SOURCE: "Pausanias the Periegete" in The Attica of Pausanias, edited by Mitchell Carroll. Boston: Ginn & Company, 1907, pp. 1-11.

[In the following essay, Carroll explores the dates for composition of the Periegesis, the aim and method used by Pausanias, and his debt to previous writers.]

1. Scope and character of Pausanias's work.

—Aldus Manutius begins his preface to the editio princeps of Pausanias's Description of Greece, which appeared in 1516, by characterizing it as an "opus antiquae raraeque eruditionis thesauros continens." And invaluable it is because of its subject-matter, since it reveals to us numerous details, not only concerning "the city of the violet crown," but also about the other most celebrated sites of ancient Greece, when its monuments still retained some of the freshness and splendor of the older time.

The [Periegesis] has come down to us in ten books. The work is a detailed account of the sites ordinarily visited and the objects ordinarily seen by the traveler in making an extensive tour of Greece. As the writer is supposed to be coming from over the Aegean Sea to the Greek mainland, his account begins with Sunium, the promontory of Attica. Thence he proceeds to Athens. Book I is devoted to the description of Athens and Attica. From Attica the traveler journeys southward by way of Megaris (also treated in Book I) and the Isthmus to Corinth and the Argolid (described in Book II). His Peloponnesian tour follows much the same route which travelers of our day usually take, embracing Laconia (Book III), Messenia (Book IV), Elis (Books V, VI), Achaea (Book VII) and Arcadia (Book VIII). Then follows a second tour to the principal cities of Central Greece, starting from Athens in the same manner as modem travelers would journey. Here the writer's chief attention is absorbed by Thebes in Boeotia (Book IX) and by Delphi in the district of Phocis (Book X). The regions of Western and Northern Greece, which had played no prominent part in the art and civilization of Hellas, Pausanias leaves out of consideration.

The territory chiefly described gives its name to the various books.… Topographical directions are not always exact; yet, by mentioning in order the names of demes, of places, and of monuments, Pausanias throws much light on the geography and topography of ancient Greece.

2. Date of the Periegesis.

—Pausanias made his sojourn in Greece in the second century of our era; in the days of Hadrian and the Antonines. His date is fixed by 5, 1,2, where he states that 217 years have elapsed since the restoration of Corinth. As this well-known event occurred in 43 B.C., the passage shows that the author was writing Book V in 174 A.D. Other intimations as to his date harmonize with this evidence. Thus, for example, in 5, 21, 15 images set up in 125 A.D. are spoken of as specimens of the art of his day; and 1, 5, 5 and 8, 9, 7 indicate that the writer was a contemporary of the emperor Hadrian. The latest historical event mentioned by him as occurring in his time (10, 34, 5) is the incursion of the Costobocs into Greece, which took place probably between 166 and 180 A.D.

Every discussion about the date of the separate books, especially of the Attica, must take as its starting-point 174 A.D., just mentioned as the only fixed date and the date of Book V. Pausanias (7, 20, 6) tells us that Book I was finished before Herodes Atticus built the Odeum at Athens, erected in honor of his wife Regilla, who appears to have died in 160 or 161 A.D. The Odeum was doubtless built not long after Regilla's death, and therefore 160-161 A.D. constitutes the terminus ante quem of Book I. A reference to Herodes Atticus probably gives us also the terminus post quem, for according to 1, 19, 6, the stadium of Athens had already been rebuilt by him before 143 A.D. or a little earlier. Book I has, therefore, as its limits 143-160 A.D.

There are numerous indications that the Attica was written and published before the rest of the work. For instance, we have the writer's statement (7, 20, 6) that the Odeum is not mentioned in his work on Attica, because his description of Athens was finished before Herodes began to build. Further, in 8, 5, 1 he corrects a view which he had adopted in Book I (c. 41, 2) regarding the kingship of Achaea at the time of the attempted return of the Heraclidae to Peloponnesus. A third argument is that in subsequent books he makes additions to certain statements in Book I. Compare, for example, 5, 11,6 with 1, 15, 3, accounts of the painting of the Battle of Marathon.¹ In one case he supersedes the account of the Gallic invasion in 1, 3, 5 ff. by the fuller narrative in 10, 19, 5 ff., as if the first had proved inadequate. There also occur remarks in the later books which seem to have been occasioned by current criticisms of the Attica already published, as, for example, in 3, 11, 1 in reference to the plan of the book; in 4, 24, 3 in regard to digressions; cf. 8, 7, 4-8; 9, 30, 3; 9, 24, 3.

