by the Meander and the Lycus to Laodicea and Apamea. This being so, the commercial supremacy was held by Miletus for a length of time, the road which was commanded by it having the advantage of being shorter and less difficult than that to which Ephesus was the key. But under the operation of influences which we can only partially trace things changed in the later period of the Greek sovereignty, and under the Romans Ephesus had the place which had once belonged to Miletus. It gained largely by the decline of other great commercial cities. The overthrow of Smyrna by the Lydians about Β.ο. 525 and that of Miletus by the Persians in B.c. 494 contributed much to its ascendency. Thus it came about that during the Roman Empire it ranked with Antioch and Alexandria as one of the three great emporia of the trade of the Eastern Mediter- ranean, and formed the commercial capital for the wide and varied territory west of the Cilician gates. It rose to the dignity of metropolis of the Roman Province of Asia. le was a free city. It had an “' assembly” and ‘“ council” of its own, and a governor, or pro-consul, ἀνθύπατος (cf. Acts xix. 38). In the general and natural decay of popular government, however, under the Imperial system, power fell into the hands of officials, and in Ephesus the γραμματεύς, the “town-clerk” (Acts xix. 35) or “recorder,” was the great authority.
Ephesus was originally a sea-port. It stood on the left bank of the Caster, it is true, a few miles up from the sea, but for a length of time the channel of the river was carefully attended to and kept open. It was never an easy task, however, to maintain a clear way between the harbour and the sea. The quantity of silt deposited by the Cajster was great. Blundering engineering, undertaken in the second half of the second century Β.ο. under Attalus II. Philadelphus, made matters worse. By Paul's time the passage had got into such a condition that, though the city still retained its pre-eminence, mariners avoided Ephesus if they could. A serious attempt to improve the channel was made by the Governor of Asia, as Tacitus informs us (Ann., xvi., 23), about Α.Ρ. 65. But effort slackened again, and things were left to take their course. The result in course of time was that the once famous harbour became a troublesome marsh. Ephesus ceased to be a sea-port, its trade declined, and the life went out of the city.
The importance of Ephesus, however, in ancient times was not due to its commercial position alone. It had a considerable name as a school of art. The great painters Parrhasius of the fifth cen- tury B.c. and Apelles of the fourth belonged to the city. Above all,