Greece in
the second
century
A.D.
I. Pausanias and his Description of Greece.—It
may be reckoned a peculiar piece
of good fortune that among the wreckage of
classical literature the Description of Greece by
Pausanias should have come down to us entire.
In this work we possess a plain, unvarnished
account by an eye-witness of the state of Greece
in the second century of our era. Of no other
part of the ancient world has a description at
once so minute and so trustworthy survived,
and if we had been free to single out one
country in one age of which we should wish
a record to be preserved, our choice might
well have fallen on Greece in the age of the
Antonines. No other people has exerted so
deep and abiding an influence on the course
of modern civilisation as the Greeks, and never
could all the monuments of their chequered but
glorious history have been studied so fully as
2in the second century of our era. The great
age of the nation, indeed, had long been over,
but in the sunshine of peace and imperial favour
Greek art and literature had blossomed again.
New temples had sprung up; new images had
been carved; new theatres and baths and aqueducts
ministered to the amusement and luxury
of the people. Among the new writers whose
works the world will not willingly let die, it is
enough to mention the great names of Plutarch
and Lucian.
It was in this mellow autumn—perhaps
rather the Indian summer—of the ancient
world, when the last gleanings of the Greek
genius were being gathered in, that Pausanias,
a contemporary of Hadrian, of the Antonines,
and of Lucian, wrote his description of Greece.
He came in time, but just in time. He was
able to describe the stately buildings with
which in his own lifetime Hadrian had embellished
Greece, and the hardly less splendid
edifices which, even while he wrote, another
munificent patron of art, Herodes Atticus, was
rearing at some of the great centres of
Greek life and religion. Yet under all this
brave show the decline had set in. About
a century earlier the emperor Nero, in the
speech in which he announced at Corinth the
liberation of Greece, lamented that it had not
been given him to confer the boon in other
3and happier days when there would have been
more people to profit by it. Some years after
this imperial utterance Plutarch declared that
the world in general and Greece especially was
depopulated by the civil brawls and wars; the
whole country, he said, could now hardly put
three thousand infantry in the field, the number
that formerly Megara alone had sent to face
the Persians at Plataea; and in the daytime
a solitary shepherd feeding his flock was the
only human being to be met with on what
had been the site of one of the most renowned
oracles in Boeotia. Dio Chrysostom tells us
that in his time the greater part of the city
of Thebes lay deserted, and that only a single
statue stood erect among the ruins of the
ancient market-place. The same picturesque
writer has sketched for us a provincial town
of Euboea, where most of the space within the
walls was in pasture or rig and furrow, where
the gymnasium was a fruitful field in which
the images of Hercules and the rest rose here
and there above the waving corn, and where
sheep grazed peacefully about the public offices
in the grass-grown market-place. In one of
his Dialogues of the Dead, Lucian represents
the soul of a rich man bitterly reproaching
himself for his rashness in having dared to
cross Cithaeron with only a couple of men-servants,
for he had been set upon and murdered
4by robbers on the highway at the point
where the grey ruins of Eleutherae still look
down on the pass; in the time of Lucian the
district, laid waste, he tells us, by the old wars,
seems to have been even more lonely and
deserted than it is now. Of this state of things
Pausanias himself is our best witness. Again
and again he notices shrunken or ruined cities,
deserted villages, roofless temples, shrines without
images and pedestals without statues, faint
vestiges of places that once had a name and
played a part in history. To the site of one
famous city he came and found it a vineyard.
In one neglected fane he saw a great ivy-tree
clinging to the ruined walls and rending the
stones asunder. In others nothing but the
tall columns standing up against the sky
marked the site of a temple. Nor were more
sudden and violent forces of destruction wanting
to hasten the slow decay wrought by time,
by neglect, by political servitude, by all the
subtle indefinable agencies that sap a nation’s
strength. In Pausanias’s lifetime a horde of
northern barbarians, the ominous precursor of
many more, carried fire and sword into the
heart of Greece, and the Roman world was
wasted by that great pestilence which thinned
its population, enfeebled its energies, and precipitated
the decline of art.
The little we know of the life of Pausanias
5is gathered entirely from his writings. Antiquity,
which barely mentions the writer, is
silent as to the man.
Date of
Pausanias.
Fortunately his date is certain. At the
beginning of his description of Elis he tells
us that two hundred and seventeen years had
elapsed since the restoration of Corinth. As
Corinth was restored in 44 B.C., we see that
Pausanias was writing his fifth book in 174
A.D. during the reign of Marcus Aurelius.
With this date all the other chronological
indications in his book harmonise. Thus he
speaks of images which were set up in 125 A.D.
as specimens of the art of his day. Again,
he gives us to understand that he was a contemporary
of Hadrian’s, and he tells us that
he never saw Hadrian’s favourite, Antinous,
in life. Now Hadrian died in 138 A.D., and
the mysterious death of Antinous in Egypt
appears to have fallen in 130 A.D. It is
natural to infer from Pausanias’s words that
though he never saw Antinous in life, he was
old enough to have seen him; from which we
conclude that our author was born a good
many years before 130 A.D., the date of
Antinous’s death. The latest historical event
mentioned by him is the incursion of the
Costobocs into Greece, which seems to have
taken place some time between 166 A.D. and
180 A.D., perhaps in 176 A.D.
Dates of
the various
books.
6From these and a few more hints we may
draw some conclusions as to the dates when
the various books that make up the Description
of Greece were written. In the seventh book
Pausanias tells us that his description of Athens
was finished before Herodes Atticus built the
Music Hall in memory of his wife Regilla.
As Regilla appears to have died in 160 or
161 A.D. and the Music Hall was probably
built soon afterwards, we may suppose that
Pausanias had finished his first book by 160
or 161 A.D. at latest. There is, indeed, some
ground for holding that both the first and the
second book were composed much earlier.
For in the second book Pausanias mentions
a number of buildings which had been erected
in his own lifetime by a Roman senator
Antoninus in the sanctuary of Aesculapius at
Epidaurus. If, as seems not improbable, the
Roman senator was no other than the Antoninus
who afterwards reigned as Antoninus
Pius, we should naturally infer that the second
book was published in the reign of Hadrian,
that is, not later than 138 A.D., the year when
Hadrian died and Antoninus succeeded him
on the throne. With this it would agree that
no emperor later than Hadrian is mentioned
in the first or second book, or indeed in any
book before the eighth. Little weight, however,
can be attached to this circumstance, for
7in the fifth book Hadrian is the last emperor
mentioned although that book was written, as
we have seen, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius,
thirty-six years after Hadrian’s death. A
much later date has been assigned to the
second book by Mr. W. Gurlitt in his valuable
monograph on Pausanias. He points out that
when Pausanias wrote it the sanctuary of
Aesculapius at Smyrna had already been
founded, and that if Masson’s chronology of
the life of the rhetorician Aristides is right
the sanctuary was still unfinished in 165 A.D.
Hence Mr. Gurlitt concludes that the second
book of Pausanias was written after 165 A.D.
Even the first book, according to him, must
be dated not earlier than 143 A.D. His reason
is that when Pausanias wrote this book the
stadium at Athens had already been rebuilt
of white marble by Herodes Atticus, and that
the reconstruction cannot, if Professor C.
Wachsmuth is right, have been begun before
143 A.D. or a little earlier. With regard to
the other books, the evidence, scanty as it is,
is less conflicting. The fifth book, as we have
seen, was composed in the year 174 A.D. The
eighth book, in which mention is made of the
victory of Marcus Antoninus over the Germans,
must have been written after 166 A.D., the
year when the German war broke out, and
may have been written in or after 176 A.D.,
8the year in which the emperor celebrated a
triumph for his success. In the tenth book
occurs the reference to the inroad of the
Costobocs; hence the book was written between
166 and 180 A.D. Further, the references
which Pausanias makes both forwards
and backwards to the several parts of his work
show that the books were written in the order
in which they now stand. Hence books six
to ten cannot have been composed earlier, and
may have been composed a good deal later,
than 174 A.D., the year in which our author
was engaged on his fifth book. Thus the composition
of the work extended over a period
of at least fourteen years and probably of
many more. That Pausanias spent a long
time over it might be inferred from a passage
in which he explains a change in his religious
views. When he began his work, so he tells
us, he looked on some Greek myths as little
better than foolishness, but when he had got
as far as his description of Arcadia he had
altered his opinion and had come to believe
that they contained a kernel of deep wisdom
under a husk of extravagance. Such a total
change of attitude towards the religious traditions
of his country was more probably an
affair of years than of weeks and months.
That the first book was not only written
but published before the others seems clear. |The first
book
written and
published
before the
rest.|
9Amongst the proofs of this the strongest is the
writer’s statement in the seventh book, that
when he wrote his description of Athens the
Music Hall of Herodes Atticus had not yet
been built. This implies that when he wrote
the seventh book the first was already published;
otherwise he could easily have incorporated
a notice of the Music Hall in its proper
place in the manuscript. Again, in the eighth
book he expressly corrects a view which he had
adopted in the first; this also he might have
done in the manuscript of the first book if he
still had it by him. In other places he tacitly
adds to statements and descriptions contained
in the first book. Further, the narrative of the
Gallic invasion in the first book is superseded
by the much fuller narrative given in the tenth
book, and would hardly have been allowed to
stand if it had been in the author’s power to
cut it out. More interesting are the passages
in which we seem to discover references to
criticisms which had been passed on his first
book. Thus in the third book he repeats
emphatically the plan of work which he had
laid down for himself in the first, adding that
the plan had been adopted after mature deliberation,
and that he would not depart from it.
This sounds like a trumpet-blast of defiance to
the critics who had picked holes in the scheme
of his first book. Elsewhere he seems conscious
10that some of their strictures were not wholly
undeserved. In speaking of the descendants of
Aristomenes he is sorely tempted to go into the
family history of the Diagorids, but pulls himself
up sharply with the remark that he passes
over this interesting topic “lest it should appear
an impertinent digression.” Clearly the arrows
of the reviewers had gone home. The tedious
historical dissertations with which he had sought
to spice the plain fare of Athenian topography
were now felt by the poor author himself
to savour strongly of impertinent digressions.
Again, old habit getting the better of him, the
sight of a ruined camp of King Philip in a
secluded Arcadian valley sets him off rambling
on the divine retribution that overtook that
wicked monarch and his descendants and the
murderers of his descendants and their descendants
after them, till, his conscience smiting him,
he suddenly returns to business with the half
apology, “But this has been a digression.”
That Pausanias had the fear of the critics before
his eyes is stated by himself in the plainest
language. He had made, he tells us, careful
researches into the vexed subject of the dates
of Homer and Hesiod, but refrained from
stating the result of his labours, because he
knew very well the carping disposition of the
professors of poetry of his own day. Little
did he foresee the disposition of certain other
11professors who were to sit in judgment on him
some seventeen hundred years later. Had he
done so he might well have been tempted to
suppress the Description of Greece altogether,
and we might have had to lament the loss of
one of the most curious and valuable records
bequeathed to us by antiquity.
Birthplace
of
Pausanias.
The birthplace of Pausanias is less certain
than his date, but there are good grounds for
believing that he was a Lydian. For after
saying that in his country traces were still to
be seen of the abode of Pelops and Tantalus,
he mentions some monuments and natural
features associated with the names of these
ancient princes on and near Mount Sipylus.
This is nearly a direct affirmation that the
region about Mount Sipylus in Lydia was his
native land. The same thing appears, though
less directly, from the minute acquaintance he
displays with the district and from the evident
fondness with which he recurs again and again
to its scenery and legends. He had seen the
white eagles wheeling above the lonely tarn of
Tantalus in the heart of the hills; he had
beheld the stately tomb of the same hero on
Mount Sipylus, the ruined city at the bottom
of the clear lake, the rock-hewn throne of
Pelops crowning the dizzy peak that overhangs
the cañon, and the dripping rock which
popular fancy took for the bereaved Niobe
12weeping for her children. He speaks of the
clouds of locusts which he had thrice seen
vanish from Mount Sipylus, of the wild dance
of the peasantry, and of the shrine of Mother
Plastene, whose rude image, carved out of the
native rock, may still be seen in its niche at the
foot of the mountain. From all this it is fair
to surmise that Pausanias was born and bred
not far from the mountains which he seems to
have known and loved so well. Their inmost
recesses he may have explored on foot in boyhood
and have drunk in their old romantic
legends from the lips of woodmen and hunters.
Whether, as some conjecture, he was born at
Magnesia, the city at the northern foot of
Mount Sipylus, we cannot say, but the vicinity
of the city to the mountain speaks in favour of
the conjecture. It is less probable, perhaps,
that his birthplace was the more distant Pergamus,
although there is no lack of passages to
prove that he knew and interested himself in
that city. As a native of Lydia it was natural
that Pausanias should be familiar with the
western coast of Asia Minor. There is indeed
no part of the world outside of Greece to which
he refers so often. He seizes an opportunity
to give us the history of the colonisation of
Ionia, and dwells with patriotic pride on the
glorious climate, the matchless temples, and the
natural wonders of that beautiful land.
Other
writers of
the same
name.
13Some scholars have identified our author
with a sophist of the same name who was
born at Caesarea in Cappadocia, studied under
Herodes Atticus, and died an old man at
Rome, leaving behind him many declamations
composed in a style which displayed a certain
vigour and some acquaintance with classical
models. But, quite apart from the evidence
that our author was a Lydian, there are strong
reasons for not identifying him with his
Cappadocian namesake. Neither Suidas nor
Philostratus, who has left us a short life of the
Cappadocian Pausanias, mentions the Description
of Greece among his works; and on the other
hand our Pausanias, though he often mentions
Herodes Atticus, nowhere speaks of him as his
master or of any personal relations that he had
with him. Further, the author of the Description
of Greece is probably to be distinguished
from a writer of the same name who composed
a work on Syria to which Stephanus of Byzantium
repeatedly refers. It is true that our
Pausanias evidently knew and had travelled
in Syria, but this in itself is no reason for
supposing that he was the author of a work to
which in his extant writings he makes no allusion.
The name Pausanias was far too common
to justify us in identifying all the authors who
bore it, even when we have grounds for believing
them to have been contemporaries.
14That Pausanias had travelled widely beyond
the limits of Greece and Ionia is clear from the
many allusions he lets fall to places and objects
of interest in foreign lands. Some of them he
expressly says that he saw; as to others we
may infer that he saw them from the particularity
of his description. In Syria he had seen
the Jordan flowing through the Lake of Tiberias
and falling into the Dead Sea, and had gazed
at the red pool near Joppa in which Perseus
was said to have washed his bloody sword after
slaying the sea-monster. He describes a tomb
at Jerusalem, the door of which by an ingenious
mechanical contrivance opened of itself once a
year at a certain hour, and he often alludes to
Antioch which for its vast size and wealth he
ranked with Alexandria. In Egypt he had
seen the Pyramids, had beheld with wonder the
colossal statue of Memnon at Thebes, and had
heard the musical note, like the breaking of a
lute-string, which the statue emitted at sunrise.