We must, accordingly, presuppose an interval of a few years between the publication of Book I and that of later books. Book II was probably written after 165 A.D., as the statement is made that the temple of Asclepius at Smyrna had already been founded (2, 26, 9), which according to other testimony was still unfinished in 165 A.D. A study of references which the author makes to various parts of his work shows that the books were written in the order in which they stand.² We have already a fixed date for Book V, 174 A.D. Hence Books II-IV must date between 165 and 174 A.D. Book VIII, which refers to the German victories of Marcus Aurelius (8, 43, 6), must have been written after 166, when the war broke out, and may have been written in or after 176, when the emperor celebrated his triumph. Book X, with the allusion to the Costoboc invasion, was written between 166 and 180, probably after 176. Thus Books VI-X may date between 174 and 180 A.D. The composition of the Description of Greece, therefore, extended over a period of not less than fourteen years (160-174 A.D.) and probably occupied a much longer period.

3. Pausanias, his life and work.

—Though the work itself is so voluminous, our knowledge of the author is limited almost to his mere name. The book gives us his date, and some insight into his personality, but as to the author's family, birthplace, citizenship, and pursuits in life we are left in almost total ignorance. An occasional allusion, however, conveys some intimation. If we inquire, for example, whence he came, he gives us a hint in 5, 13, 7 … where it is suggested that his native land was the territory about Mount Sipylus in Lydia, and mention is made in what follows of natural features and monuments pertaining to this region. This statement is strengthened by many passages in which he recurs to the scenery and legends of Lydia.³ We conclude, therefore, that he was a Lydian by birth; but whether he was a native of Magnesia, the important city at the northern foot of Mount Sipylus, or of Thyatira, or of some less known town, is not to be ascertained.

Late Greek writers mention two other authors of the same name, with whom our Pausanias is sometimes confused. Philostratus (Vit. Soph. 11, 13) speaks of a sophist named Pausanias, much esteemed in his time, who was a pupil of Herodes Atticus and teacher of Aspasius. So far as his date is concerned, we might readily identify him with the author of the Description of Greece. But the sophist came from Caesarea in Cappadocia, not from Lydia, and Suidas mentions Problemata by him, and a book on syntax, but no Periegesis. One can hardly conceive of our author with his crabbed style occupying the lectureship of eloquence at Athens. Hence the identity of the traveler and the sophist is altogether improbable.

Nor can he with any greater degree of probability be identified with the historian Pausanias, who wrote, among other works, a history of Antioch.… The historian was born at Antioch in Syria, not in Lydia. Stephanus of Byzantium cites the works of the two men … under the simple name Pausanias, but this proves nothing more than that in the fifth century the two writers of this name were not readily distinguished. We must therefore rest content with the knowledge that our author lived and traveled in the second century, and was born near Mount Sipylus in Asia Minor.

4. Aim and method of the Periegesis.

—That Pausanias has given to the world a work of unique value is manifest to any one who notes its contents. We have here a book rich in antiquarian, mythological, historical, and artistic lore, and the very nature of the subject-matter arouses the question what was the author's aim in preparing his work. The answer is nowhere clearly given by him. He begins his book without a preface; he concludes without an epilogue. Probably his work was left unfinished and no opportunity was given to revise it; probably, while it served its purpose, the author felt there was no need of explanatory remarks. Hence the answer to our question is largely a matter of inference; but we can, at any rate, gather from utterances here and there what was the author's general purpose, and how his method developed as his grasp of the subject increased.…

From these passages and from a study of the contents of the work it becomes clear that "Pausanias intended to describe all the most notable objects and to narrate all the most memorable traditions which he found existing or current in the Greece of his own time."⁴

This was a vast undertaking, especially so in the case of Attica, the first country he undertook to describe. Here he was bewildered by an embarrassment of riches before he had definitely decided on a method of treating the data he had at hand. Hence the author's method is not so clearly defined in the first as in the later books. Beginning with Book II, he regularly prefaces his account of every important city with a historical sketch and follows strictly the topographical order of description. But in the case of the Attica there is no historical introduction whatever; though the topographical order is in the main observed in describing Athens, it is not followed in his treatment of the rest of Attica. At times the course of description is confused, as when he interrupts his account of the Attic demes to describe the mountains of Attica (cf. 1, 32, 1 and 1, 35, 1 ff.). Again, he mentions fewer notable objects in proportion to the total number in Athens than he does in any other important centre of Greece, and his accounts of notable monuments in Athens are shorter than those in the remaining books. Contrast, for example, his description of Athens with that of Olympia, the former embracing only thirty chapters of one book, or seventy Teubner pages, while to the latter is devoted the larger part of two books, being forty chapters or one hundred and ten Teubner pages. Temples and statues in the whole of Athens, however, were far more numerous and imposing than in Olympia. The explanation of the defects of the Attica is, of course, that the author was finding himself in his new work, and had not altogether arrived at a definite plan.

