Looking for Aphrodite. David Price Williams
is the view, one of the finest in the classical world.
From the Acropolis we can look north across the Ceramic Gulf to the dark outline of the Bodrum Peninsula. Somewhere at the foot of those hills are the relics of the city of Halicarnassus and the remains of the Mausoleum, the tomb of Mausolus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The intervening sea stretches out like a luminous plastic sheet, lightly corrugated by the early summer breeze, shimmering silver in the reflected sunlight. To the west lies the whole extent of the Island of Kos, its northern half a mass of brooding mountain tops. On the other side of those mountains lies the Aesclepeion, the centre of healing were Hippocrates challenged the non-rational, animistic approach to medicine – dominated by superstitions, spirits and sympathetic magic – and ushered in a new understanding of the human body and of medical practice.
To the south, beyond the tranquil, turquoise water of the Commercial and the Trireme Harbours of Knidos, way in the distance behind the crenulated rocks at the top of the Island site recline the southern Dodecanese. To the east is the huge whale of Rhodes, one of the largest of the Greek islands. In
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Classical times the citizens of Rhodes built the famous Colossus overlooking the harbour – another of the Seven Wonders - to celebrate the liberation of their city in 305 BC. Many centuries later the Island became the fiefdom of the Crusader Knights.
Due south in the distance is the spine of Tilos, once home to pygmy elephants, long since extinct. Extinct too is the volcano of Nisyros to the south west, with its associated islets of volcanic ash forming a vast collapsed caldera which must once have dominated the southern Aegean. It exploded catastrophically some 25,000 years ago, when huge flaming clouds of ash must have blown many miles into the Stone Age sky, flinging pulverised ash and debris over a vast area. Nisyrian pumice can be found all over the northern tip of Tilos, the southern part of Kos and even on the mainland in the eastern part of Knidos.
Above the crater of Nisyros, wispy fumaroles are now and again still to be seen. From the Knidian Acropolis on a clear day you can just make out the tiny white houses of the village of Nikia set dramatically on the rim of the crater. The last major eruption was in 1888, but according to legend continuing rumblings are the groans of the giant Polyvotis, who was crushed when Poseidon threw a huge lump of rock wrenched from the island of Kos at him, a comforting tale for the olive farmers of the island.
And here atop the Knidian Acropolis the garrison of the demes of the city had once fortified their walls and towers with tens of thousands of local marble and conglomerate blocks, each one weighing up to a ton or more. Laboriously drilled and chiselled from the unyielding rock faces of the quarries overlooking the city’s eastern gateway, they must have been dragged in an endless procession, one by one, for perhaps a decade. Arduously lifted in place they were formed into a last redoubt against an enemy who seemingly never arrived. We lie back in the sunshine on the springing turf and muse at the folly of Man.
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Coming down from the mountain seems even more precipitous than the ascent. The scree is loose and assists the general downward movement of the group, to the accompaniment of miscellaneous screams and thuds. I don’t look round until the intrepid acropolids have emerged at sea level again and trudged towards the landing stage where the tender is waiting. Each hiker passes me wearing the badges of their achievement - various cuts and bruises on their arms and legs and rips in their clothing. They look as though they’ve been through a small war, which in a way they have. But everyone looks victorious and, looking back at the Acropolis from the rail of the yacht as we glide past the outer moles of the harbour into the open sea, everyone feels they have skirmished with untamed nature up there on the mountain.
“Wow! That was some climb. That’s really steep up there you know. I bet hardly anyone has ever gotten up to that fort.”
I forbore to mention that it was probably part of everyday life in Knidos two thousand years ago.
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CHAPTER SIX
TIME AND TIME AGAIN
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke on the enchanter’s wand;
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O’er the far times.
Byron Childe Harold Canto IV
A millennium of human time lies buried at Knidos. One thousand years of living and dying, of loving and lying, of heydays and holidays, of ancient lore and sacred ritual, of daily routine and wearying toil, of imperious power and slovenly insolence, year by year, decade by decade, life by life, epoch by epoch. I suppose those one thousand years could be measured in a catalogue of architectural achievement, in the monumental buildings that began the great city, in the theatres and temples which speak of civic pride and man-made genius. Or we could see it era by era, in the broad brush strokes of re-constituted history - Hellenistic; Roman; Byzantine – each segment coupled to significant players in the ancient world. Here was Alexander, or Hadrian, or Justinian, none of whom as far as I know had ever been to Knidos but whose lives have intellectually been used to punctuate, stage by stage, the city’s chronological pageant.
Or we can see it in a different light, through the protracted ephemera that make up the life of an individual resident, hour by hour; the tranquil radiance of each new day contrasted in slanting shadows between street walls, the defining sharp shades of noon day, or the chromatic softening of the westering sun, the warm half-light of a summer’s evening and the myriad pin-pricks of starry light over the dark pan-tiles of the houses, asleep. A dog barks hollow among the ancient stones, and the moon rises
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over the shimmering, darkling sea. Each man and woman subsists, counting or not counting their daily round, through monotonous days or momentous catastrophes, living their collective life in their own city, the senator and the slave, the poet and the peasant, the merchant and the malformed, drawn together by the unseen threads of common existence. Together they lived, generation by generation, in their particular parenthesis of united time until for them history itself ran out, the day by day process faltered to its close, the final inhabitants breathed their last and the once beloved city fell in ruins, blown by the uncaring winter wind, prey to the onset of wild-flowered interment and ultimate earthy decay.
What schemes and hopes, what fears and failures, what sexual exhilaration and bitter rejection, what expectations and adversities, once so real in their contemporary mental constructs, lie vanquished and vanished among the dusty goat paths and dry-stalked thistles of the melon fields of Knidos today? The once proud, seemingly everlasting families have been erased forever. The wealthy and wanting alike have faded utterly from the scene. The ruined houses that were once theirs and the everyday streets which they trod mutely trace a coarse outline of the once great metropolis. But the human animation which gave it its meaning, its relevance, has not only ceased, it has disappeared and left no footfall, no sound, no trace.
✳ ✳ ✳ ✳
I am standing in the dark, panelled foyer of the majestic meeting rooms of the Society of Antiquaries opening off the courtyard of the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, central London. The year is 1967, two years before my translation to Knidos. A murmur of voices rises from the soberly suited diplomats and their less severely dressed wives who have come to hear a lecture about new discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean. Many have served out distinguished careers in the British Foreign Service. Some among them will remember their time sipping Earl Grey tea on the balcony of the British
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School of Archaeology overlooking the Tigris in Baghdad, or standing in the heat of the Jordan Valley visiting Dame Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations at Jericho. British archaeology has in many ways led the world in technique and discovery over the previous half century and there is an air of both pride and expectation among the guests here today.
For me, everything is new and intimidating – the august assembly, the hallowed location and the ill-defined philosophy of archaeology. One can imagine