Pausanias (Greek: Παυσανίας) was a Greek traveller and geographer of the 2nd century A.D., who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece (Ἑλλάδος περιήγησις), a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from firsthand observations, and is a crucial link between classical literature and modern archaeology. This is how Andrew Stewart assesses him:^[1]

A careful, pedestrian writer, he is interested not only in the grandiose or the exquisite but in unusual sights and obscure ritual. He is occasionally careless, or makes unwarranted inferences, and his guides or even his own notes sometimes mislead him; yet his honesty is unquestionable, and his value without par.

Biography

Pausanias was probably a native of Lydia; he was certainly familiar with the western coast of Asia Minor, but his travels extended far beyond the limits of Ionia. Before visiting Greece he had been to Antioch, Joppa and Jerusalem, and to the banks of the River Jordan. In Egypt he had seen the Pyramids, while at the temple of Ammon he had been shown the hymn once sent to that shrine by Pindar. In Macedonia he had almost certainly viewed the traditional tomb of Orpheus. Crossing over to Italy, he had seen something of the cities of Campania and of the wonders of Rome. He was one of the first to write of seeing the ruins of Troy, Alexandria Troas, and Mycenae.

Work

Pausanias' Description of Greece takes the form of a tour in Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor and in the Peloponnese and part of northern Greece. He constantly describes ceremonial rites or superstitious customs. He frequently introduces narratives from the domain of history and of legend and folklore, and it is only rarely that he allows the reader to see something of the scenery. But, he notices the pine trees on the sandy coast of Elis, the deer and the wild boars in the oak woods of Phelloe, and the crows amid the giant oak trees of Alalcomenae. It is mainly in the last section that Pausanias touches on the products of nature, such as the wild strawberries of Helicon, the date palms of Aulis, and the olive oil of Tithorea, as well as the tortoises of Arcadia and the "white blackbirds" of Cyllene.

Pausanias is most at home in describing the religious art and architecture of Olympia and of Delphi. Yet, even in the most secluded regions of Greece, he is fascinated by all kinds of quaint and primitive images of the gods, holy relics, and many other sacred and mysterious objects. At Thebes he views the shields of those who died at the Battle of Leuctra, the ruins of the house of Pindar, and the statues of Hesiod, Arion, Thamyris, and Orpheus in the grove of the Muses on Helicon, as well as the portraits of Corinna at Tanagra and of Polybius in the cities of Arcadia.

Pausanias has the instincts of an antiquary. As his editor Christian Habicht has said,

"In general he prefers the old to the new, the sacred to the profane; there is much more about classical than about contemporary Greek art, more about temples, altars and images of the gods, than about public buildings and statues of politicians. Some magnificent and dominating structures, such as the Stoa of King Attalus in the Athenian Agora (rebuilt by Homer Thompson) or the Exedra of Herodes Atticus at Olympia are not even mentioned."^[2]

Pausanias' Periegesis, unlike a Baedeker guide, stops for a brief excursus on a point of ancient ritual or to tell an apposite myth, in a genre that would not become popular again until the early nineteenth century. In the topographical part of his work, Pausanias is fond of digressions on the wonders of nature, the signs that herald the approach of an earthquake, the phenomena of the tides, the ice-bound seas of the north, and the noonday sun which at the summer solstice casts no shadow at Syene (Aswan). While he never doubts the existence of the gods and heroes, he sometimes criticizes the myths and legends relating to them. His descriptions of monuments of art are plain and unadorned. They bear the impression of reality, and their accuracy is confirmed by the extant remains. He is perfectly frank in his confessions of ignorance. When he quotes a book at second hand he takes pains to say so.

The work, all ten volumes of it, was a failure. "It was not read," Habicht relates— "there is not a single mention of the author, not a single quotation from it, not a whisper before Stephanus Byzantius in the sixth century, and only two or three references to it throughout the Middle Ages".^[3] We came perilously close to losing it altogether, in fact: the only manuscripts of Pausanias are fifteenth-century copies, full of errors and lacunae. Until twentieth-century archaeologists found that Pausanias was a reliable guide to the sites they were excavating,^[4] Pausanias was largely dismissed by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century classicists of a purely literary bent, who followed the authoritative Wilamowitz in discrediting him, as a purveyor of literature quoted at second-hand, who, it was suggested, had not actually visited most of the places he described. The experience of a century of archaeologists has fully vindicated him.^[5]

References

See also

• Travel literature

External links

• Description of Greece, tr. W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod (1918)
• Description of Greece, Jones translation at Theoi Project
• Bibliography (in French)

Further reading

• Akujärvi, Johanna 2005, Researcher, Traveller, Narrator: Studies in Pausanias' Periegesis (Stockholm). ISBN 91-22-02134-5.
• Alcock, S.E., J.F. Cherry, and J. Elsner 2001, Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece (Oxford). ISBN 0-19-517132-2.
• Arafat, Karim W. 1996, Pausanias' Greece: Ancient Artists and Roman Rulers (Cambridge). ISBN 0-521-60418-4.
• Habicht, Christian 1985, Pausanias' Guide to Ancient Greece (Berkeley). ISBN 0-520-06170-5.
• Hutton, William 2005, Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias (Cambridge). ISBN 0-521-84720-6.
• Levi, Peter (tr.) 1984a, 1984b, Pausanias: Guide to Greece, 2 vols. (Penguin). Vol. 1 Central Greece ISBN 0-14-044225-1; vol. 2 Southern Greece ISBN 0-14-044226-X.
• Pretzler, Maria. "Turning Travel into Text: Pausanias at work", Greece & Rome, Vol. 51, Issue 2 (2004), pp. 199–216.

Notes