Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 177, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 July 1912 — A Rich field for the Antiquarian [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

A Rich field for the Antiquarian

Collectors of antiques have always kept Cnidus well in mind. A curious document, which purports ShHp to be a marble-hunter’s QjS vade mecum, drawn up by one Henry Petty, who scoured the Levant on behalf of noble virtuosi in the seventeenth century, sets down Cnidus as one of the likeliest spots; and various excavators have pecked at the place, from the Dilettanti in 1812 to an American party a few months ago; but no one has ever dug it deeply or widely. Perhaps tbe Germans, when they have finished with Miletus, may send Dr. Wiegand to do justice at last to Cnidus with his Immense experience and his large resources; perhaps the Americans who have been foiled at Cyrene by. the. Tripolitan war, and are looking for a fresh field, may anticipate him. The British Athenian school, as it happens, is going to begin excavatfons within a day’s ride of the place —at Datcha, th* ancient Akanthos. One could wish it had taken its courage in both hands and gone for the greater city. The great sites demand, of course, more time and money and men; but it is in them that in ninetynine cases out of a hundred, the great works of art and the great historical records are found. And Cnidus is a great site on all accounts. Its area is very large as Greek sites go; the scale of the visible remains is big, the indications of yet bigger things below ground are frequent. The place was always in the forefront of Asiatic Greek history; and treasures of art which it is known to have, possessed were of tbe very first quality. Even what has already been found there by hasty diggers is out of the common. The great marble lion, which is supposed to have commemorated Conon’s victory at Cnidus in 394 B. C., is not more remarkable as a historical monument than a work of art The Cnldian Demeter is the finest extant statu* which can reasonably be ascribed to the hand of an Asiatic Greek master. But splendid as is that figure of the mourning Mother —or, at least, as her head is, for her body is by an inferior hand —it would rank far below another Cnldian statues, were that still preserved for some one’s lucky spade. We know the Aphrodite of Praxiteles only from coin types and copies, of which best je' that VaticMi Jagure -eh*faß~4u-prudishpoDflcadseJtob* veiled by metal drapery from the too

earnest eye; but we know, too, that some ancient critics (among them Lucian) held the original the most beautiful of all Greek statues in the world which still knew a hundred masterpieces now lost Probably that perfect type of feminine nudity waxxapt long ago from Cnidus—though why more probably than that of Hermes should have been rapt from Olympia? —but, even so, is it not still well worth any art lover’s while to dig the site of the town which put up at Delphi the "Treasury of the Cnldans" whose beauties the French school at 'Athens have revealed to our time? All through the classical Greek age Cnidus was a capital city, the chief ot five famous neighbors on the mainland and in Rhodes; and the Dorian games, which were the bond of the six cities, were held always on the Triopian headland beneath her walls. To dig Cnidus, therefore, would be to follow the best rule ot excavators, which is to dig capitals. It was also a mother city, able to send out colonies of it* citizens to the Adriatic and. even the western Mediterranean. Its situation secured it wealth from the sea, for it lay just at the southern angle of Asia Minor in the track of every ship which beat up from the Phoenician and Egyptian seas into the Greek. The Trioplan island, which Is now Cape Krlo, lay so near the mainland that it could be joined by a causeway, and the strait thus bridged gave the city two bays, one looking westward, one eastward, and both well screened. In the latter, whose old mole still breaks the southeast swell, a modern steamer of much larger tonnage than the .average coaster can ride at ease. Tinrstta-tejEgood English mile in length, and the walls

which enclose It can be followed from sea to sea. The fine Greek masonry Is especially well preserved where the fortification runs down to the water on the east, and a terminal tower was built out intoUhe waves; but the older parts, constructed in the polygonal fashion, which made for strength, an on the Acropolis of the Triopian island. Here were evidently at once the stronghold and the holy {daces of Cnidus. The mass of the city needed, however, the larger spaces of the mainland, and climbed terrace above terrace to the summit of a-high rocky hill. Its main plan and the situation of many of its public buildings were made out of the Dilettanti expedition and by Newton, and even after years of neglect they can still be traced. The marble facings have been much damaged, partly by the builders of Rhodes, partly by native Itoe-burnersr—-but even in such an obvious quarry as the Theater offers, a good deal of the finer material remains in {dace. There is a rich harvest to be reaped by anyone who can Induce the Ottoman government to expropriate the peasant cultivators, and thereafter will break down their terraced plots and search them systematically from the harbor’s edge to the hill-top. Cnidus is the most promising and favorable Greek site which remains for a well-financed and well-equipped expedition to undertake. There Is no modern village, no modern graveyard, to hamper diggers; communications with well-supplied centers—Rhodes, Cos, and Budrum — are easy, and labor could be procured in abundance from both the Tripollan peninsula Itself and from the Isles. Finally, there 16 no lovelier spot than Cnidus on one of the loveliest coasts ottheMedlterranean.'