A hint at this building’s function is offered by an inscription carved on
the left center pillar of the Gate of Mazaeus and Mithridates in the early
third centuryC.E.^50 It records that the city, using the bequest of one Julia
Potentilla, constructed a paving in front of the ‘‘Auditorion’’ and the
Library of Celsus. A new paving was indeed installed in the plaza around
200 C.E., and one could stand beside the Auditorion inscription and look
out onto it. This inscription is the sole case yet known where the Latin
word ‘‘auditorium’’ has been transliterated into Greek, bypassing
such cognates as ‘‘akroaterion’’ for a lecture or meeting hall, or ‘‘dikaster-
ion’’ for a hall of justice.
51
In spoken language, this would be called ‘‘code-
switching,’’ the sudden use of a foreign phrase in speech of another
language, though in this case it is transliterated, the letter forms remaining
Greek. So the Auditorion inscription differs from the independent or
closely translated bilinguals that we have seen so far, though a transliter-
ation of an official Roman term also occurs on the Greek version of
Celsus’s equestrian statue base, in which the Latin version’s ‘‘aerarium’’
becomes Greek ‘‘airarion.’’
52
From this choice of the Latinate ‘‘auditorion’’ rather than a Greek
term, it has been postulated that the building in question was named
from its particular Roman use, in other words, that it was the courtroom
for the proconsul of Asia and his consilium.^53 The inscription on the gate
faces onto the plaza, and if the Auditorion had a front pavement shared
with the Library of Celsus, it must have faced onto the plaza, too. But it
cannot be the Neronian Hall, on the right: its two doors leading into two
long separate passages would have ill accommodated a tribunal or a
courtroom full of standing people, much less the seating that most of
our texts place in Roman auditoria.^54
thus to justify restoring an altar of Artemis here (Thu ̈r 2005, 359, citing Knibbe 1991); the
relevant (end) part of the base’s inscription, lines 11 13 after a vacant line, reads:› ƒåæeò
ôüðïò’ ̄ìâïºåØ=ôHí ôHí ðÆæa ôfi B ŒıæßfiÆ ìHí ŁåfiA’`æôÝìØäØ, that is, ‘‘the sacred place of the
Emboleitans who are at the side of our mistress the goddess Artemis.’’ The ‘‘sacred place’’ is
the base itself, as shown by the nominative typical oftoposinscriptions, whereas the rest
refers to the dedicators who live on that street and their allegiance to the goddess.
50.IvE3009:IªÆŁfi B ôýå½fi Å= ðüºØò ôe óýóôæø½ìÆ=ôe ðæe ôïF ÆPäåØôøæßïı=ŒÆd ôBò ̊ݺóïı
âØâºØïŁÞ=ŒÅò ŒÆôåóŒåýÆóåí KŒ ðæï=óüäøí ŒºÅæïíïìßÆò=’Éïı½ºßÆò —ïôåíôߺºÅò:
Potentilla’s bequest extended to other projects as well: seeIvE2041, 2042; van Bremen
1996, 195, 320.
- Tamm 1963, 8 23. Infra n. 52. NoteSEG17 (1960) 759, a bilingual inscription that
records a hearing held by the emperor Caracalla in Antioch: the Latin portion sets the scene
in the aud(itorium), whereas the Greek refers to it as adikasterion. - Mason 1974, 5, 7 8, 20; Leiwo 1995, 300 1; Adams and Swain 2002, 3 7.
- Engelmann 1993.
54.PaceKearsley 2001, 129. The excavators at first thought that the Auditorion
consisted of the steps at the east of the plaza, and the space enclosed by them: Alzinger
1970, 1633, where he posits that Dionysios of Miletos founded the Auditorion.
This notion changed due to further excavation in the 1980s: Jobst 1983, 154 64.
Reading, Hearing, and Looking at Ephesos 85