The topographical method already adopted in the description of Athens reveals the author's purpose in preparing the work. Thus, he begins by describing the harbors of Athens, and the objects of interest on the roads leading from the harbors to the city. He next enters the principal gate and proceeds by a broad avenue to the Agora, which he treats in great detail. Thence he traverses the territory east of the Acropolis, known as the City of Hadrian. A description of the southern slope of the Acropolis finally brings him to its principal entrance, and, having entered, he devotes to the objects of interest in the sacred precinct the maximum of attention. He concludes his account of Athens by describing the suburbs of the city. Let us compare this description with the description of Athens in Baedeker's Greece. The writer of this work gives first a historical sketch of the city. He then describes it in several sections: a, From the Royal Palace round the south side of the Acropolis; b, The Acropolis; c, From the Palace through the Town to the Theseum—the Hill of the Nymphs, Pnyx, and Museum; d, Modern Quarters of the Town; e, Walks near Athens.

Similarity of treatment shows that we have in Pausanias the prototype of Baedeker and Murray. The second century was an age of travel, like our own, and many needed systematic direction to help them on the way. The public-house system of the country was poor, but private hospitality, as in the earlier days, made some amends. Accordingly, the description of inns and other accommodations which Dionysus in the Frogs feels to be such a desideratum and which our Murray or Baedeker offers in great detail, is wanting; but in other respects the likeness between the ancient and the modern cicerone holds. Book I was meant primarily to be a guide-book for the Greek visitor to Athens and Attica, just as the whole volume was a guide-book for the generally frequented parts of Hellas, with special reference to works of art, like the modern Burckhardt. To gratify the intellectual curiosity of his readers, Pausanias. fills his volume with mythical, antiquarian, and historical lore, and he doubtless felt that his work would be serviceable to the historian as well as the traveler. Yet his main purpose was, without doubt, to provide a guide-book for visitors to the historic sites of Greece.

5. Style of Pausanias.

—The literary style displayed in the book before us is due partly to the nature of the subject-matter, partly to the character of the author as reflected in his work. Pausanias is revealed as an unimaginative man, but one deeply interested in antiquarian lore, who set out on his travels with the purpose of "doing" Greece and of giving others the benefit of his reading and observation, and who kept at it with heroic persistence. He permitted no curious legend to escape him, and gathered information from every source. He carefully studied his predecessors in historical prose, especially Thucydides and Herodotus, and laboriously sought to cultivate a good style. But he falls hopelessly short of the vigorous expression of the former, and the sweetness and lucidity of the latter. There is a sense of strain about his style. As Frazer so well puts it, "The sentences are devoid of rhythm and harmony. They do not march, but hobble and shamble and shuffle along. At the end of one of them the reader is not let down easily by a graceful cadence, a dying fall; he is tripped up suddenly and left sprawling, till he can pull himself together, take breath, and grapple with the next."⁵

Frazer thinks that these defects in Pausanias's style may perhaps be best explained by Boeckh's⁶ hypothesis that Pausanias modeled his style on that of his countryman Hegesias of Magnesia, a leader of the Asian school of rhetoric. Hegesias aimed at variety of phrase, which often avoided monotony at the cost of simplicity and clearness, and led him into a jerky yet mincing style. Pausanias's indirect mode of statement often leads him in like manner to ambiguity, the chief defect of his style.

6. Pausanias's use of previous writers.

—It is not essential to our purpose to enter fully into the discussion of Pausanias's trustworthiness and his use of previous writers, as Frazer has treated the subject most exhaustively and happily and has satisfactorily met all the more serious criticisms.

Scaliger characterized Pausanias as being "omnium Graeculorum mendacissimum." In recent times his trustworthiness and literary independence have been energetically called in question by von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (Hermes, XII, 346 ff.), but Pausanias found a vigorous champion against Wilamowitz in R. Schoell (Hennes, XIII, 432 ff.). Wilamowitz's charges, however, were followed up and exhaustively extended by A. Kalkmann (Pausanias der Perieget, Berlin 1886), who argued that Pausanias had traveled and seen very little in Greece, but had compiled the bulk of his work from the manuals of earlier writers and had added only a few hasty jottings of his own to give his descriptions a convincing atmosphere. He found his chief source, according to Kalkmann and Wilamowitz, in Polemon of Ilium, who lived in the second century B.C. The charges of Kalkmann, which were a severe impeachment of Pausanias's moral character, as well as his literary ability, were successfully refuted by W. Gurlitt (Ueber Pausanias, Graz 1890) and R. Heberdey (Die Reisen des Pausanias, Wien 1894).⁷ Kalkmann himself substantially retracts his earlier views by admitting that Pausanias saw with his own eyes all the objects that especially interested him (Arch. Anz. 1895, 12). Frazer, finally, disposes conclusively of the theory that Pausanias stole everything from Polemon. His inquiry, in which he draws the important distinction between the historical and the descriptive portions in Pausanias's work, is here summarized.