The statue still stands, and many inscriptions
in Greek and Latin carved by ancient visitors
on its huge legs and base confirm the testimony
of Pausanias as to the mysterious sound. From
Egypt our author seems to have journeyed
across the desert to the oasis of Ammon, for he
tells us that in his time the hymn which Pindar
sent to Ammon was still to be seen there carved
on a triangular slab beside the altar. Nearer
15home he admired the splendid fortifications of
Rhodes and Byzantium. Though he does not
describe northern Greece, he had visited Thessaly,
and had seen the blue steaming rivulet
rushing along at the foot of the rugged forest-tufted
mountains that hem in like a wall the
pass of Thermopylae on the south. He appears
to have visited Macedonia, and perhaps, too,
Epirus; at least he speaks repeatedly of Dodona
and its oracular oak, and he mentions the
sluggish melancholy rivers that wind through
the dreary Thesprotian plain and that gave
their names to the rivers in hell. He had
crossed to Italy and seen something of the
cities of Campania and the wonders of Rome.
The great forum of Trajan with its bronze roof,
the Circus Maximus—then probably the most
magnificent building in the world—and the
strange beasts gathered from far foreign lands,
seem to have been the sights which most impressed
him in the capital of the world. In the
Imperial Gardens he observed with curiosity
a tusk which the custodian assured him had
belonged to the Calydonian boar; and he
noticed, doubtless with less pleasure, the great
ivory image of Athena Alea which Augustus
had carried off from the stately temple of the
goddess at Tegea. In the neighbourhood of
Rome the bubbling milk-white water of Albula
or Solfatara, as it is now called, on the road to
16Tibur, attracted his attention, and beside the
sylvan lake of Aricia he appears to have seen
the grim priest pacing sword in hand, the
warder of the Golden Bough. The absurd
description he gives of the beautiful and much-maligned
Strait of Messina would suffice to
prove that he never sailed through it. Probably
like most travellers coming from the East
he reached Italy by way of Brundisium. Of
Sardinia he has given a somewhat full description,
but without implying that he had visited
it. Sicily, if we may judge by a grave blunder
he makes in speaking of it, he never saw.
Aim of
Pausanias’s
work.
The aim that Pausanias had in writing his
Description of Greece is nowhere very fully or
clearly stated by him. His book has neither
head nor tail, neither preface nor epilogue. At
the beginning he plunges into the description of
Attica without a word of introduction, and at
the end he breaks off his account of Ozolian
Locris with equal abruptness. There is reason
to believe that the work is unfinished, for he
seems to have intended to describe Opuntian
Locris, but this intention was never fulfilled.
However, from occasional utterances as well as
from the general scope and plan of the book,
we can gather a fairly accurate notion of the
writer’s purpose. Thus in the midst of his
description of the Acropolis of Athens he
suddenly interposes the remark, “But I must
17proceed, for I have to describe the whole of
Greece,” as if the thought of the wide field he
had to traverse jogged him, as well it might,
and bade him hasten. Again, after bringing
his description of Athens and Attica to an end,
he adds: “Such are, in my opinion, the most
famous of the Athenian traditions and sights:
from the mass of materials I have aimed from
the outset at selecting the really notable.”
Later on, before addressing himself to the
description of Sparta he explains his purpose
still more definitely and emphatically: “To
prevent misconceptions, I stated in my Attica
that I had not described everything, but only a
selection of the most memorable objects. This
principle I will now repeat before I proceed to
describe Sparta. From the outset I aimed at
sifting the most valuable traditions from out
of the mass of insignificant stories which are
current among every people. My plan was
adopted after mature deliberation, and I will
not depart from it.” Again, after briefly
narrating the history of Phlius, he says: “I
shall now add a notice of the most remarkable
sights,” and he concludes his description of
Delphi with the words: “Such were the
notable objects left at Delphi in my time.” In
introducing his notice of the honorary statues
at Olympia he is careful to explain that he does
not intend to furnish a complete catalogue of
18them, but only to mention such as were of
special interest either for their artistic merit or
for the fame of the persons they portrayed.
Method of
the work.
From these and a few more passages of the
same sort it seems 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. It was a vast undertaking, and
we need not wonder that at the outset he should
have felt himself oppressed by the magnitude
of it, and that consequently in the first book,
dealing with Attica, his selection of notable
objects should be scantier and his description
of them slighter than in the later books. It
was not only that he was bewildered by the
multitude of things he had to say, but that he
had not quite made up his mind how to say
them. He was groping and fumbling after a
method. As the work proceeded, he seems to
have felt himself more at ease; the arrangement
of the matter becomes more systematic,
the range of his interests wider, the descriptions
more detailed, his touch surer. Even the
second book shows in all these respects a great
advance on the first. To mention two conspicuous
improvements, he has now definitely
adopted the topographical order of description,
and he prefaces his account of each considerable
city with a sketch of its history. In the first
19book, on the other hand, an historical introduction
is wholly wanting, and though Athens
itself is on the whole described in topographical
order, the rest of Attica is not. Only with
the description of the Sacred Way which led
from Athens to Eleusis does Pausanias once for
all grasp firmly the topographical thread as
the best clue to guide him and his readers
through the labyrinth. Throughout the rest of
his work the general principle on which he
arranges his matter is this. After narrating in
outline the history of the district he is about to
describe, he proceeds from the frontier to the
capital by the nearest road, noting anything of
interest that strikes him by the way. Arrived
at the capital he goes straight to the centre of
it, generally to the market-place, describes the
chief buildings and monuments there, and then
follows the streets, one after the other, that
radiate from the centre in all directions, recording
the most remarkable objects in each of
them. Having finished his account of the
capital he describes the surrounding district on
the same principle. He follows the chief roads
that lead from the capital to all parts of the
territory, noting methodically the chief natural
features and the most important towns, villages,
and monuments that he meets with on the way.
Having followed the road up till it brings him
to the frontier, he retraces his steps to the
20capital, and sets off along another which he
treats in the same way, until in this manner he
has exhausted all the principal thoroughfares
that branch from the city. On reaching the
end of the last of them he does not return on
his footsteps, but crosses the boundary into the
next district, which he then proceeds to describe
after the same fashion. This, roughly speaking,
is the way in which he describes the cities and
territories of Corinth, Argos, Sparta, Mantinea,
Megalopolis, Tegea, and Thebes.
The work
is a guide-book.
A better and clearer method of arranging
matter so complex and varied it might be hard
to devise. It possesses at least one obvious
advantage—the routes do not cross each other,
and thus a fruitful source of confusion is
avoided. The reader, however, will easily
perceive that the order of description can hardly
have been the one in which Pausanias travelled
or expected his readers to travel. The most
patient and systematic of topographers and
sightseers would hardly submit to the irksome
drudgery of pursuing almost every road twice
over, first in one direction and then in the
other. Manifestly the order has been adopted
only for the sake of lucidity, only because in no
other way could the writer convey to his reader
so clear a notion of the relative positions of the
places and things described. Why was Pausanias
at such pains to present everything to his
21readers in its exact position? The only
probable answer is that he wished to help them
to find their way from one object of interest to
another; in other words that he intended his
Description of Greece to serve as a guide-book
to travellers. If his aim had been merely to
amuse and entertain his readers at home, he
could hardly have lighted on a worse method
of doing so; for the persons who find topographical
directions amusing and can extract
entertainment from reading that “This place is
so many furlongs from that, and this other so
many more from that other,” must be few in
number and of an unusually cheerful disposition.
The ordinary reader is more likely to yawn
over such statements and shut up the book.
We may take it, then, that in Pausanias’s work
we possess the ancient equivalent of our modern
Murrays and Baedekers. The need for such
a guide-book would be felt by the many
travellers who visited Greece, and for whom the
garrulous but ignorant ciceroni did not, as we
know, always provide the desired information.
Yet with the innocent ambition of an author
Pausanias may very well have hoped that his
book might prove not wholly uninteresting to
others than travellers. The digressions on
historical subjects, on natural curiosities, on the
strange creatures of different countries, with
which he so often breaks the thread of his
22description, may be regarded as so many lures
held out to the reader to beguile him on his
weary way. Indeed in one passage he plainly intimates
his wish not to be tedious to his readers.
Antiquarian and
religious
bias of
Pausanias.
When we come to examine the substance of
his book we quickly perceive that his interests
were mainly antiquarian and religious, and that
though he professes to describe the whole of
Greece or, more literally, all things Greek,
what he does describe is little more than the
antiquities of the country and the religious
traditions and ritual of the people. He interested
himself neither in the natural beauties
of Greece nor in the ordinary life of his contemporaries.
For all the notice he takes of
the one or the other, Greece might almost have
been a wilderness and its cities uninhabited or
peopled only at rare intervals by a motley
throng who suddenly appeared as by magic,
moved singing through the streets in gay procession
with flaring torches and waving censers,
dyed the marble pavements of the temples
with the blood of victims, filled the air with
the smoke and savour of their burning flesh,
and then melted away as mysteriously as they
had come, leaving the deserted streets and
temples to echo only to the footstep of some
solitary traveller who explored with awe and
wonder the monuments of a vanished race.
Yet as his work proceeded Pausanias seems
23to have wakened up now and then to a dim
consciousness that men and women were still
living and toiling around him, that fields were
still ploughed and harvests reaped, that the
vine and the olive still yielded their fruit,
though Theseus and Agamemnon, Cimon and
Pericles, Philip and Alexander were no more.
To this awakening consciousness or, to speak
more correctly, to this gradual widening of
his interests, we owe the few peeps which in
his later books Pausanias affords us at his
contemporaries in their daily life. Thus he
lets us see the tall and stalwart highlanders
of Daulis; the handsome and industrious
women of Patrae weaving with deft fingers
the fine flax of their native fields into head-dresses
and other feminine finery; the fishermen
of Bulis putting out to fish the purple
shell in the Gulf of Corinth; the potters of
Aulis turning their wheels in the little seaside
town from which Agamemnon sailed for Troy;
and the apothecaries of Chaeronea distilling
a fragrant and healing balm from roses and
lilies, from irises and narcissuses culled in
peaceful gardens on the battlefield where
Athens and Thebes, side by side, had made
the last stand for the freedom of Greece.
His
descriptions
of religious
rites.
Contrast with these sketches, few and far
between, the gallery of pictures he has painted
of the religious life of his contemporaries. To
24mention only a few of them, we see sick people
asleep and dreaming on the reeking skins of
slaughtered rams or dropping gold and silver
coins as a thank-offering for recovered health
into a sacred spring; lepers praying to the
nymphs in a cave, then swimming the river
and leaving, like Naaman, their uncleanness
behind them in the water; holy men staggering
along narrow paths under the burden
of uprooted trees; processions of priests and
magistrates, of white-robed boys with garlands
of hyacinths in their hair, of children wreathed
with corn and ivy, of men holding aloft blazing
torches and chanting as they march their native
hymns; women wailing for Achilles while the
sun sinks low in the west; Persians in tall
caps droning their strange litany in an unknown
tongue; husbandmen sticking gold leaf
on a bronze goat in a market-place to protect
their vines from blight, or running with
the bleeding pieces of a white cock round the
vineyards while the black squall comes crawling
up across the bay. We see the priest making
rain by dipping an oak-branch in a spring
on the holy mountain, or mumbling his weird
spells by night over four pits to soothe the
fury of the winds that blow from the four
quarters of the world. We see men slaughtering
beasts at a grave and pouring the warm
blood down a hole into the tomb for the dead
25man to drink; others casting cakes of meal
and honey into the cleft down which the water
of the Great Flood all ran away; others trying
their fortune by throwing dice in a cave, or
flinging barley-cakes into a pool and watching
them sink or swim, or letting down a mirror
into a spring to know whether a sick friend
will recover or die. We see the bronze lamps
lit at evening in front of the oracular image,
the smoke of incense curling up from the
hearth, the enquirer laying a copper coin on
the altar, whispering his question into the ear
of the image, then stealing out with his hands on
his ears, ready to take as the divine answer the
first words he may hear on quitting the sanctuary.
We see the nightly sky reddened by the fitful
glow of the great bonfire on the top of Mount
Cithaeron where the many images of oak-wood,
arrayed as brides, are being consumed in the
flames, after having been dragged in lumbering
creaking waggons to the top of the mountain,
each image with a bridesmaid standing by its
side. These and many more such scenes rise
up before us in turning the pages of Pausanias.
His
account of
superstitious
customs
and beliefs.
Akin to his taste for religious ritual is his
love of chronicling quaint customs, observances,
and superstitions of all sorts. Thus he tells
us how Troezenian maidens used to dedicate
locks of their hair in the temple of the bachelor
Hippolytus before marriage; how on a like
26occasion Megarian girls laid their shorn tresses
on the grave of the virgin Iphinoe; how lads
at Phigalia cropped their hair in honour of
the river that flows in the deep glen below the
town; how the boy priests of Cranaean Athena
bathed in tubs after the ancient fashion; and
how the priest and priestess of Artemis Hymnia
must remain all their lives unmarried, must
wash and live differently from common folk, and
must never enter the house of a private person.
Amongst the curious observances which he
notices at the various shrines are the rules that
no birth or death might take place within the
sacred grove of Aesculapius at Epidaurus, and
that all sacrifices had to be consumed within
the bounds; that no broken bough might be
removed from the grove of Hyrnetho near
Epidaurus, and no pomegranate brought into
the precinct of the Mistress at Lycosura; that
at Pergamus the name of Eurypylus might
not be pronounced in the sanctuary of Aesculapius,
and no one who had sacrificed to Telephus
might enter that sanctuary till he had bathed;
that at Olympia no man who had eaten of the
victim offered to Pelops might go into the
temple of Zeus, that women might not ascend
above the first stage of the great altar, that
the paste of ashes which was smeared on the
altar must be kneaded with the water of the
Alpheus and no other, and that the sacrifices
27offered to Zeus must be burnt with no wood
but that of the white poplar. Again, he loves
to note, though he does not always believe, the
local superstitions he met with or had read of,
such as the belief that at the sacrifice to Zeus
on Mount Lycaeus a man was always turned
into a wolf, but could regain his human shape
if as a wolf he abstained for nine years from
preying on human flesh; that within the precinct
of the god on the same mountain neither
men nor animals cast shadows, and that whoever
entered it would die within the year; that
the trout in the river Aroanius sang like
thrushes; that whoever caught a fish in a certain
lake would be turned into a fish himself; that
Tegea could never be taken because it possessed
a lock of Medusa’s hair; that Hera
recovered her virginity every year by bathing
in a spring at Nauplia; that the water of one
spring was a cure for hydrophobia, while the
water of another drove mares mad; that no
snakes or wolves could live in Sardinia; that
when the sun was in a certain sign of the
zodiac earth taken from the tomb of Amphion
and Zethus at Thebes and carried to Tithorea
in Phocis would draw away the fertility from
the Theban land and transfer it to the Tithorean,
whence at that season the Thebans kept
watch and ward over the tomb, lest the Tithoreans
should come and filch the precious earth;
28that at Marathon every night the dead warriors
rose from their graves and fought the great
battle over again, while belated wayfarers,
hurrying by, heard with a shudder the hoarse
cries of the combatants, the trampling of
charging horses, and the clash of arms.
In carrying out his design of recording
Greek traditions, Pausanias has interwoven
many narratives into his description of Greece.
These are of various sorts, and were doubtless
derived from various sources. Some are historical,
and were taken avowedly or tacitly
from books. Some are legends with perhaps
a foundation in fact; others are myths pure
and simple; others again are popular tales to
which parallels may be found in the folk-lore
of many lands. Narratives of these sorts
Pausanias need not have learned from books.
