Home > Travel Writing > Aphrodite of the Beautiful Ass

Lucian was here before us - some two thousand years before us - with his cheap jokes, his wise cracks and casual impieties. Such a well-travelled man, such a polished speaker, such an amusing and prolific writer. Why did he hate the gods so? Was there any redeeming philosophy to be found beneath his sneers at the divine?

I felt however that Lucian would have been happy to join us in the lone seaside taverna that stands at Cnidos. Our table was groaning with plates of meze and dressed with chilled bottles of Villa Doluca (the ubiquitous vin de table of Turkey). My two daughters were rolling in the dust with six puppies and a cherubic Turkish boy. One of our travelling companions was sketching, another was text-ing Washington DC while his wife was testing herself with classical Arabic root-forms. Melissa and Rose were checking out the fish in the kitchen. They returned triumphant, the eyes were bright and the gills were sufficiently red for the fish to be judged A grade fresh. The cook nodded to the boy by the outdoor charcoal brazier. The first batch was put to the grill. There was a fitting solemnity about this decision. We were as earnest about our lunch as our archaeology.

Lucian had been travelling with two friends. The attention of his gay travelling companion, Callicratidas, might have strayed away from our taverna table to glance towards the all-male French yacht with their bleached eyebrows, mahogany pecks and Gautier-like naval sweaters. His other companion Charicles on the other hand might have tried his luck with the gulet packed full of Italian students, though it was difficult to imagine how even this practiced womaniser could have made much headway amongst these cool kids in their skin tight charcoal grey teashirts and impenetrable dark glasses.

The three of them had come to Cnidos – just as we had, drawn by the fame of the worlds most celebrated statue of the goddess of love. They had a rather easier time of it than we had. Cnidos was then on the cross-roads of the worlds shipping routes. The city of Cnidus breathed trade and travel, stuck out on the furthest promontory on Asia, with its double harbour open whatever the sailing conditions. This easy access element was well advertised by one of Aphrodite of Cnidos’s favourite nick-names, Europlia “she of the fare winds”. Cnidos was also right plonk in the middle of the Pausanias-guide book clutching Roman tourist route. From Cnidos you could tick off three of the wonders of the world in almost as many days. The Colossus of Rhodes was a day south, the great steep stepped tomb-pyramid, the Mausoleum of Hallicarnassus was just a days sail north beyond which beckoned the great temple of Diana at Ephesus. To any more independent minded traellers these ‘must see sites’ of the classical world could be topped up with visits to the celebrated temple of Aesclipius at Kos, the cliff fringed shrine of Athena at Lindos and Apollo’s great oracle at Didyma. That would make the neighbours sit up when the traveller returned and told his tales.

We had made rather more of a meal of the route. A cramped package flight to the Rhodes, followed by a few days unwinding on the island, a ferry journey to Turkish Marmaris, followed by a night drive to a hotel, a failed attempt to reach the city by hire-car the next day ending with a stop-over in a pension. Today we had come on a boat charter. It is clearly the correct way to arrive at Cnidus. As you approached the harbour its ancient walls and towers suddenly emerged into clear focus out of the backdrop of same-coloured limestone. Our captain pointed out the great rock-cut ledge from where the British in the 1850’s had taken the great lion of Cnidus that now dominates the Great Court of the British Museum. They had also carted away the great half-exposed cult statue of Demeter from her hilltop shrine amongst the several hundred cases of statuary labelled for Holborn.

Once ashore we had scrambled across the ruts and trenches left by more than a hundred years of archaeological digs. Hopping across fallen blocks of masonry, dancing over the asphodels, offering piggy-back rides was one way of selling ancient history to two young girls. After intense negotiations have reached an understanding: one day of ruins gets traded for three at the beach – plus ice-creams.

Lucian would not have been so encumbered. The city of Cnidus had been laid out in a regular grid of streets, with great staircases climbing up the formal terraced slopes of the city. Strabo records the city glittering like a giant theatre that reached up to the fortress on the Acropolis. Where we saw the Agora as a thistle field he as a barrister – if even one on holiday - would have looked out across at his magnificent playing field for oratory. It was unmissable, vast and just above the port. True it was not always packed for the election of magistrates and the passing of decrees. It had its hum-drum side, like the great hiring fairs in February were labourers and crews could be taken on for a years contract.

It would also in its heyday have spelt out a proud message, that of “Brand New and Proudly Democratic”. For in the 4th century BC Cnidus was a green-field site. The old city site is a good days row down the coast. Unlike Cnidus it came with a hinterland of rich farmland but also with an irritating legacy of autocratic Kings, greedy aristocrats and lost battles. Somewhere around the middle of the Fourth Century BC the citizens had won themselves a democratic constitution which may have given them the vision and energy to make a completely fresh start in life. They moved, lock, stock and barrel to the headland site with its twin harbours. The only thing they needed to take with them were their women, their slaves, their ships and of course their Gods.

To honour the Gods and also put new Cnidus on the map they were in the market for the very best art that money could buy. It was, by happy coincidence, the perfect time for some prestige acquisitions. It was the period when the ateliers of all the great masters of Hellenistic sculpture, Praxiteles, Scopas and Bryaxis were in full production. The City Fathers bought with a deep purse, an eye for the future and a sharpened aesthetic. Not for them the vast cult statues covered in chyrsoelephantine, that royal veneer of gold and ivory, that glimmered and loomed vast in the dark cella’s of the great temples of the Parthenon and Olympias. They bought statues of the Gods that were physically quite modest but were masterpieces of sensibility. We now cannot see any of these statues without thinking of them in humanistic terms. The seated Demeter, now lodged in the British Museum, was carved as a commission for the city of Cnidos in 350. As an image of serene worshipful maternity she has yet to be matched. E.M. Forster, a visitor to both the ruins of Cnidus and its plundered statue in the British Museum, was overwhelmed (but then he would be the first to confess that his relationship to mother was also overwhelmingly problem). This was not all. The city fathers also aquired a Dionysus by Bryaxis and then went on to secure a second Dionysus and an Athena by Scopas. However their great coup came at the studio of Praxiteles. The city of Kos had commissioned an Aphrodite from Praxiteles but their ‘committee of taste’ was so shocked by the nude statue of the goddess that they rejected it out of hand. Cnidus however jumped at the chance. They got a great work at a bargain price plus a whole publicity campaign thrown in for free. As Pliny tells us, people began to sail to Cnidus simply to see this statue. The city responded in kind. The usual rectangular temple and sacred enclosure was rejected. Instead an innovative round shrine was erected so that the naked Aphrodite could be admired in the round. This revolution in Greek architecture would later be copied, painted and talked about throughout the Roman world.

The ground floor of this shrine were uncovered in 1969. The statue has not been seen for 1,500 years. Rumours abound. That it was shipped of to Constantinople, that it was burned by Christians in a lime kiln, or more temptingly for an archaeologist that it was buried for safe-keeping.

Read more travel writing by Barnaby Rogerson