Everything about Pausanias Geographer totally explained
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:
A careful, pedestrian writer, he's 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'd been to
Antioch,
Joppa and
Jerusalem, and to the banks of the
River Jordan. In
Egypt he'd seen the
Pyramids, while at the temple of
Ammon he'd been shown the hymn once sent to that shrine by
Pindar. In
Macedonia he'd almost certainly viewed the traditional tomb of
Orpheus. Crossing over to
Italy, he'd 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 is in ten books, each dedicated to some portion of Greece. He begins his tour in Attica, where the city of Athens and its demes dominate the discussion. Subsequent books describe Corinth, Laconia, Messenia, Elis, Achaia, Arcadia, Boetia, Phocis and Ozolian Locris. The project is more than topographical; it's a cultural geography. Pausanias digresses from description of architectural and artistic objects to review the mythological and historical underpinnings of the society that produced them. As a Greek writing under the auspices of the Roman empire, he found himself in an awkward cultural space, between the glories of the Greek past he was so keen to describe and the realities of a Greece beholden to Rome as a dominating imperial force. His work bears the marks of his attempt to navigate that space and establish an identity for Roman Greece.
He isn't a naturalist by any means, though he does from time to time comment on the physical realities of the Greek landscape. 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's 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's 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."
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 wouldn't 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 wasn't read," Habicht relates— "there isn't 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". 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, 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, hadn't actually visited most of the places he described. The experience of a century of archaeologists has fully vindicated him.
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