Some of them were doubtless commonplaces
with which he had been familiar from childhood.
Others he may have picked up on his
travels. The spring of mythical fancy has not
run dry among the mountains and islands of
Greece at the present day; it flowed, we may
be sure, still more copiously in the days of
Pausanias. Amongst the popular tales which
he tells or alludes to may be mentioned the
story of the sleeper in the cave; of the cunning
masons who robbed the royal treasury they
had built; of the youth who slew the lion and
29|Myths.|
married the princess; of the kind serpent that
saved a child from a wolf and was killed
by the child’s father by mistake; of the king
whose life was in a purple lock on his head;
of the witch who offered to make an old man
young again by cutting him up and boiling
him in a hellbroth, and who did in this way
change a tough old tup into a tender young
lamb. It is characteristic of Greek popular
tradition that these stories are not left floating
vaguely in the cloudy region of fairyland;
they are brought down to solid earth and
given a local habitation and a name. The
sleeper was Epimenides the Cretan; the masons
were Trophonius and Agamedes, and the king
for whom they built the treasury was Hyrieus
of Orchomenus; the youth who won the hand
of the princess was Alcathous of Megara; the
king with the purple lock was Nisus, also of
Megara; the witch was Medea, and the old
man whom she mangled was Pelias; the place
where the serpent saved the child from the
wolf was Amphiclea in Phocis. Amongst the
myths which crowd the pages of Pausanias we
may note the strangely savage tale of Attis
and Agdistis, the hardly less barbarous story
of the loves of Poseidon and Demeter as horse
and mare, and the picturesque narratives of
the finding of the forsaken babe Aesculapius
by the goatherd, and the coming of Castor
30|Legends.|
and Pollux to Sparta in the guise of strangers
from Cyrene. Of the legends which he tells
of the heroic age—that border-land between
fable and history—some are his own in the
sense that we do not find them recorded by
any other ancient writer. Such are the stories
how Theseus even as a child evinced undaunted
courage by attacking the lion’s skin of Hercules
which he mistook for a living lion; how the
same hero in his youth proved his superhuman
strength to the masons who had jeered at his
girlish appearance; how the crazed Orestes,
dogged by the Furies of his murdered mother,
bit off one of his fingers, and how on his doing
so the aspect of the Furies at once changed
from black to white, as if in token that they
accepted the sacrifice as an atonement. Such,
too, is the graceful story of the parting of
Penelope from her father, and the tragic tale
of the death of Hyrnetho; in the latter we
seem almost to catch the ring of a romantic
ballad. Among the traditions told of historical
personages by Pausanias but not peculiar to
him are the legends of Pindar’s dream, of the
escape of Aristomenes from the pit, and of
the wondrous cure of Leonymus, the Crotonian
general, who, attacking the Locrian army at
the point where the soul of the dead hero
Ajax hovered in the van, received a hurt from
a ghostly spear, but was afterwards healed by
31the same hand in the White Isle, where Ajax
dwelt with other spirits of the famous dead.
To the same class belong a couple of anecdotes
with which Pausanias has sought to enliven
the dull catalogue of athletes in the sixth book.
One tells how the boxer Euthymus thrashed
the ghost of a tipsy sailor and won the hand
of a fair maiden, who was on the point of
being delivered over to the tender mercies of
the deceased mariner. The other relates how
another noted boxer, by name Theagenes,
departed this vale of tears after accumulating
a prodigious number of prizes; how when he
was no more a spiteful foe came and wreaked
his spleen by whipping the bronze statue of
the illustrious dead, till the statue, losing
patience, checked his insolence by falling on
him and crushing him to death; how the sons
of this amiable man prosecuted the statue for
murder; how the court, sitting in judgment,
found the statue guilty and solemnly condemned
it to be sunk in the sea; how, the
sentence being rigorously executed, the land
bore no fruit till the statue had been fished up
again and set in its place; and how the people
sacrificed to the boxer as to a god ever after.
His
description
of the
country.
The same antiquarian and religious tincture
which appears in Pausanias’s account of the
Greek people colours his description of the
country. The mountains which he climbs, the
32plains which he traverses, the rivers which he
fords, the lakes and seas that he beholds shining
in the distance, the very flowers that spring
beside his path hardly exist for him but as they
are sacred to some god or tenanted by some
spirit of the elements, or because they call up
some memory of the past, some old romantic
story of unhappy love or death. Of one flower,
white and tinged with red, he tells us that it
first grew in Salamis when Ajax died; of
another, that chaplets of it are worn in their
hair by white-robed boys when they walk in
procession in honour of Demeter. He notes
the mournful letters on the hyacinth and tells
the tale of the fair youth slain unwittingly by
Apollo. He points out the old plane-tree
which Menelaus planted before he went away
to the wars; the great cedar with an image of
Artemis hanging among its boughs; the sacred
cypresses called the Maidens, tall and dark and
stately, in the bleak upland valley of Psophis;
the myrtle-tree whose pierced leaves still bore
the print of hapless Phaedra’s bodkin on that
fair islanded coast of Troezen, where now the
orange and the lemon bloom in winter; the
pomegranate with its blood-red fruit growing
on the grave of the patriot Menoeceus who shed
his blood for his country. If he looks up at
the mountains, it is not to mark the snowy
peaks glistering in the sunlight against the
33blue, or the sombre pine-forests that fringe their
crests and are mirrored in the dark lake below;
it is to tell you that Zeus or Apollo or the
Sun-god is worshipped on their tops, that the
Thyiad women rave on them above the clouds,
or that Pan has been heard piping in their
lonely coombs. The gloomy caverns, where the
sunbeams hardly penetrate, with their fantastic
stalactites and dripping roofs, are to him the
haunts of Pan and the nymphs. The awful
precipices of the Aroanian mountains, in the
sunless crevices of which the snow-drifts never
melt, would have been passed by him in silence
were it not that the water that trickles down
their dark glistening face is the water of Styx.
If he describes the smooth glassy pool which,
bordered by reeds and tall grasses, still sleeps
under the shadow of the shivering poplars in
the Lernean swamp, it is because the way to
hell goes down through its black unfathomed
water. If he stops by murmuring stream or
brimming river, it is to relate how from the
banks of the Ilissus, where she was at play, the
North Wind carried off Orithyia to be his
bride; how the Selemnus had been of old a
shepherd who loved a sea-nymph and died
forlorn; how the amorous Alpheus still flows
across the wide and stormy Adriatic to join his
love at Syracuse. If in summer he crosses a
parched river-bed, where not a driblet of water
34is oozing, where the stones burn under foot and
dazzle the eye by their white glare, he will tell
you that this is the punishment the river suffers
for having offended the sea-god. Distant prospects,
again, are hardly remarked by him except
for the sake of some historical or legendary
association. The high knoll which juts out
from the rugged side of Mount Maenalus into
the dead flat of the Mantinean plain was called
the Look, he tells us, because here the dying
Epaminondas, with his hand pressed hard on
the wound from which his life was ebbing fast,
took his long last look at the fight. The view
of the sea from the Acropolis at Athens is
noticed by him, not for its gleam of molten
sapphire, but because from this height the aged
Aegeus scanned the blue expanse for the white
sails of his returning son, then cast himself
headlong from the rock when he descried the
bark with sable sails steering for the port of
Athens.
The disinterested glimpses, as we may call
them, of Greek scenery which we catch in the
pages of Pausanias are brief and few. He tells
us that there is no fairer river than the Ladon
either in Greece or in foreign land, and probably
no one who has traversed the magnificent
gorge through which the river bursts its way
from the highlands of northern Arcadia to the
lowlands on the borders of Elis will be inclined
35to dispute his opinion. Widely different scenes
he puts in for us with a few touches—the
Boeotian Asopus oozing sluggishly through its
deep beds of reeds; the sodden plain of Nestane
with the rain-water pouring down into it from
the misty mountains; the road running through
vineyards with mountains rising on either hand;
the spring gushing from the hollow trunk of a
venerable plane; the summer lounge in the
shady walks of the grove beside the sea; the
sand and pine-trees of the low coast of Elis;
the oak-woods of Phelloe with stony soil where
the deer ranged free and wild boars had their
lair; and the Boeotian forest with its giant
oaks in whose branches the crows built their
nests.
His notices
of the
natural
products
of Greece.
It is one of the marks of a widening intellectual
horizon that as his work goes on
Pausanias takes more and more notice of the
aspect and natural products of the country
which he describes. Such notices are least
frequent in the first book and commonest in
the last three. Thus he remarks the bareness
of the Cirrhaean plain, the fertility of the valley
of the Phocian Cephisus, the vineyards of
Ambrosus, the palms and dates of Aulis, the
olive-oil of Tithorea that was sent to the
emperor, the dykes that dammed off the water
from the fields in the marshy flats of Caphyae
and Thisbe. He mentions the various kinds
36of oaks that grew in the Arcadian woods, the
wild-strawberry bushes of Mount Helicon on
which the goats browsed, the hellebore, both
black and white, of Anticyra, and the berry of
Ambrosus which yielded the crimson dye. He
observed the flocks of bustards that haunted
the banks of the Phocian Cephisus, the huge
tortoises that crawled in the forests of Arcadia,
the white blackbirds of Mount Cyllene, the two
sorts of poultry at Tanagra, the purple shell
fished in the sea at Bulis, the trout of the
Aroanius river, and the eels of the Copaic
Lake. All these instances are taken from the
last three books. In the earlier part of his
work he condescended to mention the honey of
Hymettus, the old silver mines of Laurium, the
olives of Cynuria, the fine flax of Elis, the
purple shell of the Laconian coast, the marble
of Pentelicus, the mussel-stone of Megara, and
the green porphyry of Croceae. But of the
rich Messenian plain, known in antiquity as the
Happy Land, where nowadays the traveller
passes, almost as in a tropical region, between
orange-groves and vineyards fenced by hedges
of huge fantastic cactuses and sword-like aloes,
Pausanias has nothing more to say than that
“the Pamisus flows through tilled land.”
His
account of
the state of
the roads.
On the state of the roads he is still more
reticent than on that of the country. The
dreadful Scironian road—the Via Mala of
37Greece—which ran along a perilous ledge of
the Megarian sea-cliffs at a giddy height above
the breakers, had lately been widened by
Hadrian. An excellent carriage road, much
frequented, led from Tegea to Argos. Another
road, traversable by vehicles, went over the pass
of the Tretus, where the railway from Corinth
to Argos now runs; and we have the word of
Pausanias for it that a driving-road crossed
Parnassus from Delphi to Tithorea. On the
other hand the road from Sicyon to Titane was
impassable for carriages; a rough hill-track
led from Chaeronea to Stiris; the path along
the rugged mountainous coast between Lerna
and Thyrea was then, as it is now, narrow and
difficult; and the pass of the Ladder over
Mount Artemisius from Argos to Mantinea
was so steep that in some places steps had to
be cut in the rock to facilitate the descent. Of
the path up to the Corycian cave on Mount
Parnassus our author truly observes that it is
easier for a man on foot than for mules and
horses. Greek mules and horses can, indeed,
do wonders in the way of scrambling up and
down the most execrable mountain paths on
slopes that resemble the roof of a house; but it
would sorely tax even their energies to ascend
to the Corycian cave.
The real interest of Pausanias, however, lay
neither in the country nor in the people of his
38|His
descriptions
of
the monuments.|
own age, but in those monuments of the past,
which, though too often injured by time or
defaced by violence, he still found scattered in
profusion over Greece. It is to a description
of them that the greater part of his work is
devoted. He did not profess to catalogue, still
less to describe, them all. To do so might
well have exceeded the powers of any man,
however great his patience and industry. All
that a writer could reasonably hope to accomplish
was to make a choice of the most interesting
monuments, to describe them clearly, and
to furnish such comments as were needful to
understanding them properly. This is what
Pausanias attempted to do and what, after every
deduction has been made for omissions and
mistakes, he may fairly be said to have done
well. The choice of the monuments to be
described necessarily rested with himself, and if
his choice was sometimes different from what
ours might have been, it would be unreasonable
to blame him for it. He did not write
for us. No man in his sober senses ever did
write for readers who were to be born some
seventeen hundred years after he was in his
grave. In his wildest dreams of fame Pausanias
can hardly have hoped, perhaps under all the
circumstances we ought rather to say feared,
that his book would be read, long after the
Roman empire had passed away, by the people
39whom he calls the most numerous and warlike
barbarians in Europe, [1] by the Britons in their
distant isle, and by the inhabitants of a new
world across the Atlantic.
His preference
for the
older over
the later
art.
When we examine Pausanias’s choice of
monuments we find that, like his account of
the country and people, it was mainly determined
by two leading principles, his antiquarian
tastes and his religious curiosity. In the first
place, the monuments described are generally
ancient, not modern; in the second place, they
are for the most part religious, not profane.
His preference for old over modern art, for
works of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.
over those of the later period, was well founded
and has been shared by the best judges both
in ancient and modern times. Cicero, Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, Quintilian, and our author’s
own contemporary, Lucian, perhaps the most
refined critic of art in antiquity, mention no
artist of later date than the fourth century B.C.
The truth is, the subjugation of Greece by
Macedonia struck a fatal blow at Greek art.
No sculptor or painter of the first rank was
born after the conquest. It seemed as if art
were a flower that could only bloom in freedom;
in the air of slavery it drooped and faded.
40Thus if Pausanias chose to chronicle the masterpieces
of the great age of art rather than the
feebler productions of the decadence, we can
only applaud his taste. Yet we may surmise
that his taste was here reinforced by his
patriotism. For he was more than a mere
antiquary and connoisseur. He was a patriot
who warmly sympathised with the ancient
glories of his country and deeply mourned its
decline. He recognised Athens as the representative
of all that was best in Greek life, and
he can hardly find words strong enough to
express his detestation of the men who by
weakening her in the Peloponnesian war directly
prepared for the conquest of Greece by Macedonia.
The battle of Chaeronea he describes
repeatedly as a disaster for the whole of Greece,
and of the conqueror Philip himself he speaks
in terms of the strongest reprobation. The
men who had repelled the Persians, put down
the military despotism of Sparta, fought against
the Macedonians, and delayed, if they could
not avert, the final subjugation of Greece by
Rome were for him the benefactors of their
country. He gives a list of them, beginning
with Miltiades and ending with Philopoemen,
after whom, he says, Greece ceased to be the
mother of the brave. And as he mentions
with pride and gratitude the men who had
served the cause of freedom, so he expresses
41himself with disgust and abhorrence of the
men who had worked for the enslavement of
Greece to Persia, to Macedonia, and to Rome.
His style, generally cold and colourless, grows
warm and animated when he tells of a struggle
for freedom, whether waged by the Messenians
against the Spartans, or by the Greeks against
the Gauls, or by the Achaeans against the
Romans. And when he has recorded the final
catastrophe, the conquest of Greece by Rome, he
remarks as with a sigh that the nation had now
reached its lowest depth of weakness, and that
when Nero afterwards liberated it the boon
came too late—the Greeks had forgotten what
it was to be free.
His preference
for
religious
over profane
art.
