Marble Street & the Gate of Mazaeus and Mithridates

Turn right at the Library of Celsus and you are on Marble Street — the broad, gleaming avenue that runs beneath the Great Theater. This was a stretch of the sacred way, the processional route that circled out to the Temple of Artemis; on festival days the goddess's statues rode along it in ceremony while the whole city watched.

The street earns its plain name honestly: it is paved edge to edge in thick marble slabs, raised on a platform above the sewer line. Look closely at the surface and the Roman traffic report appears — deep parallel ruts worn by centuries of cart wheels, and beneath the raised colonnade, the polished path where pedestrians kept out of the vehicles' way. Two thousand years later, the lane markings still work.

Is the footprint on Marble Street an advertisement?

Every guide stops at this slab, a short walk from the library on the agora side of the street, and the story that goes with it is famous: measure your foot against the carving, and if it is an adult's and your purse is full, follow the toes to the house where a lady is waiting. Guides have told it for generations, and we have told it too. Here is what the stone itself can support.

• No ancient source calls it an advertisement. The reading comes from modern guidebooks. The standard archaeological guide to the site, edited by Peter Scherrer, rejects the idea that it was a signboard for the so-called House of Pleasure.
• The woman is probably a goddess. Her crown is a mural crown, a ring of towers like a city wall, the badge of Tyche, the Fortune of the city. A scholar made exactly this point in 1973, in an article titled "The Alleged Advertisement for the Ephesian Lupanar."
• It is late. Werner Jobst dated the carving to the 5th century AD, the century of the Council of Ephesus. Even if it were an advertisement, it would not be the world's oldest: the painted shop signs and election notices of Pompeii, buried in AD 79, are centuries older.
• It may not be one message. The foot, the heart and the head could be separate scratches by different people at different times, as the historian Anise Strong has suggested.
• The "brothel" is doubtful too. The house at the corner of Curetes Street and Marble Street got the name mainly because a terracotta Priapus figurine turned up in its well; the figure is now in the Ephesus Museum. The historian Thomas McGinn calls the building almost certainly a Roman peristyle house, a wealthy family's home.

So what is it? Nobody knows for certain. Ordinary graffiti, perhaps from several hands, or a marker whose meaning has been lost are the readings scholars prefer; a signboard for a brothel is the least supported of all. We still stop at the slab on every walk, because a riddle carved into a Roman pavement is worth a few minutes, and we show you the evidence both ways.

The slab is easy to miss in a crowd. Our Treasures of Ephesus tour starts early and is timed to reach Marble Street ahead of the thickest crowds, with skip-the-line entry at the gate (the ticket itself is paid separately, at the Ministry price). Our Ephesus map shows where the street runs between the library and the theater.

A gate built on gratitude

At the street's south end, beside the library, rises the triple-arched Gate of Mazaeus and Mithridates. Its story is the best in Ephesus: Mazaeus and Mithridates were slaves in the household of the Emperor Augustus, were freed, grew wealthy, and built this monumental gate in 4–3 BC as a thank-you to the emperor and his family — their patrons' names spelled out in letters that were once inlaid bronze. From property to philanthropists, in one lifetime; their gate has now outlasted the empire that freed them.

One more detail we cannot resist: a warning carved near the gate promises the wrath of Hekate — a goddess you did not want angry — upon anyone who urinates there. Public order, ancient style. It apparently worked; the gate is immaculate.