In regard to the historical passages he shows that Pausanias drew his accounts of the mythical and heroic ages largely from the poets; that Herodotus is the historian most frequently cited by him; that, notwithstanding there is only one direct reference to Thucydides (6, 19, 5) and one to Xenophon (1, 3, 4), he probably used these authors in several places where he does not mention their names. He also refers to numerous other historians, and cites several local histories, notably the histories of Attica by Androtion (6, 7, 6; 10, 8, 1) and by Clitodemus (10, 15, 5). He also made extensive use of inscriptions, consulted writers on art, and got information from local guides.

Regarding next the descriptive or topographical passages, Frazer considers whether Pausanias derived his knowledge from observation, from books, or from both. The author himself gives no full or direct answer to these questions. He neither professes to have seen everything he describes, nor does he acknowledge having borrowed any of his descriptions from previous writers, whom he barely alludes to and never mentions by name. Yet he affirms that he saw personally certain things he describes; and to have seen certain things implies that he saw others. There are descriptions which Pausanias may have taken from books, but there is no description extant so like in form and substance to what Pausanias has written that one can say he copied from it. Frazer considers in detail a number of passages which, others have thought, bear traces of having been derived either wholly or in part from written documents rather than from personal observation, and concludes that in none are the indications so clear as to amount to a proof of borrowing.

Frazer discusses in considerable detail the predecessors whom Pausanias ought to have consulted, namely Pseudo-Dicaearchus the Messenian, Diodorus of Athens, Heliodorus, and Polemon, whose writings are known through extant fragments. Of Polemon we have more than one hundred fragments. These Frazer takes up one by one and draws a minute comparison with Pausanias. He concludes that not one fragment supports the theory that Pausanias copied from Polemon, nor do they justify us even in supposing that he was acquainted with the writings of his learned predecessor. Even more true is this of his relation to the other antiquarians.

Another theory of Kalkmann's that obtained some vogue was that our author did not describe Greece as it was in his own time, but as it was a century or two earlier, when his alleged sources were composed. This theory is more susceptible of verification, namely by proving that certain things Pausanias speaks of as existing had ceased to exist before his time. Kalkmann, for example, thus attacks the description of the Piraeus. It had been burnt in 86 B.C. and was in a ruined condition when seen by Strabo; how then could Pausanias's account of its temples and colonnades apply to his own time? Frazer, in reply, shows what great changes were possible in two hundred years, and how the Piraeus had regained prosperity under beneficent Roman emperors. He also gives numerous proofs, from existing monuments and otherwise, that Pausanias described Greece as it was in his own age.

We may say, then, that at present a conservatively just view has succeeded the bitter outcry against our author's alleged untrustworthiness. Pausanias cannot be regarded as an independent creative spirit, originating a great work for the benefit of mankind. He is rather a true child of his time, a plodding collector, somewhat superficial and credulous, with a propensity for the archaic and the mystical, but withal an intelligent and inquisitive traveler who rambled through land and city and carefully noted what to him appeared worth seeing and recording. The extant monuments prove that his description of Athens is founded primarily on personal observation. He did not neglect his predecessors and got together historical and mythological material out of handbooks. He also consulted, as did Herodotus, local priests and guides in his eager search for information. As a result, he has handed down to modern times a readable and instructive description of travel, that presents a fairly coherent picture of ancient Athens, and a work indispensable to the traveler and investigator.

Notes

¹ Cf. also 5, 12, 4 with 1, 21, 3; 2, 30, 2, and 3, 15, 7, with 1, 22, 4; 6, 20, 14 with 1, 24, 3; 10, 21, 5 with 1, 3, 2.

² Thus e.g. 2, 19, 8; 21, 4; 23, 6; 32, 3 show that the First Book was written before the Second, etc. See Frazer, Pausanias, I, Introduction, xvii n. 5.

³ Cf. 1, 21, 3; 24, 8; 2, 22, 3; 5, 13, 7; 6, 22, 1; 7, 24, 13; 8, 2, 7; 17, 3.

⁴ Frazer, I, Introduction, xxiii.

⁵ Frazer, I, Introduction, lxix. The reader will greatly profit by close study of this excellent critique.

⁶ "De Pausaniae Stilo Asiano," Gesamm. Ki. Schr. IV, 208-212.

⁷ With Gurlitt cf. Lolling, Gott. Gel. Anz. 1890, 627 ff., Weil, Berl. Philol. Woch. 1890, 1101 ff., and Wachsmuth in Pauly-Wissowa, Suppl. 1, 200 ff.