Demeter of Cnidus
The headless statue of a seated woman swathed in a himation was first seen at Cnidus by the expedition of the Society of Dilettanti in 1812. Nearly fifty years later C. T. Newton excavated the site—identified by inscriptions as sacred to the chthonic deities—rediscovered the body, and, after shipping it off, found the head also. There is no ground for doubting the identification as Demeter. Brunn interpreted the head with understanding in 1874, and in 1900 A. H. Smith described the statue briefly but carefully: what can be added to this, mainly on the technical side, will be found in Appendix I. Other comment has been desultory, and although the date of the statue has been generally accepted as somewhere in the fourth century B.C., there has been no satisfactory attribution to a sculptor. Doubt has gradually arisen about the substance of which it is made, even about the position of the limbs and the kind of seat on which it rests: and finally, Carpenter, quietly loosing one of his ample stock of hares, has suggested that it was made in the first century B.C. Clearly, then, it is time to study the whole problem afresh, and to see whether evidence exists for more definite conclusions. That evidence does exist, and most of it has been set down in print before—though by various writers, and piecemeal: my argument is new in its pattern only, not in its components.