The preference which Pausanias exhibits for
the art of the best period is not more marked
than his preference for sacred over profane or
merely decorative art, for buildings consecrated
to religion over buildings devoted to the purposes
of civic or private life. Rarely does he
offer any general remarks on the aspect and
architectural style of the cities he describes.
At Tanagra he praises the complete separation
of the houses of the people from the sanctuaries
of the gods. Amphissa, he tells us, was handsomely
built, and Lebadea could compare with
the most flourishing cities of Greece in style
and splendour. On the other hand he viewed
with unconcealed disdain the squalor and decay
42of the Phocian city of Panopeus, “if city it can
be called that has no government offices, no
gymnasium, no theatre, no market-place, no
water conducted to a fountain, and where the
people live in hovels, just like highland shanties,
perched on the edge of a ravine.” In the
cities he visited he does indeed notice market-places,
colonnades, courts of justice, government
offices, fountains, baths, and the houses
and statues of famous men, but the number of
such buildings and monuments in his pages is
small compared to the number of temples and
precincts, images and votive offerings that he
describes, and such notice as he takes of them
seldom amounts to more than a bare mention.
The civic buildings that he deigns to describe
in any detail are very few. Amongst them we
may note the Painted Colonnade at Athens
with its famous pictures, the spacious and
splendid Persian Colonnade at Sparta with its
columns of white marble carved in the shape
of Persian captives, the market-place at Elis,
and the Phocian parliament-house with its
double row of columns running down the
whole length of the hall and its seats rising in
tiers from the columns up to the walls behind.
His
descriptions of
religious
monuments.
It is when he comes to religious art and
architecture that Pausanias seems to have felt
himself most at home. If in his notice of civic
buildings and monuments he is chary of details,
43he is lavish of them in describing the temples
and sanctuaries with their store of images,
altars, and offerings. The most elaborate of
his descriptions are those which he has given
of the temple of Zeus at Olympia with the
great image of the god by Phidias, the scenes
on the Chest of Cypselus in the Heraeum at
Olympia, the reliefs on the throne of Apollo
at Amyclae, and the paintings by Polygnotus
in the Cnidian Lesche at Delphi. But, apart
from these conspicuous examples; almost every
page of his work bears witness to his interest
in the monuments of religion, especially when
they were more than usually old and quaint.
Among the queer images he describes are the
thirty square stones revered as gods at Pharae;
the rough stones worshipped as images of Love
and Hercules and the Graces at Thespiae,
Hyettus, and Orchomenus; the pyramidal stone
which represented Apollo at Megara; the
ancient wooden image of Zeus with three eyes
on the acropolis of Argos; the old idol of
Demeter as a woman with a horse’s head holding
a dove in one hand and a dolphin in the
other; the figure of a mermaid bound fast with
golden chains in a wild wood at the meeting
of two glens; the image of the War God at
Sparta in fetters to hinder him from running
away; the bronze likeness of an unquiet ghost
clamped with iron to a rock to keep him still;
44an image of Athena with a purple bandage on
her wounded thigh; a pair of wooden idols of
Dionysus with shining gilt bodies and red
faces; and tiny bronze images of Castor and
Pollux, a foot high, on a rocky islet over which
the sea broke foaming in winter, but could not
wash them away. Some of the images he
describes as tricked out with offerings of devout
worshippers. Such were an image of Pasiphae
covered with garlands; a figure of Hermes
swathed in myrtle boughs; a crimson-painted
idol of Dionysus emerging from a heap of
laurel leaves and ivy; and a statue of Health
almost hidden under tresses of women’s hair
and strips of Babylonish raiment in the shade
of ancient cypresses at Titane. Among the
appointments of the sanctuaries he mentions,
for example, altars made of the ashes or blood
of the victims, perpetual fires, a golden lamp
that burned day and night in the Erechtheum,
a gilt head of the Gorgon on the wall of the
Acropolis, a purple curtain in the temple of
Zeus, a golden and jewelled peacock dedicated
by Hadrian to Hera, the iron stand of
Alyattes’s bowl, chains of liberated prisoners,
hanging from the cypresses in the grove of
Hebe, and bronze railings round the shaft down
which the enquirer, clad in a peculiar costume,
descended by a ladder to consult the oracle of
Trophonius.
His
interest in
relics.
45Again, Pausanias loves to notice the things,
whether worshipped or not, which were treasured
as relics of a mythical or legendary past. Such
were the remains of the clay out of which Prometheus
had moulded the first man and woman;
the stone that Cronus had swallowed instead of
his infant son; the remains of the wild-strawberry
tree under which Hermes had been
nourished; the egg which the lovely Leda had
laid and out of which Castor and Pollux had
been hatched; the ruins of the bridal chamber
where Zeus had dallied with Semele; the
mouldering hide of the Calydonian boar; and
the old wooden pillar, held together by bands
and protected from the weather by a shed,
which had stood in the house of Oenomaus.
In the temple of Artemis at Aulis, now represented
by a ruined Byzantine chapel in a bare
stony field, the traveller was shown the remains
of the plane-tree under which the Greeks had
sacrificed before setting sail for Troy, and on
a neighbouring hill the guides pointed out the
bronze threshold of Agamemnon’s hut. But
the most revered of all the relics described by
Pausanias seems to have been the sceptre which
Hephaestus was said to have made and Agamemnon
to have wielded. It was kept and
worshipped at Chaeronea. A priest who held
office for a year guarded the precious relic in
his house and offered sacrifices to it daily,
46while a table covered with flesh and cakes
stood constantly beside it. A ruder conception
of religion than is revealed by this practice of
adoring and feeding a staff it might be hard to
discover amongst the lowest fetish-worshippers
of Western Africa. And this practice was
carried on in the native city and in the lifetime
of the enlightened Plutarch! Truly the
extremes of human nature sometimes jostle
each other in the street.
His notices
of historic
monuments.
But his religious bias by no means so
warped the mind of Pausanias as to render
him indifferent to the historic ground which he
trod, and to those monuments of great men and
memorable events on which his eye must have
fallen at almost every turn. As a scholar he
was versed in, and as a patriot he was proud
of, the memories which these monuments were
destined to perpetuate, and which in the genius
of the Greek people have found a monument
more lasting than any of bronze or marble.
He visited the battlefields of Marathon and
Plataea and beheld the trophies of victory and
the graves of the victors. At Salamis he saw
the trophy of the great sea-fight, but he mentions
no graves. Doubtless the bones of many
victors and vanquished lay together fathoms
deep in the bay. At Chaeronea he saw a
sadder monument, the colossal stone lion on
the grave of the Thebans who had fallen in
47the cause of freedom. On the battlefield of
Mantinea he found the grave of Epaminondas,
at Sparta the grave of Leonidas, and among
the pine-woods of the sacred isle that looks
across the blue Saronic gulf to Attica the
grave of the banished Demosthenes. At
Thebes he saw the ruins of Pindar’s house,
the shields of the Lacedaemonian officers who
fell at Leuctra, and the figures of white marble
which Thrasybulus and his comrades in exile
and in arms had dedicated out of gratitude for
Theban hospitality. In the Grove of the Muses
on Helicon he beheld the statues of renowned
poets and musicians—Hesiod with his lute,
Arion on his dolphin, blind Thamyris, Orpheus
holding the beasts spellbound as he sang. At
Tanagra he observed the portrait and the tomb
of the poetess Corinna, the rival of Pindar;
and in several cities of Arcadia he remarked
portraits of the Arcadian historian Polybius.
Nowhere, however, did he find historical
monuments crowded so closely together as at
Athens, Olympia, and Delphi. The great
sanctuaries of Olympia and Delphi served in
a manner as the national museums and record-offices
of Greece. In them the various Greek
cities not only of the mother-country but of
Italy, Sicily, Gaul, and the East set up the
trophies of their victories and deposited copies
of treaties and other important documents.
48|Historic
monuments
at
Olympia.|
They offered a neutral ground where natives
of jealous or hostile states could meet in peace,
and where they could survey, with hearts that
swelled with various emotions, the records of
their country’s triumphs and defeats. At
Olympia our author mentions a tablet inscribed
with a treaty of alliance for a hundred years
between Elis, Athens, Argos, and Mantinea;
another tablet recording a treaty of peace for
thirty years between Athens and Sparta; and
the quoit of Iphitus inscribed with the terms of
the truce of God which was proclaimed at the
Olympic festival. Amongst the many trophies
of war which he enumerates the most memorable
was the image of Zeus dedicated in
common by the Greeks who had fought at
Plataea, and the most conspicuous, unless we
except the figure of Victory on the pillar
dedicated by the Messenians of Naupactus,
must have been the colossal bronze statue of
Zeus, no less than twenty-seven feet high,
which the Eleans set up for a victory over the
Arcadians. A golden shield, hung high on the
eastern gable of the temple of Zeus, proclaimed
the triumph of the Lacedaemonian arms at
Tanagra. The sight of one-and-twenty gilded
shields that glittered on the eastern and southern
sides of the temple must have cost Pausanias
a pang, for they had been dedicated by the
Roman general Mummius to commemorate the
49conquest of Greece. Another monument that
doubtless vexed the patriotic heart of Pausanias
was an elegant rotunda with slim Ionic columns
resting on marble steps and supporting a marble
roof; for the statues which it enclosed, resplendent
in gold and ivory, were those of
Philip and Alexander, and the building stood
as a memorial of the battle of Chaeronea.
Historic
monuments
at
Delphi.
At Delphi the road which wound up the
steep slope to the temple of Apollo was lined on
both sides with an unbroken succession of monuments
which illustrated some of the brightest
triumphs and darkest tragedies in Greek history.history.
Here the proud trophy of the Lacedaemonian
victory at Aegospotami, with its rows of statues
rising in tiers, confronted the more modest
trophy erected by the Athenians for the victory
of Marathon. Here were statues set up by the
Argives for the share they had taken with the
Thebans in founding Messene. Here was a
treasury dedicated by the Athenians out of
the spoils of Marathon, and another dedicated
by the Thebans out of the spoils of Leuctra.
Here another treasury, built by the Syracusans,
commemorated the disastrous defeat of the
Athenians in Sicily. A bronze palm-tree and
a gilded image of Athena stood here as
memorials of Athenian valour by sea and land
at the Eurymedon. Here, above all, were
monuments of the victories achieved by the
50united Greeks over the Persians at Artemisium,
Salamis, and Plataea. The golden tripod,
indeed, which formed the trophy of Plataea,
had disappeared long before Pausanias passed
up the Sacred Way, its empty place testifying
silently to the rapacity of the Phocian leaders;
but the bronze serpent which had supported
it still stood erect, with the names of the states
that had taken part in the battle inscribed on
its coils. A prodigious image of Apollo, five-and-thirty
ells high, towering above the other
monuments, proclaimed at once the enormity
of the crime which the Phocians had committed
and the magnitude of the fine by which
they had expiated it. High and conspicuous
too, on the architrave of the temple, hung the
shields which told of one of the latest triumphs
of the Greek arms, the repulse and defeat of
the Gauls. All these and many more historical
monuments Pausanias saw and described at
Delphi.
Historic
monuments
at
Athens.
At Athens among the portraits of famous
men that attracted his attention were statues
of the statesmen Solon, Pericles, and Lycurgus,
the generals Conon, Timotheus, and Iphicrates,
the orators Demosthenes and Isocrates, the
philosopher Chrysippus, and the poets Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, and Menander. In the
Prytaneum were preserved copies of the laws
of Solon. The colonnades that flanked the
51market-place were adorned with pictures of
the battles of Marathon, Oenoe, and Mantinea,
and in one of them—the celebrated Painted
Colonnade—our author observed bronze shields,
smeared with pitch to preserve them from rust,
which had been taken from the Spartans at
Sphacteria. On the Acropolis stood, as a
trophy of the Persian wars, the immense bronze
statue of Athena, of which the blade of the
spear and the crest of the helmet could be seen
far off at sea. Close at hand in the Erechtheum
the traveller was shown the sword of Mardonius
and the corselet of Masistius, who had fallen
while leading the Persian cavalry to the charge
at Plataea. In Piraeus he saw the sanctuary
of Aphrodite which Conon had built after
vanquishing the Lacedaemonian fleet off Cnidus,
and at the entrance to the great harbour, in
view of the ships sailing out and in, the grave
of Themistocles who had won for Athens the
empire of the sea. But no place in Greece
was richer in monuments of the historic past,
none seems to have stirred Pausanias more
deeply than that memorable spot outside the
walls of Athens where, within the narrow compass
of a single graveyard, were gathered the
mortal remains of so much valour and genius.
Here lay not a few of the illustrious men who
by their counsels, their swords, or their pens
had made Athens great and famous, and hither
52the ashes of humbler citizens, who had died for
their country, were brought from distant battlefields
to rest in Attic earth. His description
of this the national burying-ground of Athens
has not, indeed, the pensive grace of Addison’s
essay on the tombs in the Abbey. It is little
more than a bare list of the names he read on
the monuments, but there almost every name
was a history as full of proud or mournful
memories as the names carved on the tombs in
Westminster and St. Paul’s or stitched on the
tattered and blackened banners that droop
from the walls of our churches. The annals
of Athens were written on these stones—the
story of her restless and aspiring activity, her
triumphs in art, in eloquence, in arms, her brief
noon of glory, and her long twilight of decrepitude
and decay. No wonder that our traveller
paused amid monuments which seemed, in the
gathering night of barbarism, to catch and
reflect some beams of the bright day that was
over, like the purple light that lingers on the
slopes of Hymettus when the sun has set on
Athens.
His digressions
on
natural
curiosities.
To relieve the tedium of the topographical
part of his work, Pausanias has introduced
digressions on the wonders of nature and of
foreign lands. Thus, for example, having mentioned
the destruction of Helice by an earthquake,
he describes the ominous signs which
53herald the approach of a great earthquake—the
heavy rains or long droughts, in winter the
sultry weather, in summer the haze through
which the sun’s disc looms red and lurid, the
sudden gusts, the springs of water drying up,
the rumbling noises underground. Further, he
analyses the different kinds of shocks, determines
the nature of the one which destroyed
Helice, and describes the immense wave which
simultaneously advanced on the doomed city
from the sea. He refers to the ebb and flow
of the ocean, to the ice-bound sea and frozen
deserts of the north, to the southern land where
the sun casts no shadow at midsummer. He
tells how the Chinese rear the silkworm, and
describes both silk and the silkworm more
correctly than any writer who preceded and
than some who followed him. It has been
suggested that he derived his information,
directly or indirectly, from a member of the
Roman embassy which appears from the
evidence of Chinese historians to have been
sent by the emperor Marcus Antoninus to the
far East and to have reached the court of
China in October 166 A.D. Again, he describes
the Sarmatians of northern Europe leading a
nomadic life in the depths of their virgin
forests, subsisting by their mares, ignorant of
iron, clad in corselets made of horse-hoofs,
shooting arrows barbed with bone from bows
54of the cornel-tree, and entangling their foes in
the coils of their lassoes.
Among the curiosities which seem to have
especially interested him were the huge bones
he met with in various places. Generally he
took them to be bones of giants, but one of
them he described more happily as that of a
sea-monster. Probably they were all bones of
mammoths or other large extinct animals, such
as have been found plentifully in modern times
in various parts of Greece, for example near
Megalopolis, where he saw some of them.
