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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,

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