Hanna Golab (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
At the end of the 1st c. CE, Claudia Trophime, a priestess and prytanis from Ephesus, inscribed two epigrams to Hestia, in which she praised the goddess and her city (IEph 1062; SGO 03/02/37). Rarely commented upon in general, her poetry was seldom used in topographical studies of Ephesus to identify Mount Peion from the second epigram (Brein 1976-1977, Engelmann 1979 and 1991). In this paper, however, I intend to invert the question: not what Claudia’s poetry can tell us about the city’s topography, but how the topography can help us understand her epigraphic project.
The inscription’s placement betrays Claudia’s intimate knowledge of the urban space and her intentional engagement with it. It was exhibited at the entrance to the cultic hall of Hestia in the inner court of the Ephesian prytaneion (Knibbe 1981: 62-63). This is not just a trivial fact: in the first epigram, Claudia praises Hestia for her power over the divine fire, which was tended to in the hall (Merkelbach 1980). It means that the epigram’s reader would have been directed to look into the prytaneion’s inner room and see the light for themselves.
This play with hidden and invisible elements of the urban landscape continues in the second epigram. There, Claudia describes the Mount Peion, which towers above the prytaneion. Though the reader would not be able to see the mountain, they would know that they are facing both the Mount Peion and the inscription at the same time. This gaze that penetrates walls, pierces also the surface of the mountain: Claudia writes that it “secretly drinks up the rain from the air and swells in its flanks to the size of the sea”. Indeed, the city was surrounded by karst landscape which absorbed rainwater, but in Claudia’s paradoxical depiction the mountain becomes the sea, which then menacingly envelops the port-city. In the final lines, she returns to Hestia to praise the goddess “who hold[s] the light, keeping in [her]self the remnants of good measure”. It seems that the expansive mountain here is a foil to Hestia guarding within her the harmonious proportions of the universe.
Clearly, Claudia played with Ephesus’ topography when choosing the place for her inscription and used it to direct the reader’s gaze into interiors: the innermost chamber of the prytaneion, the innards of the imposing mountain, and the insides of the goddess. Accordingly, she placed her inscription in the inner court of the prytaneion. The material text was in dialogue with its surroundings, revealing the city’s hidden secrets.