Again, he is particularly fond of describing or
alluding to strange birds and beasts, whether
native to Greece or imported from distant
countries. Thus he mentions a reported
variety of white blackbirds on Mount Cyllene
which had attracted the attention of Aristotle,
and he describes almost with the exactitude
of a naturalist a small venomous viper of
northern Arcadia which is still dreaded by
the inhabitants. He refers to the parrots and
camels and huge serpents of India, and he
describes briefly but correctly the ostrich and
the rhinoceros. He gives a full and sober
account of the method of capturing the bison,
and another of the mode of catching the elk
which contrasts very favourably with the absurd
account of it given by Caesar. At Tanagra
he saw the stuffed or pickled Triton, or what
55passed for such, of which the Tanagraeans were
so proud that they put a figure of a Triton on
the coins which they minted in the lifetime of
Pausanias. In the island of Poroselene he
enjoyed, he assures us, the spectacle of a tame
dolphin that came at a boy’s call and allowed
him to ride on its back.
His report of this last spectacle, though it
is confirmed by another witness, may raise a
doubt as to his credibility. Professor Alfred
Newton, whom I have consulted on the subject,
kindly informs me that he knows of no modern
evidence to bear Pausanias out, but that considering
the widespread belief of the ancients
in the familiarity of dolphins he does not
think it inconceivable that in those days the
creatures lived in little fear of mankind. We
cannot judge, he says, by the behaviour of
animals at the present day of what they might
or did do before persecution began. “When
the Russians,” he continues, “discovered Bering’s
Island in 1741, they found its shores
thronged by a big sea-beast (the Rhytina gigas
of naturalists), which, never having seen men
before, had no fear of them, and the Russians
(shipwrecked as they were) used to wade in
the water and milk the ‘cows.’ The confidence
was misplaced, and within thirty years or so
every one of the animals had been destroyed,
and the species extirpated.” Thus it seems
56not impossible that dolphins may have been
tamer in antiquity than they are now, and that
Pausanias may really have seen what he tells
us he saw. But perhaps the exhibition at
Poroselene was a hoax.
Description
of
Greece by
the pseudo-Dicaearchus.
So much for the contents of Pausanias’s
book. Before we enquire into the character
of the writer and the sources from which he
drew his materials it may be instructive to
compare his work with the fragments of
another ancient description of Greece which
have come down to us. The comparison will
help us to understand better both what we
have gained and what we have lost by the
idiosyncrasies of Pausanias. The fragments
commonly pass under the name of the eminent
Messenian writer Dicaearchus, a pupil of
Aristotle; but from internal evidence we may
conclude that the work of which they formed
part was written by a later author at some time
between 164 B.C. and 86 B.C. The nature of
the work may be gathered from the following
free translation or paraphrase, which is also
slightly abridged.
“ The road to Athens is a pleasant one,
running between cultivated fields the whole
way. The city itself is dry and ill supplied
with water. The streets are nothing but
miserable old lanes, the houses mean, with a
few better ones among them. On his first
57arrival a stranger could hardly believe that
this is the Athens of which he has heard so
much. Yet he will soon come to believe that
it is Athens indeed. A Music Hall, the most
beautiful in the world, a large and stately
theatre, a costly, remarkable, and far-seen
temple of Athena called the Parthenon rising
above the theatre, strike the beholder with
admiration. A temple of Olympian Zeus, unfinished
but planned on an astonishing scale;
three gymnasiums, the Academy, Lyceum, and
Cynosarges, shaded with trees that spring from
greensward; verdant gardens of philosophers;
amusements and recreations; many holidays
and a constant succession of spectacles;—all
these the visitor will find in Athens.
“ The products of the country are priceless
in quality but not too plentiful. However, the
frequency of the spectacles and holidays makes
up for the scarcity to the poorer sort, who
forget the pangs of hunger in gazing at the
shows and pageants. Every artist is sure of
being welcomed with applause and of making
a name; hence the city is crowded with
statues.
“ Of the inhabitants some are Attic and
some are Athenian. The former are gossiping,
slanderous, given to prying into the business of
strangers, fair and false. The Athenians are
high-minded, straightforward, and staunch in
58friendship. The city is infested by a set of
scribblers who worry visitors and rich strangers.
When the people catches the rascals, it makes
an example of them. The true-born Athenians
are keen and critical auditors, constant in their
attendance at plays and spectacles. In short,
Athens as far surpasses all other cities in the
pleasures and conveniences of life as they
surpass the country. But a man must beware
of the courtesans, lest they lure him to ruin.
The verses of Lysippus run thus:
‘If you have not seen Athens, you’re a stock;
If you have seen it and are not taken with it, you’re an ass;
If you are glad to leave it, you’re a pack-ass.’
“ Thence to Oropus by Psaphides and the
sanctuary of Zeus Amphiaraus is a day’s
journey for a good walker. It is all up-hill, [2]
but the abundance and good cheer of the inns
prevent the traveller from feeling the fatigue.
Oropus is a nest of hucksters. The greed of
the custom-house officers here is unsurpassed,
their roguery inveterate and bred in the bone.
Most of the people are coarse and truculent
in their manners, for they have knocked the
59decent members of the community on the
head. They deny they are Boeotians, standing
out for it that they are Athenians living in
Boeotia. To quote the poet Xeno:
‘All are custom-house officers, all are robbers.
A plague on the Oropians!’
“ Thence to Tanagra is a hundred and
thirty furlongs. The road runs through olive-groves
and woodlands: fear of highwaymen
there is none at all. The city stands on high
and rugged ground. Its aspect is white and
chalky; but the houses with their porches and
encaustic paintings give it a very pretty appearance.
The corn of the district is not very
plentiful, but the wine is the best in Boeotia.
The people are well-to-do, but simple in their
way of life. All are farmers, not artisans.
They practise justice, good faith, and hospitality.
To needy fellow-townsmen and to vagabonds
they give freely of their substance, for meanness
and covetousness are unknown to them.
It is the safest city in all Boeotia for strangers
to stay in; for the independent and industrious
habits of the people have bred a sturdy downright
hatred of knavery. In this city I
observed as little as might be of those unbridled
impulses which are commonly the
source of the greatest crimes. For where
people have enough to live on, they do not
60hanker after lucre, so roguery can hardly show
face among them.
“ Thence to Plataea is two hundred furlongs.
The road is somewhat desolate and stony, and
it rises up the slopes of Cithaeron, but it is
not very unsafe. In the city, to quote the
poet Posidippus,
‘Two temples there are, a colonnade and old renown,
And the baths, and Sarabus’s famous inn.
A desert most of the year, it is peopled at the time of the games.’
The inhabitants have nothing to say for themselves
except that they are Athenian colonists,
and that the battle between the Greeks and
the Persians was fought in their country.
“ Thence to Thebes is eighty furlongs. The
road is through a flat the whole way. The
city stands in the middle of Boeotia. Its
circumference is seventy furlongs, its shape
circular. The soil is dark. In spite of its
antiquity the streets are new, because, as the
histories tell us, the city has been thrice razed
to the ground on account of the morose and
overbearing character of the inhabitants. It is
excellent for the breeding of horses; it is all
well-watered and green, and has more gardens
than any other city in Greece. For two rivers
flow through it, irrigating the plain below the
city; and water is brought from the Cadmea in
61underground conduits which were made of old,
they say, by Cadmus. So much for the city.
The inhabitants are high-spirited and wonderfully
sanguine, but rash, insolent, and overbearing,
ready to come to blows with any man, be
he citizen or stranger. As for justice they set
their face against it. Business disputes are
settled not by reason but by fisticuffs, and the
methods of the prize-ring are transferred to
courts of justice. Hence lawsuits here last
thirty years at the very least. For if a man
opens his lips in public on the law’s delay and
does not thereupon take hasty leave of Boeotia,
he is waylaid by night and murdered by the
persons who have no wish that lawsuits should
come to an end. Murders are perpetrated on
the most trifling pretexts. Such are the men
as a whole, though some worthy, high-minded,
respectable persons are also to be found among
them. The women are the tallest, prettiest, and
most graceful in all Greece. Their faces are so
muffled up that only the eyes are seen. All of
them dress in white and wear low purple shoes
laced so as to show the bare feet. Their yellow
hair is tied up in a knot on the top of the head.
In society their manners are Sicyonian rather
than Boeotian. They have pleasing voices,
while the voices of the men are harsh and deep.
The city is one of the best places to pass the
summer in, for it has gardens and plenty of cool
62water. Besides it is breezy, its aspect is
verdant, and fruit and flowers abound. But it
lacks timber, and is one of the worst places to
winter in by reason of the rivers and the winds;
for snow falls and there is much mud. The
poet Laon writes in praise of the Boeotians, but
he does not speak the truth, the fact being that
he was caught in adultery and let off lightly by
the injured husband. He says:
‘Love the Boeotian, and fly not Boeotia;
For the man is a good fellow, and the land is delightful.’
“ Thence to Anthedon is one hundred and
sixty furlongs. The road runs aslant through
fields. Carriages can drive on it. The city,
which is not large, stands on the shore of the
Euboean sea. The market-place is all planted
with trees and flanked by colonnades. Wine
and fish abound, but corn is scarce, for the soil
is poor. The inhabitants are almost all fishermen
living by their hooks, by the purple shell,
and by sponges, growing old on the beach
among the seaweed and in their huts. They
are all of a ruddy countenance and a spare
form; the tips of their nails are worn away by
reason of working constantly in the sea. Most
of them are ferrymen or boat-builders. Far
from tilling the ground they do not even own it,
alleging that they are descendants of the marine
Glaucus, who was confessedly a fisherman.
63“ So much for Boeotia. As for Thespiae, it
contains ambition and fine statues, nothing else.
The Boeotians have a saying about their
national faults to the effect that greed lives
in Oropus, envy in Tanagra, quarrelsomeness
in Thespiae, insolence in Thebes, covetousness
in Anthedon, curiosity in Coronea, braggery in
Plataea, fever in Onchestus, and stupidity in
Haliartus. These are the faults that have
drained down into Boeotia as into a sink from
the rest of Greece. To quote the verse of
Pherecrates:
‘If you have any sense, shun Boeotia.’
So much for the land of the Boeotians.
“From Anthedon to Chalcis is seventy furlongs.
As far as Salgoneus the road is level
and easy, running between the sea on the one
hand and a wooded and well-watered mountain
of no great height on the other. The city of
Chalcis measures seventy furlongs in circumference.
It is all hilly and shaded with trees.
Most of the springs are salt, but there is one
called Arethusa of which the water, though
brackish, is wholesome, cool, and so abundant
that it suffices for the whole city. With public
buildings such as gymnasiums, colonnades,
sanctuaries, and theatres, besides paintings and
statues, the city is excellently provided, and the
situation of the market-place for purposes of
64commerce is unsurpassed. For the currents that
meet in the Euripus flow past the very walls of
the harbour, and here there is a gate which leads
straight into the market-place, a spacious area
enclosed by colonnades. This proximity of the
market-place to the harbour, and the ease with
which cargoes can be unloaded, attract many
ships to the port. Indeed the Euripus itself,
with its double entrance, draws merchants to the
city. The whole district is planted with olives,
and the fisheries are productive. The people
are Greek in speech as well as by birth. Devoted
to learning, with a taste for travel and
books, they bear their country’s misfortunes with
a noble fortitudefortitude. A long course of political
servitude has not extinguished that inborn freedom
of nature which has taught them to submit
to the inevitable. To quote a verse of Philiscus:
'Chalcis is a city of most worthy Greeks.'”
These passages, which I have perhaps quoted
at too great length, may suffice. I will spare
the reader a long description of Mount Pelion,
its pine-woods, its wild flowers, and its simples,
which seems to be a fragment of the same work.
Two points only in the description of the
mountain may be mentioned. The writer tells
us that the knowledge of certain simples was
hereditary in a single family, who kept it a profound
secret, though they refused to accept any
65money from the sick people whom they tended,
deeming it would be impious to do so. These
herbalists claimed to be descended from the
centaur Chiron. Again, we learn from the writer
how in the greatest heat of summer, when the
Dog Star rose, a procession of men of good
birth and in the prime of life, all chosen by
the priest and all clad in sheepskins, ascended
through the pine-woods to the cave of Chiron
and a sanctuary of Zeus on the top of the
mountain. He mentions the sheepskins as a
proof of the great height of Mount Pelion, as if
without them the men would have shivered on
the mountain even while the plains below were
sweltering and baking in the heat. But it is
more probable that the sheepskins had some
religious significance.
The
pseudo-Dicaearchus
and
Pausanias
compared.
This account of the procession of skin-clad
men to the cave and sanctuary on the top of
the high mountain reads not unlike a passage in
Pausanias. But how different is almost all the
rest of this writer’s description of Greece from
that of Pausanias! Instead of a dull patient
enumeration of monuments, arranged in topographical
order and seldom enlivened even by
a descriptive epithet, we have slight highly-coloured
sketches of the general appearance of
the towns—the white city of Tanagra on the
hill with the pretty painted porches of the
houses; Chalcis with its handsome buildings,
66its shady trees, its flowing springs, its spacious
market beside the narrows where the tide runs
fast and the porters are busy unlading the ships
in the harbour; Thebes in summer with its fine
new streets, its verdure, its fruit and flowers, and
the balmy freshness of the perfumed air blowing
over gardens; Thebes in winter, swept by bitter
cutting winds, the streets deep in mud and
whitened by the falling snow; Athens with its
old narrow lanes and mean houses, and now and
then a glimpse between them of the resplendent
Parthenon, like a sun-burst, high up against the
sky. Then again as to the people, what a contrast
between the grave Pausanias, who hardly
allows us to see them except at their devotions,
and the sparkling writer who so often lifts the
veil of the past and lets us catch a glimpse of
the bustling motley crowd and hear the hum of
their voices—the crowd that ceased to bustle
and the voices that fell silent so long ago. We
see the hungry populace at Athens forgetting
their empty stomachs in the joys of the theatre
and pageant; the frail beauties ogling; the
literary pests scribbling lampoons in their garrets
or wriggling in the grasp of the law. On the
highways we behold the travellers walking in
fear of robbers or taking their ease at their inn.
At Oropus we watch the custom-house officers
diving into the baggage of exasperated travellers,
who mutter curses. At Tanagra we shake hands
67with the bluff well-to-do farmer, comfortable,
kindly, and contented, who has a hearty welcome
for the stranger and a bit and a sup for the
beggar who knocks at his door. In the streets
of Thebes we jostle with your ruffling swaggering
blades, your bullies and swashbucklers, who
will knock you down for a word and cut your
throat in a dark lane if you dare to whisper a
word that reflects on the course of justice, or
rather of injustice, in their native city. And
moving amongst these ruffians are tall graceful
women, muffled up to their eyes, their yellow
hair gathered in knots on the top of their heads,
their purple shoes peeping from under their
white dresses, their soft voices contrasting with
the gruff deep bass of the men. Again the
scene shifts. We are no longer among the
streets and gardens of Thebes, but on the beach
at Anthedon with the salt smell of the sea in
our nostrils and the cool sea-breeze fanning our
brow. We see the fisher-folk, with their ruddy
weather-beaten faces and their finger-nails eaten
away by the brine, baiting their hooks among
the sea-weed on the shore, or hammering away
at a new fishing-boat, or ferrying travellers
across the beautiful strait to Euboea.
