Note sull'episodio
In 377 BC Mausolus inherited rule of Caria, on the southwest coast of Anatolia in modern Turkey, from his father Hecatomnus of Mylasa. He was a satrap, a provincial governor under the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and he ruled alongside his sister and wife Artemisia II. His sister Ada later became the adoptive mother of Alexander the Great. A devoted Hellenophile who spoke Greek and laid out new cities on the Hippodamian grid, Mausolus saw the elevated pillar tombs of Lycia and grasped their power as propaganda. He moved his capital to Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum, with its natural double harbor, and filled it with temples, paved streets, and statues. Among its treasures was the Jar of Xerxes I, inscribed in four languages.
Mausolus died in 353 BC, and Artemisia hired architects Satyros and Pythius and sculptors Leochares, Bryaxis, Timotheus, and Scopas to finish his tomb, each sculptor taking one side. When she died in 351 BC, Pliny the Elder records, the artists stayed and finished it for their own fame. The roughly 45 meter monument survived Alexander the Great and pirates for about 16 centuries before earthquakes between the 12th and 15th centuries toppled it. The Knights of St. John then broke up the marble for Bodrum Castle, and in 1852 Charles Thomas Newton of the British Museum used Pliny's measurements to find the foundations.
- The three-part design: a frieze-wrapped podium, 36 Ionic columns with statues between them, and a 24-step pyramid topped by a four-horse chariot
- How Artemisia I earned the Xerxes jar, and his remark at Salamis that his men had become women and his women men
- The sealed burial with sacrificed cattle, sheep, and birds, a rubble-filled stair, and a stone plug that still failed to stop grave robbers
- Why the Knights burned the marble in kilns, turning calcium carbonate into quicklime for mortar
- Newton's finds, including a chariot wheel over six feet across, and the tomb's echoes in St. Louis, Washington, and Melbourne