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Bible Dictionaries
Miletus
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or (Μίλητος)
Miletus was an ancient Greek colony on the coast of Caria, and became the most flourishing of the twelve free cities which formed the Ionian League. Five centuries before Christ it ‘had attained the summit of its prosperity, and was accounted the ornament (πρόσχημα) of Ionia’ (Herod. v. 28), being unquestionably the greatest of Greek cities at the time. Favourably situated on the S. shore of the Gulf of Latmos, and possessing four harbours, it controlled the trade of the rich Maeander Valley, and was without a rival in the commerce of the aegean.
‘The citizens,’ says Strabo (xiv. i. 6, 7), ‘have achieved many great deeds, but the most important is the number of colonies which they established. The whole Euxine, for example, and the Propontis, and many other places, are peopled with their settlers.… Illustrious persons, natives of Miletus, were Thales, one of the seven wise men, his disciple Anaximander, and Anaximander the disciple of Anaximander.’
After the capture of Miletus by Darius, who massacred the inhabitants (494 b.c.), and by Alexander the Great (334), its days of greatness and glory were ended. The trade of the Maeander Valley was diverted to Ephesus, and, before the coming of the Romans, Miletus, though still called a ‘metropolis’ of Ionia, had become a second-rate commercial town, which the conquerors did not think it necessary to link up to any important city by one of their great roads. Having no longer any political importance, it became more and more isolated, and nature gradually completed its ruin by filling its harbours and almost the whole gulf with the silt of the Maeander (Pliny, Historia Naturalis (Pliny) ii. 91, v. 31). Its site-known as Palatia, from the ruins of its great theatre-is now 5 or 6 miles from the sea, and the island of Lade, which Strabo (xiv. i. 7) mentions as lying ‘close in front of Miletus,’ is now a small hill in the plain.
St. Paul did not select such a decaying city as a base of missionary operations, and its connexion with the record of his activity is a mere accident. At the end of his third journey, when he was hastening to Jerusalem to attend the Feast of Pentecost, he deliberately chose at Troas a ship which was not to touch at Ephesus, where it was probably still unsafe for him to appear, and where in any case his time would have been very short (Acts 20:16). But when the coaster in which he was sailing, and whose movements he naturally could not control, came to Miletus, he unexpectedly found that he would be detained there for some days, and it occurred to him that in the interval he might send a messenger to Ephesus-30 miles distant in a straight line, and somewhat further by boat and road-and summon its elders to meet him.
If his ship sailed from Samos (or Trogyllium, according to D) early in the day, and thus took advantage of the northerly breeze which rises in the aegean every morning during the summer and dies away in the afternoon, he would reach Miletus, 25 (or 20) miles distant, before noon. His messenger probably did not make the great detour by Heracleia at the head of the gulf, but waited for the gentle south wind (called the Imbat), which blows after sunset, to take him across to Pyrrha or Priene.
Strabo makes the ancient topography clear. ‘From Heracleia to Pyrrha, a small city, is about 100 stadia by sea, but a little more from Miletus is Heracleia, if we include the windings of the bays. From Miletus to Pyrrha, in a straight line by sea, is 30 stadia; so much longer is the journey by sailing near the land’ (xiv. i. 8, 9).
Passing through Priene, crossing Mt. Mycale, and speeding along the coast road, the messenger might reach Ephesus by midnight. The elders would travel south next day to Priene or Pyrrha, and get the northerly wind to take them over the bay to Miletus on the following morning. St. Luke writes as an eye-witness of the meeting, fellowship, and parting of St. Paul and the Ephesians, the record of which has given Miletus an abiding consecration. The Apostle’s address to the elders, with its lofty ideal of pastoral duty, reads ‘as an unconscious manifesto of the essence of the life and ministry of the most influential exponent of Christianity’ (J. V. Bartlet, Acts [Century Bible, 1901], p. 327).
Miletus is mentioned again in 2 Timothy 4:20 : ‘Trophimus I left at Miletus sick.’ This has been regarded as proving that St. Paul, released from his Roman prison, resumed his work in the East, and after all revisited the scene of his pathetic farewell. But many scholars prefer a different construction. Assuming that the passage in question occurs in a brief note (2 Timothy 4:9; 2 Timothy 4:11-13; 2 Timothy 4:20-21 a) sent to Timothy from Macedonia, and afterwards editorially incorporated in a longer letter written to him from Rome, they date the visit to Miletus before the one recorded in Acts 20:15. When St. Paul was leaving Ephesus, intending to return by Macedonia to Corinth (1 Corinthians 16:5), he may have had reasons for first visiting Miletus, and been obliged to leave Trophimus, who became sick there; or, though he did not personally visit Miletus, he might use a condensed expression, which meant that his friend, having been sent to Miletus and detained there by sickness, was unable to return to Ephesus before the time of sailing, and so was left behind.
Miletus has extensive ruins, of which the most remarkable is the theatre, and the site has been excavated by Wiegland for the Berlin Academy (SBAW [Note: BAW Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften.] 1900 ff.).
James Strahan.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Miletus'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/m/miletus.html. 1906-1918.
