Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 47

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

39