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Gaius Julius Aquila, Roman Consul, completed the Library of Celsus in honor of his father, the Roman Senator Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus who was Governor of Asia around 115 A.D. The Library was built with private funds and was completed in 135 A.D. both as   the late Senator’s tomb and as the repository of 12,000 scrolls.  Walking up the steps of this magnificent building, the visitor still is greeted by four female statues embodying Wisdom, Knowledge, Intelligence and Virtue: a testament to what was truly valued by the most enlightened citizens of the great city of Ephesus at the cusp of the Roman Empire prior to its dis-integration and eventual descent into chaos and darkness.

It is hard to grasp in our age the glory, scale, and history of Ephesus: a city with a population estimated at between four hundred thousand to half a million inhabitants, second only to Rome in the first century A.D., and whose roots may go back to 6,000 BC and the very dawn of civilization.  Sitting at the intersection of East and West, Ephesus was witness to the Mycenaen Civilization, to the rise and fall of Athens, to the Greek struggles against Persia, to the dominion of Cyrus, Darius, and Alexander the Great.  With the rise of Rome, Ephesus was one of the cosmopolitan centers where the best of Greece’s cultural inheritance was fused into Rome’s (and therefore our “Western”) intellectual DNA for ages to come.

The Library is a testament to what human-kind can achieve, but can also lose. It speaks of a struggle of thousands of years that culminated in the first human attempt at a cosmopolitan society: a few brief centuries when learning and diversity were valued, when ideas competed freely in the public square,  when the light of logic and science first pierced through layers of fear and superstition, and when the intellect of man finally evolved into a finer mechanism of inquiry, analysis, comprehension, and discovery. But this Library was lost (as was its larger cousin in Alexandria) and this first enlightenment was  aborted when demographic and economic forces fostered partly by plague and climate, and made worse by institutional short-comings, wound the clock of civilization back into superstition, theocracy, and eventual institutional dissolution.

Our civilization, the re-birth of the principles that inspired the Library of Celsus, is still young and its survival is in no way assured. We have mastered in part key potential threats derived from our surroundings such as epidemic diseases and food production; but we struggle still to create reliably stable economic systems, effective political institutions, and sufficiently enlightened cultural patterns to mold fulfilled individual and social lives. Unforeseen external shocks or unrecognized internal cultural decay can revert our societies back to the darkness and superstition that fueled the mob spirit which, in  Ephesus, Alexandria, and throughout the Roman Empire, tore down the intellectual and artistic monuments of our first enlightened age and tried to erase its heritage from history. Let’s look back upon the ruins of the Library of Celsus to remind ourselves of the active role each of us must play in striving for and in sustaining a civilization rooted in Wisdom, Knowledge, Intelligence, and Virtue.