The Sacred Way
An Artist's Conception of the Temple W hen the poet Antipater in the 2 nd century BCE saw the Temple of Artemis and proclaimed it the greatest of all the wonders of the world, he was looking at a temple built upon the inexhaustible wealth and boundless ambition of Croesus, King of Lydia, in the 6 th century BCE. It survived until 356 CE, when Herostratus, for reasons unknown, set fire to everything in it that was combustible and brought the whole magnificent structure tumbling to the ground. The motive attributed to him at the time was a fervent desire to be famous, but I have never believed that story. So I wrote a different story and gave him a different motive. Coincidentally, the Temple was destroyed on the very day that Alexander the Great was born…well, maybe it wasn't a coincidence. Alexander preferred to think that the goddess had popped across the Aegean Sea to assist at his birth in Macedonia, leaving her Temple unprotected. Alexander accepted so