4. A history of Ephesus from coins: the Roman province
4.1 From Julius Caesar to the end of the Republic.
The Roman administration was run more for the benefit of Romans than for the provincials, and Ephesus followed the call of Mithradates VI of Pontus to rise against Rome (and kill many resident Romans) in 88 BCE. The city was recovered by Sulla, and harshly punished.
Julius Caesar paid a more welcome visit in 48, when he kept the Temple of Artemis from being plundered by a renegade partisan of Pompey. After his death, from 42-37 BCE the Empire fell under the control of the second Triumvirate: his posthumously adopted son Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus.
The (second) triumvirate was founded in 42 BCE "for the restoration of the (Roman) state," and the pursuit of the murderers of Julius Caesar. On Ephesus' coins ( 22 ) the three are linked together, with few portrait features to distinguish them. Of the three, Antony held power in the East, and as the "new Dionysos" he was welcomed into the city in 41 by Ephesians dressed as satyrs and maenads. Lepidus was eliminated in 36, leaving the other two to fight it out. As the hostility among the former triumvirs grew, Ephesus became a headquarters for Antony; he wintered there with Cleopatra in 33/2 BCE, and his partisans in Rome fled there in 32 to form a sort of "anti-Senate."
Mark Antony had been a partisan of Julius Caesar, and became a part of the second triumvirate that avenged him. In the partition of power afterward, Antony received the East, where he began a liaison with Cleopatra VII of Egypt in 41 BCE. It was briefly interrupted by his diplomatic marriage to Octavia, sister of Octavian. Ephesus minted cistophoroi with the portrait of Antony on the obverse, and a smaller bust of Octavia above the cista mystica on the reverse ( 23 ). The marriage soon fell apart, his war with the Parthian empire was not a success, and his relationship with Octavian deteriorated, until his defeat at the battle of Actium ended his (and Cleopatra's) ambitions and lives.