These pictures of a vanished world are worth
something. They have life, warmth, and colour;
but the colours, we can hardly doubt, are
heightened unduly. The lights are too high,
68the shadows too deep. We cannot believe that
the population of Oropus consisted exclusively
of cut-throats and custom-house officers; that
the farmers of Tanagra were all bluff and
virtuous; that none but good men struggling
nobly with adversity resided at Chalcis; that
no lawsuit at Thebes ever lasted less than thirty
years. The writer, it is plain, has exaggerated
for the sake of literary effect. And he has
a strong leaning to gossip and scandal. He
extenuates the praise of Boeotia in the mouth
of a poet on the ground of a painful episode in
the bard’s private history, and he retails with
evident relish the current tattle as to the characteristic
vices of the various Boeotian towns. On
the whole this lively, superficial, gossipy work,
with its showy slap-dash sketches of life and
scenery, cannot compare in solid worth with the
dry and colourless, but in general minute and
accurate description of Greece which Pausanias
has given us. In the writings of Pausanias we
certainly miss the warmth and animation of the
other, the pictures of contemporary life and
character, the little touches that bring the past
and the distant vividly before us. His book is
too much a mere catalogue of antiquities, the
dry bones of knowledge unquickened by the
breath of imagination. Yet his very defects
have their compensating advantages. If he
lacked imagination he was the less likely to
69yield to that temptation of distorting and discolouring
the facts to which men of bright fancy
are peculiarly exposed, of whom it has been
well said that they are like the angels who veil
their faces with their wings.
Character
of Pausanias.
In truth Pausanias was a man made of
common stuff and cast in a common mould.
His intelligence and abilities seem to have been
little above the average, his opinions not very
different from those of his contemporaries.
|His
political
opinions.|
While he looked back with regret to the great
age of Greek freedom, he appears to have
acquiesced in the Roman dominion as inevitable,
acknowledging the incapacity of the degenerate
Greeks to govern themselves, the general
clemency of the Roman rule, and especially the
wisdom and beneficence of the good emperors
under whom it was his happiness to live. Of
democracy he had no admiration. He thought
the Athenians the only people who ever throve
under it, and on observing that the slaves who
fought and died for Athens were buried with
their masters, he remarks with apparent surprise
that even a democracy can occasionally be just.
With his turn for study and for brooding over
the past, it was natural that he should prefer a
life of privacy to the cares and turmoils of a
public career. Accordingly we find that he
admired the prudence of Isocrates who lived
placidly to old age in the shade and tranquillity
70of retirement, and that he censured implicitly
the imprudence of Demosthenes, whose fiery
genius hurried him through the storm and
sunshine of public life to exile and a violent
death.
Such a preference, implied rather than expressed,
says much for the decay of public spirit
in Greece. Our author himself was conscious
that his lot had fallen on evil days. He speaks
sorrowfully of the olden time when the gods
openly visited the good with honour, and the
bad with their displeasure; when the benefactors
of mankind were raised to the rank of divinities,
and evil-doers were degraded into wild beasts
and stones. “But in the present age,” he adds
mournfully, “when wickedness is growing to
such a height, and spreading over every land
and city, men are changed into gods no more,
save in the hollow rhetoric which flattery addresses
to power; and the wrath of the gods at
the wicked is reserved for a distant future when
they shall have gone hence.” We cannot doubt
that here he glances covertly at the practice of
deifying the Roman emperors, which seems to
have stirred his honest indignation as a mark of
the supple servility and political degeneracy of
the age. Nor was he a stranger to those graver
thoughts on the vaster issues of life and history
which the aspect of Greece in its decline was
fitted to awake. The sight of the great city of
71Megalopolis lying in ruins brings to his mind the
high hopes with which it had been founded,
and that again ushers in a train of melancholy
reflexions on the instability of human affairs.
He thinks how from so many golden cities of
the ancient world—from Nineveh and Babylon,
from Thebes and Mycenae—the glory had
passed away; how nature itself, which seems
so stable, is subject to great mutations; how
transitory, then, is earthly glory, how brief and
frail the life of man!
His ethical
views.
On the passions which move men and make
history he seems to have thought much like
other people. He knew that avarice is the cause
of many crimes, and that love is the source both
of great happiness and of great misery. Yet
he appears to have held that the mischief
wrought by the passion of love outweighs the
good it brings; for after telling how, by washing
in the river Selemnus, men and women were
supposed to forget their love, he adds that if
there is any truth in this story great riches are
less precious to mankind than the water of the
Selemnus. Again, he has a sincere admiration
for the heroic virtues, and a genuine detestation
of baseness and depravity of all sorts. Treason
he stigmatises as the foulest of crimes. He
considers that the bold and disinterested patriot
Thrasybulus, who freed his country and healed
her dissensions, was the best of all the famous
72men of Athens, and that the deed of Leonidas
and his Spartans at Thermopylae was the most
splendid feat of arms in Grecian history. He
praises his Spartan namesake for his courteous
treatment of the captive Coan lady and for
rejecting the base proposal of the wretch who
would have had him mutilate the corpse of the
gallant Mardonius. He speaks with sympathy
of the brave men worthy of a happier fate who
fell on the tyrant Lachares, of those who would
have wrested Piraeus from the Macedonians had
they not been done by their confederates to
death, and of those others whom on the great
day Cimon led to victory by sea and land. He
tells how in the last fight with the Romans,
before the day was lost, the Achaean general
fled, leaving his men to shift for themselves, and
he contrasts his selfish cowardice with the
soldierly devotion of an Athenian cavalry officer
who on the disastrous retreat from Syracuse
brought off his regiment safe, then wheeled
about and, riding back alone, found the death
he sought in the midst of the enemy.
His
religious
opinions.
Belief in
the gods.
In religion as in morals Pausanias seems to
have occupied a position not unlike that of his
contemporaries. That it did not occur to him
to doubt the existence of the gods and heroes
of Greek mythology is clear from the tenour of
his work as well as from many observations
which he lets fall. Thus for example, he tells
73us that to see the gods in bodily shape was
perilous; that Pan possessed, equally with the
greatest of the gods, the power of answering
prayer and requiting the wicked; and that
down to his own time there was preserved at a
city on the Euphrates the very rope, plaited of
vine and ivy branches, with which Dionysus had
spanned the river on his march to India. Even
the criticisms which he sometimes offers on
myths and legends prove that in the act of
rejecting them wholly or in part he does not
dream of questioning the reality of the divine
or heroic personages of whom they were told.
Thus, to give instances, while he examines and
rejects the claims set up on behalf of various
objects to be works of Hephaestus, he admits
the genuineness of one of the objects, thereby
clearly taking for granted the existence of the
smith-god himself. Again, observing an image
of Aphrodite with fetters on her feet he tells
how, according to one tradition, Tyndareus had
put this indignity on the goddess to punish her
for bringing his daughters to shame. “This
explanation,” declares Pausanias with decision,
“I cannot accept for a moment It would have
been too silly to imagine that by making a
cedar-wood doll and dubbing it Aphrodite he
could punish the goddess.” Obviously our
author, if he has small reverence for the image
and none at all for the tradition of its origin,
74cherishes an unfaltering faith in the reality of
the goddess. Again, he denies that Semele
was ever, as Greek tradition would have it,
rescued from hell by Dionysus, and the reason
he gives for his incredulity is that Semele was
the wife of Zeus and therefore could not die.
Yet again, after telling the legend of Eurypylus
and the wonderful chest in which he kept a
portable god, he mentions only to reject the
tradition that Eurypylus received the chest
from Hercules. “Sure am I,” says he, “that
Hercules knew all about the chest, if it really
was such a wonderful chest, and I do not
believe that knowing about it he would ever
have given it away to a comrade in arms.” Once
more, Pausanias cannot bring himself to believe
that Hercules ever carried his anger at a friend’s
daughter so far as to condemn her to remain a
spinster for the rest of her days and to serve
him in that capacity as his priestess. He opines
that while Hercules was still among men,
“punishing other people for presumption and
especially for impiety, it is not likely that he
would have established a temple with a priestess
all for himself, just as if he were a god.”
His
scepticism
as to hell.
There is one side, however, of Greek religion
as to which Pausanias shows himself consistently
sceptical, if not incredulous. He had serious
doubts as to the existence of a subterranean hell.
“It is not easy,” he says, “to believe that gods
75have an underground abode in which the souls
of the dead assemble.” He speaks of the
“supposed subterranean realm” of Pluto, and in
the cave at Taenarum, which was thought to be
one of the mouths of hell, he looked in vain for
any passage leading down to the nether world.
Cerberus in particular, the hound of hell, is
roughly handled by Pausanias, who ruthlessly
strips him of his superfluous heads, reduces him
to a commonplace serpent, and seems to take a
malicious pleasure in enumerating all the places
where the animal was said to have been haled
up by Hercules. But though Pausanias had
his doubts as to hell, he seems to have believed
in the existence of the soul after death; for in
a passage which has been already quoted he
speaks of the punishment that awaits the wicked
in another life. At the same time his belief in
the doctrine was apparently not very firm; at
least he refers to it somewhat hesitatingly in
mentioning the Messenian tradition that the
soul of the dead hero Aristomenes had fought
against his old foes the Lacedaemonians at
Leuctra. “The first people,” he there tells us,
“who asserted that the soul of man is immortal
were the Chaldeans and the Indian magicians;
and some of the Greeks believed them, especially
Plato, the son of Aristo. If everybody accepts
this tenet, there can be no gainsaying the view
that hatred of the Lacedaemonians has rankled
76in the heart of Aristomenes through all the
ages.”
His
attitude to
various
deities.
Amongst the gods Pausanias assigns the
first place to Zeus. He alone is superior to
Destiny, to which all the other gods must submit;
he is the ruler and guide of the Fates, and
knows all that they have in store for man. Of
the Fates themselves Fortune is, in our author’s
opinion, the most powerful; she it is whose
resistless might sweeps all things along at her
will, determining the growth and decay of cities,
the revolutions of nature, and the destiny of
man. Yet Pausanias’s own devotions seem to
have been paid rather to Demeter than to Zeus
or the Fates. He visited Phigalia chiefly for
the sake of the Black Demeter to whom he
sacrificed at the mouth of the cave; he relates
at length the history of her image; and he
describes in unusual detail the sanctuary and
images of Demeter and Proserpine at Lycosura.
Again, he had been initiated into the Eleusinian
mysteries; he loves to trace their diffusion from
Eleusis over the rest of Greece; he speaks of
the Andanian mysteries as second in point of
sanctity to the Eleusinian alone; he tells us
that the Greeks of an earlier age esteemed the
latter as far above all other religious exercises
as the gods were above heroes; and he expresses
his own conviction that there was nothing on
which the blessing of God rested in so full a
77measure as on the rites of Eleusis and the
Olympic games. His religious awe of the
mysteries, silencing his antiquarian garrulity,
forbade him to describe not only the rites but
the sacred precincts in which they were celebrated.
Once more, on Mount Panhellenius in
Aegina he sacrificed to the images of the kindred
deities Damia and Auxesia according to the
ritual observed in sacrificing at Eleusis. Another
deity in whom Pausanias seems to have been
especially interested was Aesculapius. He
examines the legends of the god’s parentage,
discusses his nature, and traces the spread of his
worship from Epidaurus. Along with his belief
in the gods and in the resistless power of Fate
our author apparently cherished a dim faith in
a divine providence which watches over the
affairs of man. In speaking of the exploits of
Theseus in Crete he remarks that “nothing less
than the hand of Providence could reasonably
be supposed to have brought him and his comrades
safe back, guiding him through all the
mazy intricacies of the labyrinth, and leading
him unseen, when his work was done, through
the midst of his enemies.”
His belief
in the
active interference
of
the gods in
human
affairs.
The gods, in the opinion of Pausanias, were
neither cold abstractions nor blessed beings who,
lapped in the joys of heaven, took no thought
for the affairs of earth. They actively interfered
in the course of events, rewarding the virtuous
78and punishing the wicked. They were the
givers of good things to men; and if their
rewards had been more open and manifest in
days of old, the prosperity of the pious Athenians
was a standing proof that even in later times
the gods had not forgotten to recompense their
worshippers. Yet, like most people who lay
themselves out to justify the ways of God to
man, Pausanias was readier to detect the hand
of the deity in the miseries and misfortunes of
his fellow-creatures than in their joys and blessings.
The confidence with which he lays his
finger on the precise misdeed which drew down
on a malefactor the wrath of a justly offended
god implies an astonishing familiarity with the
counsels of the Almighty. He knew that the
Persians were defeated at Marathon because
they had angered Nemesis by bringing, in the
pride of their hearts, a block of marble which
they proposed to set up as a trophy of their
expected victory; that the destruction of Sparta
and Helice by earthquakes was due to the wrath
of Poseidon at the violation of his sanctuaries;
that the ruin and death of Mithridates had
been brought to pass by Apollo, whose sacred
island had been sacked by the king’s general;
that Sulla’s miserable end was a direct consequence
of his guilt in tearing Aristion from the
sanctuary of Athena; and that the wrath of the
Eleusinian goddesses abode on the Megarians
79for ever because they had encroached on the
sacred land and murdered a herald who warned
them to desist. Again, he shrewdly suspects
that the long misfortunes of the Messenians
flowed directly from the anger of the Dioscuri
at the impious presumption of two Messenian
youths; and he surmises that gods and heroes
combined to wreak their displeasure on the
devoted head of Cleomenes, who had tampered
with the Delphic oracle, ravaged the sacred
Eleusinian land, and burned the grove of the
hero Argus. The Delphic Apollo was quick
and powerful, according to Pausanias, to defend
his honour and to visit with vengeance the
sacrilegious persons who dared to assail his
sanctuary or rifle his treasures. King Archidamus,
who had fingered the sacred moneys,
fell in battle in a foreign land and his corpse
weltered unburied; the Phlegyans, who made
a raid on Delphi, perished by thunderbolts and
earthquakes; and it was in all the majesty of
thunder, lightning, and earthquake that at a
later time the god stood forth to repel the Gauls.
Amongst the punishments with which the gods
were thought to visit unwarranted intrusions into
their sanctuaries, blindness and madness had a
special place. King Aepytus, on forcing his
way into the shrine of Poseidon at Mantinea,
which none might enter, was instantly struck
blind and died soon afterwards; some Persian
80soldiers who ventured into the sanctuary of the
Cabiri near Thebes became crazed and in that
state put an end to themselves; and it was
believed that if any defiled or impious person
entered the sanctuary of the Eumenides at
Cerynea he would go mad on the spot.
His belief
in oracles.
Believing in the gods, Pausanias naturally
believed in their official utterances, the oracles.
The Delphic oracle, he thinks, foretold the battle
of Leuctra and various episodes in the Messenian
wars; and he appeals to one of its answers as
conclusive evidence that the mother of Aesculapius
was Coronis. He relates how the accidental
exposure of the bones of Orpheus was
followed by the destruction of the city of
Libethra in accordance with a prediction of
Dionysus in Thrace, and he narrates the fatal
disasters which Epaminondas, Hannibal, and
the Athenians incurred by misunderstanding
oracular answers sent them from Delphi, Ammon,
and Dodona. The history of Macedonia,
its rise and its fall, had been predicted by the
Sibyl, if we may believe Pausanias, who quotes
her prophecy; and he assures us that the
inroad of the Gauls into Asia had been foretold
by Phaennis a generation before the event took
place. He had himself consulted the oracle of
Trophonius, and has left us a curious account
of the ceremonies observed by enquirers at the
shrine. In his day, he informs us, the most
81infallible oracle was that of Amphilochus at
Mallus in Cilicia.
