth and the prestige that came from his connections to the most powerful men in Rome.

  Excavations led by R. R. R. Smith at Oxford University and Katharine Welch of the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, ongoing in 1993, traced the lavish building programme at the city's civic center back to Zoilos. He funded it largely himself. He also made a choice that proved decisive: he directed Aphrodisias to support Octavian in his struggle against Mark Antony.

  That alignment was not sentiment. The Gens Julia, the family of Julius Caesar and Octavian, claimed divine descent from Venus, the Roman counterpart of Aphrodite. A city whose central cult was Aphrodite was an especially resonant ally for a man building that particular claim to power. Zoilos's calculation paid off. Octavian's lasting favor brought financial privileges that underwrote the city's prosperity for generations.

  The Sebasteion, or Augusteum, expressed this relationship in stone. A 1st-century inscription on its propylon declared it jointly dedicated to Aphrodite, the Divine Augusti, and the People. A relief found in the ruins of the south portico showed the city itself, personified, making sacrifice to the cult image of the goddess, described there as promētōr, meaning foremother or ancestral mother.

• 4. Buildings of the Civic Center

  ›

  At the end of the main north-south street, a monumental gateway called a tetrapylon led into a large forecourt before the Sanctuary of Aphrodite. Built around AD 200, it marked the approach to the city's religious and political heart.

  The Bouleuterion, the council house, stood on the north side of the North Agora. Its semicircular auditorium faced a shallow stage structure roughly 46 meters wide. Nine rows of marble seats divided into five wedges survived intact in the lower section; twelve additional rows in the upper section collapsed with their supporting vaults. The building's design was unusually open, with multiple entrances at ground level. Massive parallel buttresses indicate it was originally roofed and vaulted, with tall arched windows in the curved outer wall. Seating capacity has been estimated at 1,750.

  The building dates to the Antonine or early Severan period, meaning the late 2nd or early 3rd century AD. Two brothers who were senators in the early Severan period had their names inscribed on statue bases at the ends of the auditorium's retaining walls. Claudia Antonia Tatiana and her uncle Lucius Antonius Dometinus, both active at the end of the 2nd century, were honored on symmetrically placed bases on the exterior facade. Tatiana had close ties with Ephesus, and the Bouleuterion at Aphrodisias closely resembles the council house on the civic agora there, dated by inscription to the mid-2nd century.

  In the early 5th century, a municipal official had the Bouleuterion converted into a palaestra, a hall for lectures, performances, and competitive displays. Factional inscriptions carved into the seats and additional cuttings likely for poles supporting awnings suggest the building had lost its roof by that point. The orchestra floor was lowered and given a new marble pavement, probably reused from the earlier phase.

  The stadium, built in the 1st century AD, measured approximately 270 meters by 60 meters, with 30 rows of seats along each side and around each end, giving a maximum capacity of around 30,000 spectators. The track measured roughly 225 meters by 30 meters. Its meetings followed the model of Delphi, where artistic contests were emphasized over pure athletic competition. Inscriptions at the site confirm persistent use through the 3rd century AD. The eastern portion was later converted into a circus for Roman gladiatorial games, and after a 7th-century earthquake badly damaged the theatre, part of the stadium was adapted to host events that had previously taken place there.

• 5. The Cult Image

  ›

  The Aphrodite of Aphrodisias was not quite the same goddess worshipped in Corinth or Paphos. She was a local deity who, through the process the ancient world called interpretatio graeca, came to be identified with the Greek Aphrodite. Her image relates her to the Lady of Ephesus, the goddess widely known in the Greco-Roman world as Artemis of Ephesus.

  All surviving images of the Aphrodite of Aphrodisias come from the late phase of the cult, in Hellenistic and Roman times, and all appear in contexts that were civic rather than strictly ritual. She wore a thick tunic that encased her body in something close to a columnar form, her feet necessarily close together, her forearms extended to receive and to give. Over the tunic she wore a floor-length chiton. Necklaces adorned her, along with a mural crown, a diadem, and a wreath of myrtle. A long veil framed her face and reached to the ground.

  The tunic carried four registers of bas-relief imagery. These depicted the Charites, the Three Graces who were Aphrodite's closest attendants; a married pair identified by Lisa Brody as Gaia and Uranos, Earth and the Heavens; Helios and Selene separated by a pillar; the marine Aphrodite riding a sea-goat; and at the base, a group of Erotes performing cult rituals.

  The goddess's unique cult image was once housed in the Temple of Aphrodite. Around 481-484, Emperor Zeno ordered the temple dismantled, because it had been the focus of pagan Hellenic opposition to his rule, organized in support of the rebel Illus, who had promised to restore Hellenic religious rites that had been suppressed during the persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire.

• 6. Inscriptions and Memory

  ›

  Upwards of 2,000 inscriptions have been recorded by excavators working under the aegis of New York University, a number made possible by the unusual quality of the local marble, which preserved text across centuries. Many of the inscribed pieces had been built into the city's Late Antique walls, where they could be read from the surface without any excavation at all. Visitors recorded them starting from the early 18th century.

  Most inscriptions belong to the Imperial period. Funerary and honorary texts are the most common, but texts survive from every period between the Hellenistic and Byzantine eras. A particular set was assembled into what excavators call the "Archival Wall", a deliberate collection designed to present the city's grandeur and history.

  Among the inscriptions uncovered, one stands apart for what it reveals about religious community. Written in Greek, it lists donations by numerous individuals, several of whom are described as theosebeis, or Godfearers. Comparative evidence from inscriptions at the Sardis synagogue and from the New Testament suggests that Godfearers were interested gentiles who attached themselves to Jewish communities, supporting and perhaps attending the synagogue. The Aphrodisias inscription points to this as a widespread practice across Asia Minor during the Roman period.

  A frieze discovered in 1980 adds a different dimension. It shows a bare-breasted, helmeted female warrior labeled BRITANNIA, writhing in agony under the knee of a Roman soldier, with the inscription TIBERIUS CLAUDIUS CAESAR to the left and below. The image is read as a depiction of Britain subjugated by Rome, carved in a city that had every reason to celebrate Roman imperial power.

• 7. Excavation and Rediscovery

  ›

  The first formal excavations at Aphrodisias were conducted in 1904-5 by Paul Augustin Gaudin, a French railroad engineer. Friezes, pilasters, and capitals he removed from the site are now in the British Museum.

  Ara Güler, a Turkish photojournalist born in 1928 and who died in 2018, brought the ancient city to wider attention during his time with Magnum Photos in the early 1960s. His photographs introduced Aphrodisias to an international audience at a moment when formal excavation was just resuming.

  Kenan Erim began ongoing excavations in 1962 under the sponsorship of New York University, a programme that continued for decades. By 1993, leadership had passed to R. R. R. Smith of Oxford University and Katharine Welch of the NYU Institute of Fine Arts.

  Part of the ancient city had been covered by the modern village of Geyre, and some of the village's cottages were removed in the 20th century to expose the ruins beneath. A new Geyre was built a short distance away to accommodate the displaced residents.

  In September 2014, drones were used to create a three-dimensional map of the above-ground ruins. The data was being analyzed by the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna. In March 2018, an ancient tomb came to light in an area where illegal excavations had been carried out; it was removed to the Aphrodisias Museum. Two years later, in 2020, two sarcophagi were found in an olive grove, one bearing a relief of Medusa. In 2017, the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage Site list, recognition that came more than a century after Gaudin first broke ground.