Herostratic

Herostratic (pronounced hera-strat-ick)

The act of seeking fame at any cost; desire for notoriety.

1640s: First noted in English in translation of fourth century documents, the construct was Herostratus +‎ -ic 

Herostratus was a learned borrowing from the Latin Hērostratus, from the Ancient Greek Ἡρόστρατος (Hēróstratos), the construct being Ἥρᾱ (Hḗrā) (Greek goddess of marriage, women, and family) + στρᾰτός (stratós) (army, military force; band or body of men; common people).  The suffix -ic was from the Middle English -ik, from the Old French -ique, from the Latin -icus, from the primitive Indo-European -kos & -ḱos, formed with the i-stem suffix -i- and the adjectival suffix -kos & -ḱos.  The form existed also in the Ancient Greek as -ικός (-ikós), in Sanskrit as -इक (-ika) and the Old Church Slavonic as -ъкъ (-ŭkŭ); A doublet of -y.  In European languages, adding -kos to noun stems carried the meaning "characteristic of, like, typical, pertaining to" while on adjectival stems it acted emphatically; in English it's always been used to form adjectives from nouns with the meaning “of or pertaining to”.  A precise technical use exists in physical chemistry where it's used to denote certain chemical compounds in which a specified chemical element has a higher oxidation number than in the equivalent compound whose name ends in the suffix -ous; (eg sulphuric acid (H₂SO₄) has more oxygen atoms per molecule than sulphurous acid (H₂SO₃).  Herostratical is an adjective and herostratically is an adverb.  The jocular noun herostratisphere is non-standard.

Attention seeking

In Asia Minor (near present-day Selcuk, Türkiye), in a sacred grove not far from the city of Ephesus, stood the Great Temple of Artemis (also known as the Temple of Diana), one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. During the evening of 21 July, 356 BC, Herostratus (also called Erostratus) of Ephesus saturated the timber and fabric furnishings of the temple with gallons of oil and when all was thoroughly soaked, he set fires in many places, inside and out.  Within minutes, as he had planned, the fire was uncontrollable and the temple was doomed.  Coincidently, on the day the temple was razed, Alexander the Great (356-323 DC) was born.

St. Paul Preaching in Ephesus Before the Temple of Artemis (1885), by Adolf Pirsch (1858-1929).

Herostratus was apparently a wholly undistinguished and previously obscure citizen, different from others only in his desire to be famous and the lengths to which he was prepared to go to achieve that fame.  As shocked Ephesians rushed to the fire, Herostratus met them and proudly proclaimed his deed, telling them his name would for all eternity be remembered as the man who burned down the Great Temple of Artemis and razed one of the wonders of the world.  Herostratus was, as he expected, executed for his arson.  In an attempt to deny him the fame he craved, the Ephesians passed the damnatio memoriae law, making it a capital crime ever to speak of him or his deed.  However, it proved impossible to suppress the truth about such an event; the historian Theopompus (circa 380–circa 315 BC) relates the story in his Philippica and it later appears in the works of the historian Strabo (circa 64 BC–circa 24 AD).  His name thus became a metonym for someone who commits a criminal act in order to become noted.  Subsequent attempts to erase names from history (tried on a grand scale by comrade Stalin and the Kim dynasty in the DPRK) seem always to fail.

It's unfortunate history didn't unfold so Android and iOS were available in 356 BC so  Herostratus could have played Lindsay Lohan's The Price of Fame instead of turning to arson.  The game was said to be "a parody on celebrity culture and paparazzi" and enabled players to become world famous celebrities by creating an avatar which could "purchase outfits, accessories, toys and even pets".  Played well. he could have entered a virtual herostratisphere and the temple might stand today.  As Ms Lohan would understand, the tale of Herostratus reminds all that for everything one does, there's a price to be paid. 

Like many of the tales from antiquity, the story of destruction by arson is doubted.  Various conjectures have been offered, some of which doubt the technical possibility of what Herostratus is said to have done, some claiming it was a kind of inside job by the temple’s priests who had their own reasons for wanting a new building and even a reference to the writings of Aristotle which offers a lightning strike as the catalyst for the conflagration.  However, whatever did or didn’t happen in 356 BC, the word herostatic, to describe one who seeks fame at any cost, has endured, the attempt to make his name unspeakable as doomed as the temple.