Ancient city
Gate of Mazeus and Mithridates
Key answer
The famous photograph of Ephesus puts the library beside a triple-arched gate, as if they were designed together. They were not. The gate was already standing, and already old news, when the library was built next to it.
The South Gate of the agora
This is the three-passage South Gate of the Tetragonos Agora, the city's commercial square. Its job was practical before it was ceremonial: to admit and sort movement between the small square beside the library and the great enclosed market behind it. Three passages allow flow in more than one direction at once.
Historical Evidence
What the inscription records
The dedication honours Augustus and Livia, together with Agrippa and Julia, and names Mazeus and Mithridates as the men who paid for it. The imperial titulature dates the dedication to 4/3 BCE.
That date matters, because popular accounts often place this gate decades later, in the middle of the first century. The inscription does not allow it: the gate belongs to the Augustan reshaping of Ephesus.
Who were Mazeus and Mithridates?
The text describes the emperor and his family as their patrons, and on that basis scholarship identifies the two dedicators as imperial freedmen. This is a historical interpretation resting on a single word of the inscription, and it is a reasonable one — but the text gives no offices, no careers and no life story, and none should be supplied for them.
What the monument does show is how a formerly unfree man could pay for a piece of the city's public face and have his name cut into it beside the emperor's.
A pairing made in stages
Because the gate predates the Library of Celsus by more than a century, the famous corner visitors photograph is a composition assembled over time. The library was inserted beside an existing monument and had to negotiate with it.
Stand in the small square and watch how the two façades address each other and how the gate channels people sideways into the agora. Seeing a landmark as a sequence of decisions, rather than a single design, is one of the quiet pleasures of exploring Ephesus with someone who knows its order.
Common questions
The imperial titulature in its dedication dates the monument to 4/3 BCE, in the reign of Augustus. Later dates given for it in popular accounts are not supported by the inscription.