Her brother Tiberius Claudius Phesinus from Teos, likely her original
home as well, became chief priest of the provincial temple of the Augusti
at Ephesos in 90C.E.^26 Usually when both dedicators are Easterners, even
if Roman citizens, the dedications are just in Greek. Was Metrodora’s
husband a Latin speaker from the West? Or was the dedication so strongly
attracted by the nearby gate of Mazaeus and Mithridates that it ended up
bilingual? We can only hope for additional data that will tell us.
The Neronian Hall’s effect on its readers must have been quite differ-
ent from that of the Gate of Mazaeus and Mithridates. First, the archi-
tectural parallelism made it evident that the two inscriptions on the stoa
were equivalents, rather than statements of different things. That the
Latin inscription came first, was higher on the building, and was in larger
letters (with interpuncts), was usual, and just showed the pecking order.
This time the building’s architecture has no tinge of the Roman, but that
is to be expected, as the design of the end of the stoa had to reflect that of
the whole, which was plain Doric. Though a new construction, it is
unmistakably an extension of the Greek Agora.
Before the Neronian Hall stood an older, round monument on a tall
base. Stairs had to be added to make a passable transition between it, the
new Neronian Hall, and the Gate of Mazaeus and Mithridates. There are
several guesses about what this monument was. From the parts that have
been found, dated by ornament style to the second half of the first century
B.C.E., it was a small tholos with a conical roof. It has been restored by
Friedmund Hueber, chief engineer and architect of Ephesos, as a combin-
ation water clock, tower of the winds, and water organ, with a nest of
trumpets coming out of the roof; he did not indicate exactly how this
would have worked.^27 Jobst saw the monument as a heroon, one of
several such along the ‘‘Embolos’’ street leading off to the east; there is a
similar circular podium for an intramural tomb at Aphrodisias.^28 It is also
possible that it was a fountain, as there were holes and grooves for piping
in roof and column fragments that may have belonged to it. Unfortu-
nately, no inscription for it has yet been found.
Originally this area was a major east-west street flanking the Agora, and
on its other side was a late Hellenistic peristyle house. But the new
- Campanile 1994, 42 3; van Bremen 1996, 71 5, 84, 154, 195, 291 2, 309; Kearsley
- Hueber (1997a, 70 3, 1997b, 267) based his theory on a mid first centuryB.C.E.
inscription (IvE3004) which states that ahorologeionwas at ‘‘the middle of the Agora.’’ But at
the time of that inscription, the area in which the round monument stood was not yet a
plaza, but a street; it may have become part of the Agora later, by the time of the burial
of Dionysios of Miletos there (see below). The remains of what may be a contemporary
water clock in Pergamon look very different from the building at Ephesos: Radt 2005.
On Hellenistic and later water clocks, Wikander 2000, 363 9. - Jobst 1983, 184 98; on the ‘‘Embolos’’ heroa, infra n. 61. Cormack 2004, 173, on
the Aphrodisias tomb.
Reading, Hearing, and Looking at Ephesos 77