Herostratus

Burning the Temple

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was dedicated to the Greek goddess of childbirth and the hunt. Born of competition between the city and its rival Samos, it was designed by Chersiphron and Metagenes and built over 120 years starting around 560 BCE. Pliny the Elder estimated that it surpassed the Parthenon in size by twofold. Nearly all of it was made of marble, save for such parts as the wooden statue of Artemis and the roof. Ancient sources listed the temple as one of the Seven Wonders of the World; Philo of Byzantium and Pliny crowned it "the only house of the gods" and "the most wonderful monument of Græcian magnificence", respectively.

On the day Alexander the Great was born in 356 BCE, a man burned the temple down; some historians claim he set its large wooden roof ablaze. The crime was attributed to an unknown man named Herostratus. Promptly arrested, he was tortured on the rack, where he confessed to having committed the arson to secure everlasting fame or notoriety. He was then executed. To thwart his ambition and harden his punishment, Ephesus passed a damnatio memoriae law forbidding anyone from mentioning his name. The arson shocked and grieved the city and possibly pushed it to the brink of panic.

There might be gaps in this account. One gap, observes Borowitz, is that Herostratus professed his vainglorious motives under torture instead of "[crying] his name ... to all who would listen". Torture was often not considered a means of obtaining information. Also, Ephesians may have suspected that Herostratus' true intention remained concealed, for instance, in the event that enemies of the city had hired him to burn the temple.

Starting in 323 BCE, the temple was rebuilt, and the resulting structure was larger than before. The Goths looted and burned it around 262/267 CE, and the temple met its end in 401 CE at the hands of a Christian mob. As of 2017, a sole reassembled column stayed standing.

Motives

No piece of evidence reveals Herostratus' motives. While ancient sources agree that he burned the temple to amass eternal or ubiquitous fame, they do not definitively conclude why he sought this fame. The leading theory since antiquity suggests he grew resentful at some perceived injustice and could not attain a good reputation, which thrust him toward the act. Greek satirist Lucian proposed for the first time that jealousy or a feeling of mediocrity motivated Herostratus, in that fame would only arrive by burning the Artemision and by no other means: a perversion, says Borowitz, of the Greek world's admiration of honor, bravery, and heroism. According to Russian poet Semyon Nadson, Herostratus had acknowledged that he was a "maggot squashed by destiny, in the midst of the countless hordes". Roman historian Valerius Maximus notes Herostratus' penchant for sacrilege as a factor.

Transmission and historical interpretation

The damnatio memoriae law did not stop numerous ancient writers from documenting Herostratus. If anything, the law may have guaranteed him posthumous fame, argues Matthew Fraser. The first to mention him was Theopompus, a Chian historian and contemporary of the arson; he does so in the Philippica. In a segment titled "Of Appetite for Glory", Valerius Maximus brings up Herostratus' case to demonstrate quests for fame that resort to crime alongside Pausanias', who killed Philip II of Macedon. His essay was the first to juxtapose Herostratus with a criminal hunt for fame. Around the second century CE, Lucian named the arson in relation with a later violent act, that is, Peregrinus' self-immolation at the Olympics.

By the Middle Ages, Herostratus was a familiar name in Europe. Writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer generally mentioned him to mark unscrupulous quests for celebrity and stressed that fame for wrongdoing often outlives deserved glory. Invoking the arsonist, the protagonist of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón's 1630 comedy La verdad sospechosa (The Suspicious Truth) reasons that a low public profile makes a person an "animal" and that one must seek out fame by any means necessary. In his 1699 play Richard III, Colley Cibber paints the English king as fame-thirsty and eager to define himself through unusual methods, and thus he recalls Herostratus' story: "Th'aspiring Youth, that fir'd the Ephesian dome, / Outlives, in Fame, the pious Fool that rais'd it." Beyond literature, an oral tradition revolving around him arose.

Starting from the Renaissance, Herostratus was a common metonym for someone accused of ruthlessness. Satirist Gabriel Harvey wrote in the late sixteenth century an attack on another author, Robert Greene, likening his libels to the burning of the Artemision. Thomas Jefferson was also called Herostratic. When he fantasized about grand salt deposits on the Missouri River Louisiana Purchase, one writer understood it as a dream of glory similar to Herostratus'.

