Terrorism for Self-Glorification

The Herostratos Syndrome

Albert Borowitz

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1969
• ISBN:
  9781612774145
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Examines the motives of terrorists, from ancient Greece to the present day

"A unique work of... history, made all the more interesting by its relevance to the time in which we live. "
—James R. Elkins, editor of Legal Studies Forum

In this timely study of the roots of terrorism, author Albert Borowitz deftly assesses the phenomenon of violent crime motivated by a craving for notoriety or self-glorification. He traces this particular brand of terrorism back to 356 BCE and the destruction of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus by arsonist Herostratos and then examines similar crimes through history to the present time, detailing many examples of what the author calls the "Herostratos Syndrome, " such as the attempted explosion of the Greenwich Observatory in 1894, the Taliban's destruction of the giant Buddhas in Afghanistan, the assassination of John Lennon, the Unabomber strikes, and the attacks on the World Trade Center buildings.

The study of terrorism requires interdisciplinary inquiry. Proving that terrorism cannot be the exclusive focus of a single field of scholarship, Borowitz presents this complex subject using sources based in religion, philosophy, history, Greek mythology, and world literature, including works of Chaucer, Cervantes, Mark Twain, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Terrorism for Self-Glorification, written in clear and direct prose, is original, thorough, and thought provoking. Scholars, specialists, and general readers will find their understanding of terrorism greatly enhanced by this book.

1	The Birth of the Herostratos Tradition

AT FIRST GLANCE, the two antagonists appear to have been mismatched—Herostratos, an arsonist of obscure origins, and the goddess Artemis, one of the most powerful deities in ancient Greek worship. The man’s identity is shrouded in mystery except for the name that history attributes to him. It is a name drawn from Greek roots, and although Classicists debate its meaning, the elements of which it is formed seem to predict a nobler destiny than lay in wait for Artemis’s enemy. The word stratós means “army” in ancient Greek, and scholars have suggested that the male appellation “Herostratos” may be translatable as “army-hero” or, alternatively, as an “army devoted to Hera,” wife of Zeus.¹ The ancient Greeks customarily bestowed only one name on a child, often making a choice that was etymologically associated with a god; the firstborn son was generally named after his paternal grandfather.² History, unfortunately, tells us nothing about the arsonist’s family and it is by no means clear whether the name by which we know him was his at birth or later came to personify him in the course of the remarkable oral and written tradition that he inspired.

It is plain, at least, that the name Herostratos was not uncommon in the Greek world. An earlier man bearing this name established a shrine to Aphrodite in his home city of Naucratis, a treaty port in Egypt, after a narrow escape from disaster at sea. Despite the tarnish brought to the name by the arsonist, we find a Herostratos among the trusted lieutenants of Brutus, who sent him on a mission to Macedonia in 44 BC to win the support of the military commanders there, following the assassination of Julius Caesar.³

Because of the vastness of the Greek-speaking world, Herostratos’s name provides no clue to his place of birth or residence. Writers have sometimes assumed that he must have been a citizen of the predominantly Greek-populated city of Ephesus (near the modern town of Selçuk inland from the western coast of Turkey) where he perpetrated his famous crime. This supposition, however, does not give adequate weight to the far range of Hellenistic seafaring or to the large numbers of noncitizens residing in Greek city-states in the fourth century BC;⁴ it is with greater insight into the ease of Aegean travel and diversity of urban populations that Alessandro Verri, in writing the first Herostratos novel, makes his antihero a native of Corinth.⁵ Another void left by the historical record is Herostratos’s occupation and position in society. Imaginative literature has variously presented him as a poet, an artisan, or a jack-of-all-trades, but ancients and moderns alike are prone to visualize him as a failure—lonely, unrecognized, and bitter.

The object of Herostratos’s malice, Artemis (worshiped in Rome as Diana) was the daughter of Zeus and the Titaness Leto; she was the elder twin sister of Apollo, whom she miraculously helped her mother deliver on the ninth day of labor. Among the Olympians, Artemis is particularly notable for her versatility and her ambivalent roles as a sustainer and destroyer of life. A virgin deity who hunted game, particularly deer, she tried her silver bow when still young, choosing as targets two trees, “a wild beast, and a city of unjust men.”⁶ Despite her love of the chase, she is often represented in images as a “mistress of the animals” whose young she protects. According to one of the two Homeric Hymns in her honor, Artemis, in the company of her brother Apollo, also took pleasure in the gentler arts of music and dance:

Yet when the archeress tracker of beasts has had pleasure enough

From the hunt and has gladdened her mind, she unstrings her flexible bow

And goes to her brother’s great home, to Phoibos Apollo’s abode

In Delphi’s rich land, to prepare for the Muses’ and Graces’ fair dance.

