Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 48

over the shimmering, darkling sea. Each man and woman subsists, counting or not counting their daily round, through monotonous days or momentous catastrophes, living their collective life in their own city, the senator and the slave, the poet and the peasant, the merchant and the malformed, drawn together by the unseen threads of common existence. Together they lived, generation by generation, in their particular parenthesis of united time until for them history itself ran out, the day by day process faltered to its close, the final inhabitants breathed their last and the once beloved city fell in ruins, blown by the uncaring winter wind, prey to the onset of wild-flowered interment and ultimate earthy decay.

What schemes and hopes, what fears and failures, what sexual exhilaration and bitter rejection, what expectations and adversities, once so real in their contemporary mental constructs, lie vanquished and vanished among the dusty goat paths and dry-stalked thistles of the melon fields of Knidos today? The once proud, seemingly everlasting families have been erased forever. The wealthy and wanting alike have faded utterly from the scene. The ruined houses that were once theirs and the everyday streets which they trod mutely trace a coarse outline of the once great metropolis. But the human animation which gave it its meaning, its relevance, has not only ceased, it has disappeared and left no footfall, no sound, no trace.

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I am standing in the dark, panelled foyer of the majestic meeting rooms of the Society of Antiquaries opening off the courtyard of the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, central London. The year is 1967, two years before my translation to Knidos. A murmur of voices rises from the soberly suited diplomats and their less severely dressed wives who have come to hear a lecture about new discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean. Many have served out distinguished careers in the British Foreign Service. Some among them will remember their time sipping Earl Grey tea on the balcony of the British

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