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CHAPTER FOUR

ONE PROMISCUOUS MASS OF RUINS

The Society of the Dilettante is a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk: the two chiefs are Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood who were seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy.

Horace Walpole 1743

Various savants and august bodies have conducted archaeological investigations at Knidos in recent centuries. The first to identify the site as that of the ancient city and to encourage archaeological exploration here was the Society of the Dilettante in 1812. This organisation, originally founded in 1732 by Francis Dashwood, began life as a group of wealthy if somewhat disreputable rakes who created a drinking club for gentlemen under the guise of purportedly studying the Classical world. They had all been on the Grand Tour and felt a corporate association with the ethereal past, though their main interests were rather more inclined to the debauched present. But by the early 19th century the Society was in fact supporting more serious antiquarian pursuits in the Mediterranean, and the discovery of Knidos was at least one of their successes.

It is obvious from their description of the site that rather more of the city’s remains were visible the year of the Society’s visit. A certain William Leake, a military man who visited Knidos at more or less the same time and wrote about his experiences in 1824 in a book about his travels in Asia Minor describes the remains of several temples, stoas, artificial terraces and three theatres, of which certainly only one and a bit now remain. A huge amount of stone-work had clearly been robbed soon after his time. Indeed, we have records that only a few years later, Muhammad Ali Pasha, the ambitious Ottoman governor of Egypt, organised several ship-loads of blocks to be

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