She hangs up there with its arrows her bow that springs back from the pull,

And wearing graceful adornments takes the lead in the dance.

The goddesses, raising their heavenly voices, sing a hymn

Of fair-ankled Leto, and tell how she gave her children birth,

Who are in both counsel and deeds the best of immortals by far.⁷

Rites of passage are another of the goddess’s special interests; she guides young girls to womanhood and is sometimes concerned with male rituals of transition to maturity. Despite her jealously guarded maiden state, Artemis has important maternal functions, easing the pains of childbirth as she had done for her own mother, and assuring human and animal fertility. As a goddess of the moon and its phases, she is intimately connected with women’s monthly cycles. The moonlight was flattering to Artemis but from time to time she smelled the kill. Without warning she then turned fearsome as a dealer of sudden death to women in labor as well as to men who offended her, such as Actaeon, whom she turned into a stag and had torn apart by his own pack of fifty hounds after he had committed the impropriety of seeing her naked.⁸

In Ephesus, on the Ionian coast of western Asia Minor, Artemis assumed traits of the great mother goddess worshiped as Cybele in a temple at a site near modern Ankara. The cult statues in the Ephesus Museum emphasize the fecundity of the Ephesian Artemis: “Although the nodes on her chest were once thought to be breasts, it has become apparent that they represent the testes of bulls sacrificed for her.”⁹ This powerful divinity not only made the countryside flourish but also caused the important port and trading center of Ephesus to thrive under her patronage.

The origins of early settlements in western Asia Minor are hazy. Greek legend fancifully regarded the Amazons, redoubtable female warriors from far reaches of the ancient world, as the first inhabitants of Ephesus, and the claim of Athens to have colonized all the cities on the Ionian coast is also disputed. The Ephesians from their beginnings devoted themselves to the worship of Artemis. Successive versions of her temple (called the Artemision) were situated in a marshy plain about a mile to the northeast of the town, near the hill of Ayasoluk; as the shrine grew in magnificence it came to be ranked among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Philo of Byzantium, a scholar and engineer who described the Seven Wonders in a text written in Alexandria, Egypt, in about 225 BC, ecstatically praises the Artemision: “The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus is the only house of the gods. Whoever looks will be convinced that a change of place has occurred: that the heavenly world of immortality has been placed on the earth.”¹⁰

Selahattin Erdemgil, director of the Ephesus Museum, attributes the construction of the magnificent Archaic Artemision in the early sixth century BC to intercity rivalry. Just before 570 BC construction of a widely admired Temple of Hera was completed in Samos. The competitive Ephesians engaged the Cretan architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes to design a great shrine to Artemis that would outshine the Samians’ achievement. The construction of the new Artemision (which, according to Pliny the Elder, “occupied all Asia Minor for 120 years”) was in progress when King Midas of Lydia occupied Ephesus in about 561 BC and placated its citizens by contributing generously to the project. Midas’s beneficence may also have had the political objective of establishing worship of Artemis as a state religion to replace cults supported by powerful local clans. The temple, built almost entirely of marble and in accordance with the Ionic order, was of unusually large dimensions (380 by 180 feet, according to Director Erdemgil) that dwarfed those of the Parthenon. Two rows of columns surrounded the temple on its four sides. Pliny, who visited the later Hellenistic temple built at a higher elevation on the same design, counted 127 columns in all; thirty-six of the columns were carved with reliefs. The eight-column western facade of the building afforded a fine prospect of the city and harbor. Museum director Erdemgil refers to a calculation that “the architraves supported by the columns weighed twenty-four tons,”and adds: “Considering the equipment available then, it is difficult to comprehend how such heavy pieces could be lifted twenty metres and placed on the columns. The people believed that Artemis herself came and placed the architrave on the columns.”¹¹ In fact, Pliny informs us, the architect Chersiphron achieved this marvel “by filling bags of plaited reed with sand and constructing a gently graded ramp which reached the upper surfaces of the capitals of the columns.” Lying under some fifteen feet of alluvial deposit, the site of the Archaic Temple and its successor (the Hellenistic Temple) was identified in 1870 as a result of excavations conducted by architect John Turtle Wood on behalf of the British Museum.¹² In ancient times the site had been on the seaboard but the land has moved a few miles westward as a result of silt accumulation in the Caystros River.

