It was not long before the city council sent an anxious message to say that great crowds were on their way along the streets leading to the Greek theater, where an illegal meeting was to be held. The silversmiths had seized two of Paul’s companions in the street, but his other disciples had forcibly prevented Paul from going to the theater. The city fathers also sent a warning to Paul, appealing to him not to mix with the crowd in case it led to murder.
When it became evident that the city council was not in control of the situation, Publius Celer ordered me to call out the cavalry and he himself placed a cohort of infantrymen at the entrance to the theater. He smiled, his eyes cold and his mouth crooked, and assured me that he had been looking forward to a suitable opportunity of this kind to give these unruly people a few lessons in Roman discipline and order.
With a trumpeter and a cohort commantler, I went into the theater to be able to give the signal if the crowd turned violent. The people were noisy and restless in the huge theater; many obviously did not know what it was all about and had, in the Greek way, simply come to shout as loudly as they could. No one seemed to be armed. I could imagine the panic that would ensue if the theater had to be cleared forcibly.
The senior elder of the silversmiths tried to quiet the crowd so that he could speak, but he had already roused them to such an extent that his voice was hoarse and cracked completely when he started to speak. Even so, I managed to make out that he was accusing Paul the Jew of misleading the people, not only in Ephesus but all over Asia, into believing that handmade idols were not gods.
“We are threatened with the danger,” he shouted in his cracked voice, “of the great temple of Artemis losing all respect and she herself her power. She who is worshiped by the whole of Asia and all over the world.” The huge crowd began to shout on the tops of their voices: “Great is Artemis of Ephesus!”
The continuous roar lasted so long that my trumpeter became anxious and tried to raise his instrument to his lips, but I knocked it away again.
A group of tasseled Jews was standing huddled nearby, and they pushed a coppersmith forward, crying, “Let Alexander speak.”
As far as I could make out, this Alexander wished to explain that the faithful Jews were not followers of Paul and that Paul did not even have the complete confidence of all the Christians in Ephesus.
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But when the crowd saw from his clothes that he was a Jew, they did not want to let him speak, and they were right, inasmuch as the faithful Jews did not approve of idols or handmade images of such things. To stop him from speaking, the crowd broke out again with the cry: “Great is Artemis of Ephesus!” This time the roar lasted without exaggeration for two full lines on the water clock.
Publius Celer appeared beside me with his sword drawn.
“Why don’t you give the signal?” he snarled. “We can disperse the whole meeting in no time.”
“Several hundred people would be trampled underfoot,” I warned him. The thought seemed to please Celer. So I added hastily: “They’re only praising their own Artemis. It would be both blasphemy and political fool-ishness to disperse a crowd for that reason.”
When the City Chancellor saw us standing hesitandy at one of the entrances, he signaled desperately for us to wait. He even had sufficient authority to quiet the crowd gradually as he stepped up to speak.
Now the Christians were thrust forward. They had been beaten and their clothes torn, but nothing worse had happened to them. To show what they thought, the Jews spat at them, but the Chancellor told the crowd not to act rashly, and reminded them that the city of Ephesus had been chosen to care for Artemis’ idol which had fallen from heaven. According to him, Paul’s disciples were neither temple defilers nor blas-phemers.
The more sensible people in the crowd began to glance at my red plumes and at the cavalry trumpeter and then make their way out of the theater. For a moment everything hung in balance. Publius Celer ground his teeth, for if he had found reason to attack, then in the traditional Roman way he could have set fire to and plundered the silversmiths’ shops. The educated members of the crowd fortunately remembered the frightening events of the past and hurried away. As an outlet for his disappointment, Celer let his soldiers besiege the theater and beat a few of the remaining rebels and Jews. But nothing worse occurred.
Afterwards he reproached me bitterly, saying, “Both of us would have been enormously wealthy men now, if you hadn’t been so indecisive. Suppressing a rebellion would have taken us to the top of the roll of knights. We could have put the cause of the uprising down to Silanus’ lax rule. One must seize the opportunity as it arises, otherwise one loses it forever.”
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