Knidos is a mariner's city, situated at the end of a long spindly Turkish peninsula jutting out towards the Dodecanese islands of Cos, Nicyros and Telos. It is renowned for its wine, vinegar and above all for Praxiteles' statue of Aphrodite. The statue has long since disappeared, but the elegantly proportioned podium of the round temple in which it stood was discovered twenty-five years ago. The temple was built in the fourth century BC to Aphrodite Euploia, the Aphrodite of fair voyages. It was a merchants, temple. the cathedral of a city whose rationale was commerce. The temple dates from the foundation of Knidos in about 360 BC, when its citizens moved their city from an inlet surrounded by fertile lands at Datca, fifty miles to the east, to this barren, waterless, but dramatic headland known as Cape Crio. The Knidians, then under Persian hegemony, understood the promise of this unlikely site. When the meltem, the strong northwest wind, blows, ships sailing from the south are unable to round the cape. Obliged to shelter for days at a time in the great commercial harbour constructed by the Knidians, wayfarers were compelled to contribute substantially to the port's revenues. Aphrodite's temple was the symbol of this new venture. It was circular with eighteen Doric columns which supported a cupola. The altar, on which sacrifices were made to the goddess, faced the temple's main entrance, located on the east side. Here stood the remarkable statue made by the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles (active c. 370-300 BC). It is known that in about 360 he had made two versions of the goddess. The clothed version was purchased by the Coans, while the other, portraying the goddess in naturalibus, was chosen by the Knidians as the principal ornament of their new city. Why the great sculptor made these two works remains unknown, but it was the Knidian Aphrodite, which over the subsequent millennium was the subject of profound appreciation as well as prurient voyeurism.