His
criticism of
myths.
Yet while Pausanias accepted on the whole
the religion of his country, he was by no means
blind to the discrepancies and improbabilities
of many Greek myths and legends, and he
speaks somewhat disdainfully of the unquestioning
faith of the multitude in the stories they
had heard from childhood. “Falsehood in
general,” he says, “passes current among the
multitude because they are ignorant of history
and believe all that they have heard from
childhood in choirs and tragedies.” And again
he observes that “it is not easy to persuade
the vulgar to change their opinions.” From
the former of these passages it appears that
Pausanias was little disposed to place implicit
faith in the utterances of the poets on matters
of tradition. Elsewhere he intimates his doubts
still more plainly. Speaking of the hydra,
which he maintains had not more than one
head, he says that the poet Pisander multiplied
the creature’s heads “to make the monster
more terrific, and to add to the dignity of his
own verses.” Again, he mentions that the
poets have declared certain objects of art to
be works of Hephaestus, and that obsequious
public opinion has chimed in with them, but
he for his part rejects all such relics as spurious
save one. The only poet to whose authority
82he inclined to bow was Homer, whose testimony
he often appeals to with respect. He
held that many old stories were true enough
in their origin, but had fallen into discredit
by reason of the distortions and exaggerations
to which they had been subjected by
the narrators. The particular story which
suggests this remark is the legend that Lycaon
had been turned into a wolf on sacrificing a
babe to Lycaean Zeus. Pausanias believes the
legend, but he rejects as incredible the assertion
that at every subsequent sacrifice to Zeus
on Mount Lycaeus a man had been turned
into a wolf, and he does not stick to brand as
humbugs the persons who gave out that the
Arcadian boxer Damarchus had been so transformed.
“Lovers of the marvellous,” he observes,
“are too prone to heighten the marvels
they hear tell of by adding touches of their
own; and thus they debase truth by alloying
it with fiction.”
His disbelief
of
certain
myths.
The attitude of incredulity which Pausanias
maintained towards many of the current legends
is declared by him in the most unequivocal
manner. He speaks of “the many falsehoods
believed by the Greeks,” and reminds us that
though he is bound to record Greek stories he
is not bound to believe them, and that as a
matter of fact he does not believe them all.
The myths of the transformations of gods and
83men into animals and plants seem especially
to have stuck in his throat. He does not
believe that Zeus changed himself into a cuckoo
to win the love of Hera, and as to the story of
the transformation of Cycnus into a swan, he
says roundly: “That a man should be turned
into a bird is to me incredible.” Nor will he
hear of Narcissus’s love for his own reflexion
in the glassy pool and his wondrous change
into the flower that bore his name. “It is
sheer folly,” he remarks, “to suppose that a
person who has reached the age of falling in
love should be unable to distinguish between a
man and his reflexion,” and as for the flower
in question he has chapter and verse for it to
prove that it grew before Narcissus was born.
The companion story of the transformation of
Hyacinth into the flower he does not treat quite
so cavalierly. “It may not be literally true,”
he tells us, “but let it pass.” Further, he cannot
believe that the beasts followed Orpheus
as he sang, and that the minstrel journeyed
down to hell to win back his lost Eurydice.
Again, while he believes in giants, he rejects
as a silly story the notion that they had serpents
instead of feet, and he supports his
scepticism by referring to the corpse of one
of these monstrous beings which had been
found in the bed of the river Orontes enclosed
in a coffin eleven ells long. Often,
84without formally refusing his assent to some
tale of wonder, he quietly hints his incredulity
by indicating that he leaves his readers to
believe it or not as they feel inclined. Thus
after telling how pigs thrown into the halls of
Demeter at Potniae were supposed to re-appear
next year at Dodona, he adds, almost sarcastically:
“The tale may possibly find credence
with some people.” Other marvels which he
dismisses with a sneer are the sowing of the
dragon’s teeth by Cadmus and the springing
up of armed men; the sprouting of Hercules’s
club into a tree when he set it on the ground;
the wonderful vision of Lynceus who could see
through the trunk of an oak-tree; and the
story that at a certain rock in Megara the sad
Demeter stood and called back her daughter
from the darkling road down which she had
vanished.
His rationalistic
interpretation
of some
myths.
It is not always, however, that Pausanias
meets seemingly miraculous stories with a blank
negation. He had too much good sense to do
that. He knew that our experience does not
exhaust the possibilities of nature, and he endeavoured
accordingly to trim the balance of
his judgment between hasty credulity on the
one side and rash disbelief on the other. Thus
after pointing out that, if the descriptions of
the strange creatures of distant lands are false
in some particulars, they are true or at least
85not improbable in others, he concludes: “So
careful should we be to avoid hasty judgments
on the one hand, and incredulity in matters
of rare occurrence on the other.” In his
endeavour to winnow the true from the false,
to disentangle the ravelled skein of tradition,
he has often recourse to that convenient and
flexible instrument—rationalistic or allegorical
interpretation. We have seen with what ease
he thus disencumbered himself of Cerberus’s
superfluous heads and reduced that animal
from a very extraordinary dog to a very
ordinary serpent. The miraculous story of the
death of Actaeon, rent in pieces by his hounds
at the instigation of Artemis, gives him no
trouble: it was a simple case of hydrophobia.
Medusa was a beautiful African queen who met
Perseus at the head of her troops. Titan was
an early astronomer who resided near Sicyon
and passed for a brother of the sun for no other
reason than that he made observations on that
luminary. The fable that Procne and Philomela
were turned into a nightingale and a
swallow arose merely from a comparison of
their mournful cries to the plaintive notes of
these birds. In one passage, indeed, under the
fierce light of criticism the gods themselves
seem on the point of melting away like mist
before the sun, leaving behind them nothing
but the clear hard face of nature, over which
86for a while the gorgeous pageantry of their
shifting iridescent shapes had floated in a
golden haze. The passage occurs in the
description of Aegium, where our author fell
in with a Phoenician of Sidon with whom he
discussed the philosophic basis of the belief in
Aesculapius, coming to the conclusion that the
god was nothing but the air and his father
Apollo nothing but the sun. Had Pausanias
followed up this line of thought he might, like
Schiller, have seen as in a vision the bright
procession of the gods winding up the long
slope of Olympus, sometimes pausing to look
back sadly at a world where they were needed
no more. But the whole tenour of his work
goes to show that, if here he had a glimpse of
a higher truth, it was only a flash-light that
went out leaving him in darkness.
His change
of view as
to myths.
In a later passage he makes a confession
of his faith in matters of mythology. After
telling the barbarous tale how the cannibal
Cronus, intending to devour his infant son
Poseidon, had been cozened by Rhea into
swallowing a foal, he goes on: “When I
began this work I used to look on these
Greek stories as little better than foolishness;
but now that I have got as far as
Arcadia my opinion about them is this: I
believe that the Greeks who were accounted
wise spoke of old in riddles, and not straight
87out; and, accordingly, I conjecture that this
story about Cronus is a bit of Greek philosophy.
In matters of religion I will follow
tradition.” This seems to be practically a recantation
of earlier, perhaps youthful scepticism.
The tales which he had once ridiculed as
absurd he now finds to be full of deep, if
hidden, wisdom. Meditation and perhaps still
more the creeping paralysis of age, which brings
so many men to a dull acquiescence in beliefs
and practices which they had spurned in youth,
appear to have wrought a mental revolution
in Pausanias. The scoffer had become devout.
His treatment
of
discrepant
traditions.
Yet to a pious believer the discrepancy
between Greek traditions must have been a
sore stumbling-block. Pausanias tripped over
it again and again. “Greek traditions,” says
he, “are generally discrepant.” “The legends
of the Greeks differ from each other on most
points, especially in the genealogies.” “The
old legends, being unencumbered by genealogies,
left free scope for fiction, especially
in the pedigrees of heroes.” “Most things in
Greece are subjects of dispute.” In face of
such differences Pausanias, when he does not
content himself with simply enumerating the
various traditions, chooses to follow either the
most generally received version or the one
which on any ground appears to him the
most probable. With his sober unimaginative
88temperament and bias to rationalism, it was
natural that between conflicting versions of the
same tradition he should choose the one which
clashed least with experience. Thus he relates
the two stories told of the way in which the
people of Tanagra acquired the Triton whose
stuffed carcase was the glory of the town.
One story ran that the creature had been slain
by Dionysus himself in single combat; according
to the other, a common mortal had found
the Triton lying drunk on the beach and had
chopped off his head with an axe. The latter
version of the tale is described by Pausanias as
“less dignified but more probable.” Tritons,
it is true, whether drunk or sober, are not
common objects of the sea-shore; but there
was no need to heighten the marvel by lugging
in Dionysus. Again, the death of Aristodemus,
the ancestor of the two royal houses of Sparta,
was variously narrated. “Those who wish to
invest him with a halo of glory,” writes Pausanias,
“say that he was shot by Apollo”; but
the truer story was that he had been knocked
on the head by the children of Pylades. Again,
he regards with suspicion the claims of men
and women to be the husbands and wives,
the sons and daughters of gods and goddesses.
“The Moon, they say, loved Endymion, and he
had fifty daughters by the goddess. Others,
with more probability, say that Endymion
89married a wife.” “Cadmus made a distinguished
marriage if he really married, as
the Greeks say he did, a daughter of Aphrodite
and Ares.” Then as to reputed sons of
gods. “That Corinthus was a son of Zeus has
never yet, so far as I know, been seriously
asserted by anybody except by a majority of
the Corinthians themselves.” Oenomaus was a
son of Alexion, “though the poets have given
out that he was a son of Ares.” The father
of Augeas was Eleus, “though those who
magnify his history give the name of Eleus a
twist, and affirm that Augeas was a son of the
sun.” The crafty Autolycus “was reputed to
be a son of Hermes, though in truth his father
was Daedalion.” The story that Orpheus had
the Muse Calliope for his mother is stigmatised
by our author as a falsehood. Rivers that
appeared in the character of fathers were also
viewed by Pausanias with distrust. He held
that the father of Eteocles was Andreus, not
the river Cephisus; and he believed that the
father of Plataea was not the river Asopus but
a king of the same name. Other instances
of his hesitation to accept legends of divine
parentage might be cited.
His
application
of historical
methods to
Greek
traditions.
But in his criticism of Greek legends Pausanias
did not confine himself to the simple
test of experience. He did not merely ask
whether a story agreed more or less with the
90laws of nature, and accept or reject it accordingly.
In historical enquiries the application
of such a criterion obviously cannot carry the
enquirer beyond the first step. Pausanias went
much further. He introduced considerations
drawn from general probability, from chronology,
from the monuments, from a comparison
with other traditions, from the relative weight
to be attached to the authorities by which each
version of a legend was supported. In fact, far
from being hide-bound in the trammels of
tradition, he moved freely among the materials
at his disposal, accepting this and rejecting that
in obedience to the dictates of a reasonable and
fairly enlightened criticism. Thus, he rejects
the Sophoclean version of the death of Oedipus
because it conflicts with the Homeric. He
will not allow that a bronze image of Athena
at Amphissa can have formed part of the
Trojan spoils, and that a bronze image of
Poseidon at Pheneus can have been dedicated
by Ulysses, because at the time of the Trojan
war and in the lifetime of Ulysses the art of
casting in bronze had not yet been invented.
He refuses to believe that the grave of Dejanira
was at Argos, because she was known to have
died at Trachis and her grave to be not far from
Heraclea. Among the several places in Greece
that set up claims to be the Oechalia of Homer,
our author decides in favour of Carnasium in
91Messenia, because the bones of Eurytus were
there. The tradition that the mysteries at
Celeae had been founded by a man of Eleusis
named Dysaules, who had been driven into exile
after a battle between the Eleusinians and
Athenians, is rejected by Pausanias on the
grounds that no such battle took place and that
no such person is mentioned by Homer. The
legend that Daedalus joined Aristaeus in colonising
Sardinia is set aside by him for the reason
that Daedalus lived several generations after
Aristaeus, and therefore could not possibly have
shared with him in a colony or in anything else.
Similarly he argues on chronological grounds
against the traditions that Achilles had been
a suitor of Helen; that Timalcus went to
Aphidna with the Dioscuri; and that the
Telamon and Chalcodon who marched with
Hercules against Elis were the well-known
Telamon of Aegina and Chalcodon of Euboea.
The Spartan tradition as to the image of
Brauronian Artemis is preferred by Pausanias
to the Athenian, and that for a variety of
reasons which he sets forth in detail.
Thus Pausanias criticised Greek myths and
legends according to his lights, and if his lights
did not shine very brilliantly the fault was not
his.
His taste in art.
Of his taste in painting and sculpture we
are scarcely able to judge, partly because he is
92chary of his praise, generally confining himself
to a simple mention or description of the work
before him, partly because so few of the works
described by him have survived to our time.
|His taste in
painting.| The paintings are all gone. A little blue
pigment on a ruined wall at Delphi is all that
remains of those frescoes of Polygnotus which
excited the admiration of antiquity. That
Pausanias himself admired them is clear, both
from the length of his description and from the
words with which he brings it to a close: “So
varied and beautiful is the painting of the
Thasian artist.” Elsewhere he seems to have
lost no opportunity of describing extant pictures
of Polygnotus, though he does not always mention
his name. A painting of Drunkenness by
Pausias apparently struck Pausanias especially,
for he tells us that “in the picture you can see
the crystal goblet and the woman’s face through
it.” But the only pictures, besides those of
Polygnotus at Delphi, on which he deigns to
bestow a dry word of commendation are a
couple of paintings on tombstones, one of them
by Nicias, as to whom Pausanias tells us elsewhere
that he had been the greatest painter of
animals of his time.
His taste in
sculpture.
In sculpture the taste of Pausanias was
apparently austere. He decidedly preferred the
earlier to the later art. Of the archaic works
attributed to Daedalus he says that they “are
93somewhat uncouth to the eye, but there is a
touch of the divine in them for all that.” He
praises Bupalus, an artist of the sixth century
B.C., as “a clever architect and sculptor.” But
on the whole it was for the sculptors of the
fifth century B.C. that he chiefly reserved his
scanty praise, and amongst them he seemingly
preferred the masters of the older manner who
immediately preceded Phidias. |Predecessors
of Phidias.| Thus, with regard
to Pythagoras of Rhegium, who flourished
about 480 B.C., he says that he was “a good
sculptor, if ever there was one,” and in speaking
of the boxer Euthymus he remarks that “his
statue is by Pythagoras, and most well worth
seeing it is.” Of Onatas, who was at work
about 467 B.C., he expresses a high opinion:
“I am inclined to regard Onatas, though he
belongs to the Aeginetan school of sculpture,
as second to none of the successors of Daedalus
and the Attic school.” This criticism indicates
that Pausanias preferred in general the Attic
school of sculpture to the Aeginetan, though he
considered one master of the latter school as
the peer of the greatest Attic sculptors. At
Pergamus there was a bronze image of Apollo
by this same Onatas which Pausanias describes
as “one of the greatest marvels both for size
and workmanship.” It is a proof of the independence
of Pausanias’s judgment in art that
this early sculptor, whom he ranked with
94|Phidias| Phidias and Praxiteles, is not even mentioned
by any other ancient writer except in a single
epigram of the Anthology. Another old master
of the fifth century whose statues Pausanias
often notices is Calamis; on one of them he
bestows a word of commendation. A statue
by this artist was much admired by Lucian.
