Kitap 14
1.24
The city has both an arsenal and a harbor. The mouth of the harbor was made narrower by the engineers,Literally, “architects.” but they, along with the king who ordered it, were deceived as to the result, I mean Attalus Philadelphus; for he thought that the entrance would be deep enough for large merchant vessels—as also the harbor itself, which formerly had shallow places because of the silt deposited by the Caÿster River—if a mole were thrown up at the mouth, which was very wide, and therefore ordered that the mole should be built. But the result was the opposite, for the silt, thus hemmed in, made the whole of the harbor, as far as the mouth, more shallow. Before this time the ebb and flow of the tides would carry away the silt and draw it to the sea outside. Such, then, is the harbor; and the city, because of its advantageous situation in other respects, grows daily, and is the largest emporium in Asia this side the Taurus.
1.25
Notable men have been born in this city: in ancient times, Heracleitus the Obscure, as he is called; and Hermodorus, concerning whom Heracleitus himself says: It were right for the Ephesians from youth upwards to be hanged, who banished their most useful man, saying: ‘Let no man of us be most useful; otherwise, let him be elsewhere and with other people.’Hermodorus is reputed to have written certain laws for the Romans. And Hipponax the poet was from Ephesus; and so were Parrhasius the painter and Apelles, and more recently Alexander the orator, surnamed Lychnus,i.e., Lamp. who was a statesman, and wrote history, and left behind him poems in which he describes the position of the heavenly bodies and gives a geographic description of the continents, each forming the subject of a poem.
