In 356 BCE, on the same night ancient historians claim Alexander the Great was born, a man named Herostratus set fire to the wooden roof of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, near modern Selçuk in Turkey. The temple was said to be twice the size of the Parthenon and took 120 years to build, and the heat of the collapsing roof turned its marble to chalky powder through calcination. Almost nothing is known about Herostratus himself, but the fact that he was tortured on the rack suggests he was of low social standing, since full citizens were often protected from such treatment. Under torture he confessed that his only motive was everlasting fame.

Ephesus executed him and passed a decree forbidding anyone to speak or write his name on pain of death. It failed almost immediately. The historian Theopompus of Chios, outside Ephesian jurisdiction, recorded the name, and later writers from Valerius Maximus and Lucian to Chaucer kept it alive. Jefferson was once accused of a herostratic dream of glory, and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a short story inspired by him. The episode also questions whether a confession extracted on the rack can be trusted, and whether Herostratus was a scapegoat for a larger plot.

• How the ban on his name became one of the earliest examples of what is now called the Streisand effect
• Why heat from a burning wooden roof could destroy a marble temple
• Luigi Lucheni, who assassinated Empress Elisabeth of Austria for newspaper fame and blew kisses during his trial
• Arthur Bremer, who shot George Wallace in 1972 and picked his target by expected media coverage
• Philosopher Jeffrey Scarre’s argument that Herostratus is remembered only for pointless, pathetic stupidity