Looking for Aphrodite. David Price Williams
were never to be subjected to legitimate academic scrutiny nor were scholars able to use the findings to compare with other sites in the region. So I never did get to see my surveys, plans and sections of Knidos, of which I for one was rather proud, in print. It represented for me at least a rather damp squib, a somewhat ignominious outcome to what was otherwise undoubtedly a magnificent expedition.
31
CHAPTER FIVE
PEOPLING THE PAST
There the centurion found an Alexandrian vessel bound for Italy and put us aboard. For a good many days we made little headway, and we were hard put to it to reach Cnidus. There the wind continued against us.
Book of Acts 27:7
I must have heard this verse many times when I was young, read from the pulpit in church. Little notice did I take of it at the time, and little did the name ‘Cnidus’ mean to me, at an age when an hour in a pew seemed like a geological epoch to a small boy, a boy who preferred fishing in mountain streams, or later, to a teenager who spent many a hapless time pondering the incomprehensible mysteries of curvilinear country girls. Little did I know or care then where or what ‘Cnidus’ was, as St Paul sailed his way westward two thousand years ago across the eastern Mediterranean and into the pages of theological history.
And yet, some years later, I was to experience a similar life-changing transition as Paul had done on the road to Damascus, a conversion which had brought him on this voyage to Rome and his destiny. But mine was not on the road to Damascus, but at the very Knidos that Paul was passing in ‘Acts’. I was to go where Paul had never gone, though he meant to, to moor in the ancient commercial harbour and to marvel at the city-scape of this once thriving metropolis.
Knidos of course was essentially a Greek city, designed and built with all the panache of the many poleis of the Greek mainland, though probably the inhabitants were a mixture of Greeks and indigenous Anatolian races. Now,
32
before I arrived in Knidos, when it came to the Classical Greeks there was nothing you could tell me about them that I didn’t already know. I knew them through book learning as a priest knows his bible. I had studied Greek since I was thirteen years old, sitting in a hard pitch-pine desk in Form 3A. I’d conjugated the verb λυω in all its moods, and those tricky third declension nouns were my constant companions.
I had gone on to study more and yet more Greek at University, being introduced to Alexandrian Greek and koine Greek, the Greek of the New Testament. I knew everything about the ancient Greeks – Greek language, Greek grammar, Greek syntax, Homeric poems, the philosophy of Aristotle, the plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes, the debating style of Socrates, the botanical observations of Theophrastus and the cynicism of Diogenes. Of particular fascination was Xenophon’s Anabasis, a history of the march through eastern Anatolia to the Black Sea after the Battle of Cunaxa, with that famous tearful moment at the end of Book Four when the ten thousand reach the sea – Thalassa! Thalassa! they cried. Marvellous! Also, R.E. Wytcherley, who wrote the famous book, ‘How the Greeks Built Cities’, was one of my professors, so I knew the architecture, the triglyphs, the metopes, the gymnasia and the Greek political institutions too. Yes, I knew it all. Everything!
I knew it all, that is, until I arrived at Knidos. Here, walking the stepped streets, looking up at the terraces, seeing the mason’s initials on the walls, a bolt mark on a threshold block in the Hellenistic houses on the Island, a worn tread on a stair, or gazing out to sea, across to the Dodecanese, I suddenly became aware that I had missed one crucial, all-important ingredient in my Hellenic education, namely, the people. I had omitted to relate any of the academic elements I had amassed to anything actual, things like men and women, life and death, the marble you walk on, the water you drink, seed time and harvest, in short, everything that makes human existence tangible. I knew the theory, but none, absolutely nothing, of the practice. Although I had become educated it was an artificial world I had studied.
33
My book learning was totally theoretical and, I now realised, completely sterile, lacking in that essential vitality that makes studying other people, past or present, in any way worthwhile. A well head, a game carved on a paving slab, an oil lamp, a broken amphora, a fragment of graffiti, these were evidences of daily life, of a living people, infinitely more than could be found in the pages of Abbott and Mansfield’s Primer of Greek Grammar. The austerity of the Aorist tense and the idiosyncrasy of the iota subscript suddenly transposed themselves into the veracity of a people going about their daily round, speaking to one another in authentic situations. The experience struck me like a lightening bolt. I was at once smitten.
✳ ✳ ✳ ✳
To understand Knidos in its full geographical context, the best and most spectacular views of the city are from the Acropolis, high above the north east of the site.
“Say, David, would you like to lead us in a hike up to the Acropolis tomorrow?”
This is many years later, and speaking is the leader of one of our visiting Transatlantic groups who had invited me to show them the ancient world.
“I realise David that you are probably totally unfit, not playing tennis, going to the gym or jogging and all, but, Hell, we’d really like to do it, and we’ll even let you rest, and we’ll wait for you half way. OK?”
“Well, if you really want to, then I’ll take you. But be warned, it’s a tricky ascent, very prickly, very steep, with lots of scree, and it will be hot.”
“Oh that’s OK. We can go real early. How about six tomorrow morning? You up by then, David?”
34
“The only problem with that, on a summer day like today, is that there is no wind and the heat can be extremely enervating until the breeze comes up around eight. Still, we’ll go.”
Next morning the expedition assembles, dressed in heavy climbing boots, woollen socks, drill trousers, safari jackets, large hats and huge back-packs full of juice, sun cream, medications, camera gear, compasses, walking poles and enough rations for a week. I appear in sandals and T shirt, carry a small bottle of water.
“We need to hike! hike! hike!” says their leader, making alternate motions upwards with her index fingers. Looking at me, dressed simply as I was, she asked:
“Are you not coming with us, David?”
Ignoring this jibe, I set off. We climb slowly up the well-known paths, past the lower theatre, the Corinthian temple and the Byzantine houses. Skirting the upper terrace walls the snake of people reaches the upper theatre, its huge ashlar blocks of the auditorium wings, the only ones left, dwarfing the party. Everyone looks keenly upwards at the great backbone of the ridge leading onwards and upwards to the Acropolis. So far so good!
I mention the loose rocks and sharp tree branches to come and we set off again. In Classical times there used to be a zigzag pack-way to the fort at the top, up which donkeys would no doubt take supplies. The roadway has long since been washed away, but the massive retaining blocks point the way to the summit and this ascent skirts around the dangerous cliffs lower down.
We get into the harder pathways, where balance and stamina are needed to negotiate the boulders, the thickets of pistachio bushes and the spiny broom which make the going tough. We get to the second turn, higher up the mountain.
35
“Say, David, could we stop for just a moment. You know, the younger ones may need the rest.”
Ten minutes go by. I start up the mountain again. The group is lagging behind, talking constantly.
“Oh, David, we can’t see you, David. Where are you? We’re lost.”
They are a few metres below me. I stop again, and again, all the way up to the top. It has taken well over an hour to do a half hour climb, but it’s been worth it. As we breast the last rise the Hellenistic fort of Knidos comes into view, its block-built walls festooned over the three summits of the mountain, and in places still standing an impressive five meters high, punctuated with