Nineteenth-century literature, writes Borowitz, commenced "the still ongoing process of converting Herostratos from a symbol of destructiveness into a richly imagined personage". Differing from ancient sources, some modern authors supply their account of Herostratus' arson with a background and context. While most rebuke his crime, some indirectly romanticize or abate it by stressing his imagined obscurity and dejection. Enlightenment writer Alessandro Verri published the first book-length fiction on Herostratus in 1815, La Vita di Erostrato (The Life of Herostratus). It tells the tale of a man seeking glory who, after constantly having his dreams shattered in failure, grows frustrated and burns the Temple of Artemis. On the other hand, Romantic and exoticist poetry tends to focus on Herostratus' supposed "joy in destruction or self-destruction" over his hunger for fame.

Herostratus' legacy has persisted in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Jean-Paul Sartre's short story "Erostratus" concerns Paul Hilbert, who aspires to become a "black hero" in the vein of Herostratus but fails due to his personal weakness. The 1967 film Herostratus, a critique of a society drenched in advertising that exploits youth, molds the historical figure and event into a tale addressing 1960s society. Before the forlorn protagonist intends to kill himself, he arranges to make his suicide a media spectacle until a change of mind befalls him. A recent adaptation, Philipe Arnauld's 2002 La boite à chagrins (Pandora's Box), introduces mass media and the internet, as a serial killer who goes by Herostratus plans to publish images of his murders on the internet; a detective traps him. In another, Sam Levinson's 2018 satirical film Assassination Nation, a hacker under the handle Er0str4tus leaks half of Salem's personal information "for the lulz", sending the town into a frenzy of violence and insanity.

Analysis and social legacy

Herostratus' name has become a term for someone who commits a crime to achieve notoriety or self-glorification, and Herostratic fame refers to "fame [sought] at any cost". According to writer Julia H. Fawcett, he "exemplifies a figure asserting his right to self-definition, one who strikes out against a history to which he is unknown by performing himself back into that history—through whatever means necessary".

Herostratus is sometimes considered the first terrorist. Modern terrorists, notes Borowitz, tend to follow his example, as they hanker for publicity and aspire to surpass the injustice they perceive. Such injustice may be deeply personal and rooted in having little sense of meaning or self-worth. Per James W. Clarke's analysis of assassins, being unloved or confined to an existence without purpose are possible factors. While many, like Herostratus, are not ideologically or politically committed, others are though devoted to fame at the same time. Thus some shun their claimed objectives, as when jihadist Mohammed Merah murdered three Muslim soldiers in 2012. Modern acts of terror often deliberately appear senseless.

The Herostratic criminal targets a publicly valued symbol, an important person, or multiple people. To gather celebrity, in scholars' view, they require media coverage; in one instance, the antitechnology terrorist Ted Kaczynski pledged to halt his bombing campaign if the New York Times and Washington Post published his manifesto. Driven by an urge to appear in the newspapers and to a far lesser extent by his anarchist leanings, Luigi Lucheni assassinated the Austrian empress Elisabeth, and during the trial that followed, he acted theatrically and vaingloriously and "blew star's kisses to the audience". The attorney general made the case for forever wiping out his name. Similarly, Arthur Bremer, desperate for stardom, shot Alabama governor George Wallace in 1972. To him, the choice of victim depended on how much coverage he thought their assassination would garner. All these Herostratic criminals suffered a troubled past; Lucheni writes that his childhood was deprived of love, and Kaczynski, among other things, faced academic pressure from his parents and trauma from a harrowing college experiment. But this should not imply that no other factors led them to criminality.

Following September 11, numerous writers brought up Herostratus' name. Many of them understood the World Trade Center's destruction, a potent symbol of the United States, as a venture for immortality akin to the Artemision's demolition. And in what Borowitz deems a tool of self-aggrandizement, Osama bin Laden recorded a video of himself celebrating the terrorist attacks. A contemporary commentator wrote: "[The] highlighting of terrorism in mass media is a trigger for the Herostratus phenomenon. Every showing of a shop's explosion, mass murder and falling skyscrapers gives birth to more and more terrorists." The arson has also been paralleled with the Taliban's destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan.

Philosopher Geoffrey Scarre considers Herostratus to discuss whether posthumous events can make one's life more significant. While noting that he did realize his dream, to secure fame, and thus his meaningless life seemingly gained meaning, Scarre concludes that the arson did not enrich Herostratus' life since "what is remembered about [him] is the pointless stupidity of the man and his project. If his was a strategy for evading absurdity, it was self-defeating in its own absurdity".