1. ENGLISH - Richard Hodges: In the city of Aphrodite

Richard Hodges: In the city of Aphrodite

August 21, 2019 

A view across the ruins of the ancient city of Knidos. 

Claims and counter-claims about a sculptural fragment held by the British Museum brought a touch of trepidation to a celebrity visit during excavations at Knidos, the Turkish city of Aphrodite, in 1971, as Richard Hodges remembers in this exclusive extract from his latest book.

‘Sir Mort’s coming. That’ll put the cat among the p-pigeons!’, Tim exclaimed with a mischievous smile directed at Henry. Henry looked at him, puzzled, then startled. Tim had heard about the visit from Sheila Gibson, talismanic architect on the Knidos team, when she was drawing the Hellenistic houses at the Stepped Street. Sheila had heard it directly from excavation director Iris Love, because Iris – for all her Manhattan bluster – knew that Sheila might find this visit a little hard to take, and Sheila was the one person on the project whom Iris valued as much as or perhaps more than herself. If Sheila was nervous, I failed to detect it.

17.-Lindsey-Folsom-the-Demeter-team

Sir Mortimer Wheeler, often self-styled the greatest archaeologist of the 20th century, brilliant at parodying himself, was a guest lecturer on a Swan Hellenic cruise. Visiting Knidos, the city of Aphrodite, with Ms Love in residence was too good an opportunity to overlook for this supreme opportunist. Now, as it happened, also on the ship, as we all were to learn, was Sir John Wolfenden, the Director of the British Museum and ad interim guardian of trophies collected by (Sir Charles) Newton from Knidos in 1857-1858, including the battered head of a goddess that Iris had transformed into an international celebrity. Herein was the nub of the soap opera. As much as Sir Mort coveted controversy, having matured with the Bloomsbury writers, Sir John eschewed it.

Hidden in plain sight?

The controversy was about judgement: academic judgement and plain old judgement. In November 1970, Iris announced in The New York Times that she had discovered in the British Museum basement the battered head of a famous statue of Aphrodite crafted by the peerless ancient Greek sculptor, Praxiteles. Iris afterwards claimed that she had been forced into a premature revelation. Hearing the story many times, listeners tended to divide along ethnic lines. The Americans mostly had sympathy for her and noted the implicit subtexts: how is it those Brits didn’t have a handle on their own stuff? The old colonialists needed taking down a peg or two. The Europeans tended to take the British Museum’s part in the story.

The remains of the Round Temple, dedicated to Aphrodite Euploia on Knidos. It was here that Praxiteles’ sculpture once stood. 

In May the previous year, Iris – accompanied by her cousin, Margot, and Sheila – asked to see the sculptures collected by Sir Charles Newton at Knidos but not on display. The British Museum dutifully acceded. Proctors were dispatched to the museum’s cavernous basements, from which they retrieved a galaxy of fingers, toes, and battered bits, then lay them out in the hallowed halls of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities for their honoured guests. In Newton’s erstwhile bailiwick, his metaphorical successor a century later was paying homage to the treasures he had found.

Alas, one piece was missing. Was it deliberate or an inadvertent error made in the haste to deal with Iris and her party? Iris spotted this in a jiffy, as Sheila recalled with measured bemusement. Newton’s catalogue number 1314 was the object that Iris had set her heart on handling from the outset. Bust 1314, according to Newton and affirmed by his great successor Sir Bernard Ashmole (a former Director of the British School at Rome), dated to the 4th century BC and was very likely the work of one of Praxiteles’s contemporaries.

The encounter in the British Museum entered legend.

‘As soon as I saw it’, Iris recalled, ‘I thought, was it, could it be… the head? Her eyes had that limpid gaze that has been described so often. They were so Praxitelean! So I screamed at Margot, “I think this might be the Aphrodite.”’

Iris Cornelia Love, excavation director, travelling in style.