The Library of Celsus is a historic Roman architecture at Ephesus, Anatolia

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22-Jun-2025 12 am

The Library of Celsus is a historic Roman architecture at Ephesus, Anatolia, which is now close to the present-day town of Selçuk in the western Turkish province of İzmir. The structure was finished during the reign of Roman Emperor Hadrian, some time after passing of Aquila, and was commissioned in the 110s CE by Tiberius Julius Aquila Polemaeanus, a Roman consul, as a funerary monument for his father, Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, a former proconsul of Asia. One of the rare surviving instances of an ancient world library in the Roman Empire is the Library of Celsus, which is regarded as an architectural wonder. With an estimated 12,000 scrolls, it was the third-largest library in the Greco-Roman world, behind the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum. Celsus is entombed in a marble sarcophagus in a vault beneath the library. The library-façade was demolished by an earthquake in the tenth or eleventh century, while the interior and its contents were lost in a fire that was caused by either an earthquake or a Gothic invasion in 262 CE. Before archaeologists rebuilt the façade between 1970 and 1978, it had been in ruins for millennia. After serving as a Roman army commander and being chosen to be a Roman Empire consul in 92 CE, Celsus had a prosperous military and political career. One of the first men from the Greek-speaking eastern provinces of the Roman Republic to hold the highest elected position in Imperial Rome, the consulship, was Celsus, a Romanized Greek native of Sardis or Ephesus who came from a family of Roman priests. There is, however, a scholarly disagreement over whether he was the first Greek to hold a position as a senator in Rome. Later on, he was named proconsul, or governor, of Asia, the Roman province that roughly corresponded to present-day Turkey. Celsus advanced swiftly through the ranks of the Roman government as a senator, consul, and praetor. After that, he retired and went back to his home in Ephesus. Using Greek and Roman methods, Tiberius Julius Aquila Polemaeanus, son of Celsus, commissioned the library in honor of his father after his death. But it was not finished till after Aquila passed away. According to an inscription, Celsus bequeathed a substantial sum of 25,000 denarii to cover the cost of the library-books. The affluent and privileged were supposed to be benefactors in ancient Roman society, using their fortune for the benefit of the community as a whole. In the Greek city of Ephesus, where Aquila constructed the library in memory of his father and for the good of Ephesus as a whole, this Roman belief spread to other Roman provinces and regions. The library itself exemplifies the Roman ideals of literacy development and knowledge exchange. #History #Architecture #Castles

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