In 356 BC the Temple of Artemis that King Croesus had sponsored was burnt to the ground. The story of the catastrophe, as pieced together from the surviving ancient sources, can be quickly retold: The temple is said to have been destroyed on the same night (most likely July 20 or 26)¹³ on which Alexander the Great was born. The fire, which caused widespread shock and lamentation in Ephesus, was attributed to arson committed by Herostratos, who was promptly arrested. Placed upon the rack, he confessed that he had conceived the crime to satisfy his appetite for fame. With the purpose of foiling his objective, the Ephesians, in addition to ordering the execution of Herostratos, adopted a decree banning the mention of his name.

Although in most respects the traditional narrative of Herostratos’s crime cannot be confirmed from nonliterary sources, archeological finds have uncovered physical proof that the Archaic Artemision was, indeed, destroyed by fire. Anton Bammer and Ulrike Muss, successive directors of the ongoing Austrian excavations of the site, report their evidence with jubilation: “This is one of those rare cases in which the historical report is archeologically verifiable, since many of the sculptured column drums and pedestals as well as the sima frieze [under the temple’s eaves] show traces of a fire.”¹⁴ John and Elizabeth Romer have surmised that Herostratos may have succeeded in setting the temple ablaze by torching its “enormous timber roof.”¹⁵

The surviving literary works from which the crime and its aftermath have been reconstructed were produced over a period of more than 250 years; the first of them appeared three centuries after Herostratos’s death, and thus it hardly furnishes fresh historical evidence. With only one exception, the authors treated their subject anecdotally or by way of illustration of a religious or moral precept and therefore seized only on isolated details that suited their narrative or stylistic purposes. The earliest source to come down to us can be found in a passage on the manifold activities of the goddess Diana (Artemis) in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods (De Natura Deorum), a philosophical work that he composed in 45 and 44 BC, the last years of his life. Noting the identification of the goddess with the light-bringing and wide-wandering moon, he explains that she was called Diana “because she made a sort of day in the night-time.” The invocation of her assistance at the birth of children was due to the equivalence of “occasionally seven, or more usually nine, lunar revolutions” to the period of gestation. This consideration led Cicero to pass along a clever observation made, as he recalled, by Greek historian Timaeus (ca. 356–260 BC), about Diana/Artemis’s conflicting duties on the night of her Ephesus temple’s destruction: “Timaeus in his history with his usual aptness adds to his account of the burning of the temple of Diana of Ephesus on the night on which Alexander was born the remark that this need cause no surprise, since Diana was away from home, wishing to be present when Olympias [Alexander’s mother] was brought to bed.”¹⁶

In his supplementary treatise, On Divination, Cicero mentioned again the simultaneity of Herostratos’s fire and Alexander’s birth. Relating these twinned events to his subject of divination, he also referred to the delirium of Asian magi over the portents to be read into the Ephesian calamity: “Everybody knows that on the same night in which Olympias was delivered of Alexander the temple of Diana at Ephesus was burned, and that the magi began to cry out as the day was breaking: ‘Asia’s deadly curse was born last night.’”¹⁷ The curse would be fulfilled, of course, when the newborn Alexander became Asia’s conqueror.

Plutarch (ca. 46–after 120 AD), in his life of Alexander, also adopted the tradition that stated Herostratos’s arson and Alexander’s birth both occurred on the same date. He retold the joke about Artemis’s preference of midwifery to fire fighting but cited Hegesias of Magnesia as the author of “the conceit, frigid enough to have stopped the conflagration.” He sounds a more somber note, however, in recalling the despair of visiting Asian magi over the loss of the holy sanctuary: “And all the Eastern soothsayers who happened to be then at Ephesus, looking upon the ruin of this temple to be the forerunner of some other calamity, ran about the town, beating their faces, and crying that this day had brought forth something that would prove fatal and destructive to all Asia.”¹⁸

Both Cicero and Plutarch, in the passages cited, continued to honor the decree suppressing mention of the arsonist’s name; their texts, in fact, do not disclose that the fire was willfully set. Some earlier writers, however, had already ignored the ancient prohibition against mentioning the name of the arsonist. Transgressors against the Ephesian ban on memory followed the lead of Theopompus of Chios, a Greek historian (born ca. 378 BC) who was living at the time of the fire but has left posterity only fragments of his works, an account of the last years of the Peloponnesian War (Hell...