How Many People Actually Lived in Roman Ephesus?

Nobody knows exactly how many people lived in Ephesus, because no census survives, but modern estimates for the Roman city at its height run from about 34,000 to 172,000, and the two most recent systematic studies sit at the lower end, between roughly 34,000 and 72,000. The figure repeated in so many books and websites, 200,000 to 250,000, is much older. It goes back to an estimate made in 1886, and for half a century it leaned on a line of Greek that had been misread. Even the smallest honest number still leaves Ephesus among the great cities of the Roman world.

What was the population of ancient Ephesus?

Every number for Ephesus is a modern estimate, and each one rests on two choices: how much of the city was actually lived in, and how tightly people were packed into that space. Change either assumption and the total moves by tens of thousands, which is why careful scholars have landed so far apart. These are the estimates that matter, from the oldest to the most recent.

Where the quarter-million figure came from

The big number has a paper trail. In 1886 the German historian Karl Julius Beloch compared the size of Ephesus with Alexandria and arrived at about 225,000 people. In 1938 the American scholar T. R. S. Broughton found what looked like proof in a recently published inscription honoring a wealthy Ephesian named Aurelius Baranus. As Broughton read it, Baranus had entertained the city council and 40,000 citizens. Forty thousand citizens, plus their families and slaves, made Beloch’s total look, in Broughton’s words, like no exaggeration, much as the physician Galen had once put his own Pergamon at 40,000 citizens and 120,000 people with women and slaves added. In 1950 David Magie cited the same stone to credit Ephesus, Pergamon and Smyrna with at least 200,000 people each, and from there the figure spread into books and guides of every kind.

The stone says 1,040 citizens, not 40,000. For fifty years, a city of a quarter of a million rested on that misreading.

In 1988 two classicists, Preston Duane Warden and Roger Bagnall, went back to the Greek. The words on the stone, chilious tessarakonta, run in descending order, thousands first and then tens, so they mean one thousand and forty. Their note in Classical Philology is short and decisive: the phrase cannot mean 40,000, the inscription is no evidence for the size of the citizen body, and how many citizens Ephesus really had, they conclude, we do not know. Hosting the whole council and 1,040 citizens was already a lavish gift. Hosting 40,000 was out of the question.

A second inscription argument points the same way. In 1981 the Austrian epigraphist Dieter Knibbe counted 48 civic divisions in an inscription of the Curetes, the priests of Artemis. The divisions were called chiliastyes, “thousands”, and Knibbe took each to hold a thousand citizens: 48,000 citizens, and 200,000 or more people once wives, children and slaves are added. The weak point is the name. A chiliastys was a named unit of the citizen body, and Ephesian citizenship decrees show new citizens being assigned to a tribe and a chiliastys by lot. The word “thousand” in its name is no more a head count than an English county “hundred” held a hundred people.

The other shortcut people reach for is the theater sum. The Great Theater held about 25,000, a city is supposed to be roughly ten times its largest venue, and so a quarter of a million it must be. That is a rule of thumb, not evidence, and no published study stands behind it. The seats were never meant only for people who lived inside the walls: the city’s territory ran up the Cayster valley, and the festivals of Artemis drew visitors from across the province. A theater’s size tells you what a city could afford and how it liked to gather. It does not tell you how many people slept inside the walls.

Why the modern estimates are so much smaller

Modern demographers start from the ground rather than from a seat count or a single stone. They work out how much of a city was actually housing, then apply densities measured at excavated towns where the houses can be counted. At Ephesus that shrinks the answer quickly. The walls of Lysimachus enclosed about 415 hectares, but they took in the steep slopes of Mount Pion and of Bülbüldağ, the ridge above the Terrace Houses, and much of the flat ground between them was filled by agoras, temples, baths, gymnasia, the stadium and the harbor. John Hanson counted about 224 hectares as lived-in and gave a range of 33,600 to 56,000. The Austrian team surveying the city, led by Stefan Groh, came at it from the street plan: about 25,000 people in the residential blocks and some 30,000 to 70,000 with the wider urban area. The model he later built with Scott Ortman, published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, puts Ephesus at about 71,600. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor reached 138,000 to 172,500 by allowing a larger area and a density of 400 to 500 people per hectare, well above the 150 to 250 that Hanson considers realistic.

A check from the water supply

Water gives a different angle. By the second century AD four long-distance lines fed the city: clay pipes from Şirince and from the Derbentdere springs, and two masonry channels, 36 and 42 kilometers long, from Değirmendere near Kuşadası and from Kayapınar near Belevi; the last of them ended at the Fountain of Trajan. Engineers who recalculated them in Water Supply in 2014 put their combined capacity at about 330 liters a second, some 28,500 cubic meters a day at the very most. That is a ceiling, not a meter reading: the springs themselves were measured far lower a century ago.

Now divide. Shared among 250,000 people, even the full ceiling comes to about 115 liters a head each day, before the great baths, the fountains that ran day and night and the workshops took their share. Shared among 70,000, it is about 400 liters, the generous scale Roman engineers built for. Water cannot count people, but it sits far more easily with the lower estimates than with the quarter-million.

Population of Ephesus in the first century

Many people asking this really want the city the Apostle Paul knew in the 50s AD. No study separates that decade from the century after it, so the same range is the best answer available for Paul’s Ephesus too. What is certain is its standing: from 133 BC Ephesus was the capital of the Roman province of Asia, and its harbor made it the natural hub of the region. Some of the grandest buildings you see today came later. Work on the Library of Celsus began around AD 110 and the Temple of Hadrian followed around AD 130, both long after Paul had left. For a street-by-street picture of the earlier city, read what Ephesus was like in Bible times.

So how many people lived in Ephesus?

If you want one sentence: the most recent studies put Roman Ephesus at roughly 34,000 to 72,000 people, one respected scholar allows for well over 100,000, and the quarter-million figure is a century-old estimate that has not survived checking. None of that makes Ephesus small. Most towns of the Roman world had no more than a few thousand inhabitants, and in Hanson and Ortman’s summary of the historian Walter Scheidel’s work, Ephesus stands among the five largest cities of the Greco-Roman world by the second century AD, alongside Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Carthage.

The ancient writers agree on its rank, even though none of them counted heads. The geographer Strabo, writing under Augustus and Tiberius, called Ephesus the largest emporium in Asia this side the Taurus. The city gave itself the title “first and greatest metropolis of Asia” on its inscriptions and coins. The numbers have come down. The rank has not.

Before and after the peak

The Roman figures describe a city at its height, and Ephesus was not always that size. Before Lysimachus moved it into the valley in the early third century BC, the town was far smaller: its oldest known wall, built around 400 BC, enclosed only about nine hectares, according to the Austrian Academy of Sciences. At the other end of the story, after the raids of the seventh century the new walls enclosed less than half of the old city, and people moved up Ayasuluk Hill, the start of today’s Selçuk. How that happened is told in what happened to Ephesus. No study gives reliable numbers for those earlier and later centuries, so we do not invent them.

Reading the numbers on the ground

Standing in the city makes all of this easier to judge. From the upper seats of the theater you look down the Harbor Street toward the plain where the ancient port silted up, and you can see how much of the valley floor was public space. From the Odeon, the roofed council hall at the top of the site, the hillside rises straight behind the State Agora, and it is easy to picture houses stepping up it. Our stop-by-stop city tour route walks the whole site from that upper end down to the theater, and on a private Ephesus tour there is time to pause at both viewpoints and talk through the arithmetic. A half-day Ephesus tour covers the same main street. If the scale of the digging interests you, how much of Ephesus has been excavated carries the story on, and our history of Ephesus puts these centuries in order.