Education: Labor of Love

WHILE other scholarly meetings rang with the sounds of political combat, the Archaeological Institute of America convention in San Francisco turned up news of a different sort: announcement of the rediscovery in Turkey of the temple of Aphrodite of Cnidus, which is thought to have been built in the second or third century B.C. One of the most dazzling archaeological finds in years, the temple of the Greek goddess of love was unearthed last summer by an expedition led by a 36-year-old assistant professor at Long Island University who happens to be named Iris C. Love.

Professor Love discovered the temple on the day the first astronauts landed on the moon. "The moon and Aphrodite have been connected for thousands of years," she says. Rare as the circular Doric temple may be, an even more valuable treasure remains to be found. It is Praxiteles' bigger-than-life marble statue of the nude Aphrodite, which stood at the center of the temple on a terrace overlooking the Aegean Sea, where it safeguarded passing ships and sailors. The most renowned sculpture in all antiquity, it was judged by Pliny as "equally admirable from every angle," and copies of it were prized by Ptolemy IV of Egypt and Hadrian of Rome. Professor Love thinks that the original may still be at Cnidus, buried in the ruins. She plans to resume digging next June.