The great sculptor Myron, a contemporary of
Phidias, seems also to have found favour in the
eyes of Pausanias, for he mentions that the
image of Dionysus on Mount Helicon was the
finest of all the artist’s works, next to the
statue of Erechtheus at Athens. That Pausanias
appreciated the greatness of Phidias is
clear from the way in which he speaks of him
and from the detail in which he describes the
sculptor’s two most famous works, the image of
the Virgin Athena at Athens and the image of
Zeus at Olympia. Of the latter he observes
that the mere measurements of the image could
convey no idea of the impression which the
image itself made on the beholder. Yet he did
not consider it the sculptor’s masterpiece, for as
to the image of the Lemnian Athena at Athens
he remarks that it is “the best worth seeing of
all the works of Phidias.” The preference thus
given to this comparatively obscure statue over
the image of Zeus which the ancient world
agreed in extolling as little less than divine is
another proof of the independence of Pausanias’s
95judgment in artistic matters; and that his taste
here was good is attested by the very high
place which his contemporary Lucian, one of
the best critics of antiquity, assigns to the same
statue. Of Alcamenes our author observes that
as a sculptor he was second only to his contemporary
Phidias, and with regard to the statue
of Aphrodite in the Gardens by this artist he
says that “few things at Athens are so well
worth seeing as this.” Here, again, our author’s
judgment is confirmed by that of Lucian, who
describes this image as the most beautiful work
of Alcamenes, and draws from it not a few
traits for his imaginary statue of ideal beauty
which was to combine all the most perfect
features of the most celebrated statues. Another
sculptor whose style seems to have pleased
Pausanias was Naucydes, a brother of the
famous Polyclitus, who worked at the end of
the fifth or at the beginning of the fourth
century B.C. A bronze image of Athena
by Hypatodorus at Aliphera is declared by
Pausanias to be worth seeing both for its size
and its workmanship; but the date of this
sculptor is somewhat uncertain. Strongylion,
whom Pausanias describes as unrivalled in his
representations of oxen and horses, seems to
have flourished toward the end of the fifth
century B.C. Among the sculptors of the following
century Pausanias praises Cephisodotus
96|Sculptors
of the
fourth
century B.C.|
for the conception of his statue representing
the infant Wealth in the arms of Peace,
and the sculptors Xenophon and Callistratus for
a similar allegorical work representing Wealth
in the arms of Fortune. Further, he commends
some of the sculptures of Damophon
at Messene, [3] and he has a few words of approbation
for several works of Praxiteles, but not
one for any work of the other two great masters
of the fourth century, Scopas [4] and Lysippus,
though he mentions many statues by them. A
critic of a taste so severe that he could pass
by the works of Scopas and the Hermes of
Praxiteles without uttering a syllable of admiration
was not likely to take much pleasure in
the productions of the decadence. Pausanias
notices few and praises none of the successors
of Praxiteles. Of the colossal image of
Olympian Zeus at Athens, which must have
been executed in his own lifetime, he says
condescendingly that it was good for its size.
It may be noted as significant of Pausanias’s
interest in the older sculpture that the only
97artists with whose styles he shows himself so
familiar as to recognise them at sight are
Calamis, Canachus, Endoeus, and Laphaes, of
whom Calamis and Canachus flourished in the
early part of the fifth century B.C., and Endoeus
in the last part of the sixth century B.C. The
date of Laphaes is unknown, but as the two
images by this artist were both made of wood
and are expressly declared by Pausanias to be
ancient, we can hardly suppose that the sculptor
flourished later than the sixth century B.C.
His taste
in architecture.
Of Pausanias’s taste in architecture we are
much better able to judge, for many of the
buildings described by him exist, and by a
most fortunate coincidence amongst them are
some of which he expressed his admiration in
unusually strong language. |Walls of
Tiryns.| To begin with the
relics of the prehistoric age, the walls of Tiryns
and the beehive tomb of Orchomenus, which he
calls the Treasury of Minyas, raised his wonder
to such a pitch that he compares them to the
Egyptian pyramids and animadverts on the
perversity of the Greeks, who admired and
described only the marvels they saw abroad,
while they entirely neglected the marvels no
less great which they had at home. The walls
of Tiryns he describes with amazement as
“made of unwrought stones, each stone so large
that a pair of mules could not even stir the
smallest of them.” No modern reader who has
98|Beehive
tomb at
Orchomenus.|
seen the walls of Tiryns as they still stand,
built of enormous stones and resembling a work
of giants rather than of men, will be likely to
regard Pausanias’s admiration of them as misplaced,
whatever may be thought of the comparison
of them to the pyramids. Amongst
the prehistoric remains of Greece they are
certainly unmatched. The walls of Mycenae
and of the great prehistoric fortress of Gla or
Goulas in Boeotia surpass them, indeed, in
extent, but fall far short of them in the size of
the blocks of which they are composed. As
to the beehive tomb at Orchomenus, of which
Pausanias says that there was no greater marvel
either in Greece or elsewhere, it is now sadly
ruinous, but we can judge of its original effect
by the great beehive tomb at Mycenae known
as the Treasury of Atreus, which agrees with
the tomb at Orchomenus very closely in
dimensions and exists almost intact. To stand
within the great circular chamber and look up
at the domed roof, with its rings of regularly
hewn stones diminishing one above the other
till they are lost in the darkness overhead, is an
impressive experience. Those who have enjoyed
it will be disposed to think that Pausanias was
right in regarding the similar edifice at Orchomenus
as a very wonderful structure.
The
Propylaea.
To come down to buildings of the historical
age, Pausanias admired the Propylaea or grand
99|Theatre at
Epidaurus.|
portal of the Acropolis at Athens, which “for
the beauty and size of the blocks,” he says,
“has never yet been matched.” It is probably
not too much to say that even in its ruins this
magnificent portal is still the highest triumph
of the mason’s craft. The exquisite fitting of
the massive cleanly-cut blocks of white marble
is a pleasure to behold. Again, the sight of
the theatre in the sanctuary of Aesculapius at
Epidaurus moves the sober Pausanias to an
extraordinary, almost unparalleled burst of
admiration. “In the Epidaurian sanctuary,”
he says, “there is a theatre which in my
opinion is most especially worth seeing. It is
true that in size the theatre at Megalopolis in
Arcadia surpasses it, and that in splendour the
Roman theatres far transcend all the theatres
in the world; but for symmetry and beauty
what architect could vie with Polyclitus? For
it was Polyclitus who made this theatre.” Here
again modern taste confirms the judgment of
Pausanias. Neither the Dionysiac theatre at
Athens, nor the great theatre at Megalopolis,
nor the well-preserved theatre at Delphi, nor
any other existing Greek theatre, so far at least
as my experience goes, can vie for a moment
in beauty and symmetry with the exquisite
theatre at Epidaurus.
Temples at
Bassae and
Tegea.
Again, in regard to the temple of Apollo at
Bassae our author says that “of all the temples
100in Peloponnese, next to the one at Tegea, this
may be placed first for the beauty of the stone
and the symmetry of its proportions,” and as
to the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, to
which he here refers, he says elsewhere, “The
present temple far surpasses all other temples
in Peloponnese both in size and style.” So far
as the size of the temple at Tegea goes,
Pausanias is wrong. The temple of Zeus at
Olympia was nearly twice as large. But in
regard to style modern taste merely echoes the
opinion of Pausanias. The scanty remains of
the temple at Tegea are now mostly buried
underground, but the admirable design and
workmanship of the architectural fragments, and
the beauty of the shattered sculptures, justify
the praise which Pausanias bestows on it as
the finest temple in Peloponnese in respect of
artistic style. No person of taste but will set
the pathetic force and beauty of the two
battered heads from this temple above all the
coarse vigour of the Phigalian frieze and the
ungraceful, almost repulsive hardness of the
groups from the gables of the Olympian temple.
And that in architectural style the temple at
Bassae came next to the one at Tegea is an
opinion that will hardly be disputed by any one
who has seen the beautiful temple at Bassae
with its long rows of grey columns standing
solitary among the barren mountains. That
101Pausanias was right in preferring it to the
temple of Zeus at Olympia both for the beauty
of the stone and the symmetry of its proportions
is hardly open to question. The temple of
Zeus must have been imposing from its size, but
its proportions, so far as we can judge from the
ruins, do not strike an observer as especially
harmonious; and as to the materials, the rough
conglomerate of Olympia cannot be compared
for beauty with the fine hard limestone of
Bassae.
Walls of
Messene.
Further, Pausanias describes the walls of
Messene with their towers and battlements, and
declares them to be stronger than the finest fortifications
he had seen elsewhere. The remains
of these superb fortifications bear him out.
For the scale on which they are planned and
for the solidity and perfection of the masonry
they are without a rival in Greece. In other
places, as at Asea in Arcadia, at Aegosthena
in Megaris, and at Lilaea and Drymaea in
Phocis, circuits of walls with their flanking
towers exist in better preservation, but none of
them can vie in style and splendour with the
fortifications of Messene. Here again we must
pronounce unhesitatingly that so far as our
knowledge goes Pausanias was in the right.
Music Halls
at Athens
and Patrae.
To come down to buildings of a later age,
Pausanias tells us that the Music Hall at Patrae
was the grandest in Greece except the one
102built by Herodes Atticus at Athens, which
excelled it both in size and style. Here we
are in the fortunate position of being able to
compare for ourselves the two buildings which
Pausanias ranks together as the finest of their
kind in Greece, for both of them exist in comparatively
good preservation to the present day.
That the Music Hall of Herodes Atticus excels
in size the one at Patrae, as Pausanias says it
did, is obvious at a glance. The former is in
fact a spacious theatre, the latter is a tiny one.
But both, as appears from the remains, were
originally cased with marble and probably
presented a splendid appearance. The lions’
paws of white marble which adorn the seats
in the Music Hall at Patrae, together with the
mosaic pavement of black and white in the adjoining
chamber, enable us to form some slight
idea of the elegance of those appointments
which excited the admiration of Pausanias.
Stadium
at Athens.
Lastly, our author observes that the stadium
at Athens, built of white marble by Herodes
Atticus, was “wonderful to see, though not so
impressive to hear of,” and that the greater
part of the Pentelic quarries had been exhausted
in its construction. The latter statement is, of
course, an exaggeration. Mount Pentelicus is
made of white marble, and there is a good deal
of it left to this day, though the great white
blotches on its sides, visible even from the coast
103of Epidaurus, tell plainly where the quarrymen
have been at work. But we may easily believe
Pausanias that the stadium was a wonderful
sight when tiers of white marble benches,
glistening in the strong sunshine, rose steeply
above each other all along both sides of the
valley. For a valley it is still, and a valley
lined with white marble it must have been in
the days of Pausanias. Those who have seen
the stadium since it was partially refitted with
white marble benches for the games of 1896
can better picture to themselves what its aspect
must have been when the benches were complete.
Before the time of Herodes Atticus the spectators
may have sat either on the earthen slopes, as at
Olympia, or on benches of common stone, as at
Epidaurus and Delphi.
On the whole, then, so far as we can judge
from the existing monuments and the testimony
of ancient writers, especially of Lucian, the
artistic taste of Pausanias was sound and good,
if somewhat austere.
Intrinsic
evidence of
Pausanias’s
truthfulness.
The manner in which he has described the
monuments is plain and appropriate, entirely free
from those vague rhetorical flourishes, literary
graces, and affected prettinesses with which, for
example, Philostratus tricks out his descriptions
of pictures, and which have consequently left it
a matter of dispute to this day whether the
pictures he describes existed anywhere but in
104his own imagination. No one is ever likely
seriously to enquire whether the temples and
theatres, the statues and paintings described by
Pausanias ever existed or not. His descriptions
carry the imprint of reality on them to every
mind that is capable of distinguishing between
the true and the false; and even if they did
not, their truthfulness would still be vouched for
by their conformity with the remains of the
monuments themselves. Proof of this confirmity
might be adduced in great abundance.
Here, however, we are concerned with that
internal evidence of the author’s honesty and
candour which the writings themselves supply.
Evidence of this sort can never, indeed, amount
to demonstration. Candour and honesty are
not qualities that can be brought to the test
of the senses; they cannot be weighed in a
balance or seen under a microscope. A man
who is neither candid nor honest himself will
probably never sincerely believe in the existence
of these qualities in others, and there is no
means of convincing him. It is always open to
him to find a sinister motive for the simplest
act, a covert meaning under the plainest words.
In the case of Pausanias the internal evidence
of good faith seems amply sufficient to convince
a fair-minded enquirer. It consists in the
whole cast and tenour of his writings; in the
naturalness and credibility of all that he affirms
105of his own knowledge, with the exception of
two or three cases in which he seems to have
been duped by mercenary or priestly trickery;
it consists in the plainness and directness of the
descriptions; in their freedom from any tinge
of rhetoric or sophistry; in the modesty with
which the author generally keeps himself in
the background; and finally in occasional confessions
of ignorance which only malignity could
interpret as artifices resorted to for the purpose
of supporting an assumed air of ingenuous
simplicity. This last feature of the work it
is desirable to illustrate by instances. The
others, pervading as they do the whole book,
hardly admit of exemplification.
His confessions
of
ignorance.
Repeatedly, then, Pausanias owns that he
had not been present at certain festivals, and
consequently had not seen certain images which
were only exhibited on these occasions. Thus
with regard to the very curious image of Eurynome,
which would have especially interested
him as an antiquary, he tells us that the
sanctuary in which it stood was opened only
on one day in the year, and that as he did not
happen to arrive on that day he had not seen
the image, and therefore could only describe it
from hearsay. Similarly he says that he cannot
describe the image of Artemis at Hyampolis
because it was the custom to open the sanctuary
only twice a year. He tells at second hand of
106a festival of Dionysus at Elis, in which empty
kettles were said to be found miraculously filled
with wine; but he informs us that he was not
himself at Elis at the time of the festival, and
from expressions which he uses in regard to
the marvel we may infer that he had his doubts
about it. No one presumably will dispute
these statements of Pausanias and maintain
that he arrived in time for those festivals and
saw those images although he assures us that
he did not. We are bound, therefore, in fairness
to believe him when he tells us with regard
to the sanctuary of Mother Dindymene at
Thebes that “it is the custom to open the
sanctuary on a single day each year, not
more. I was fortunate enough to arrive on
that very day, and I saw the image.” As
other instances of his candour may be cited his
acknowledgment that he had not witnessed the
ceremonies performed at the tombs of Eteocles
and Polynices at Thebes, nor beheld the secret
object revered in the worship of Demeter at
Hermion; that he could describe the sanctuary
of Poseidon at Mantinea only from hearsay;
that he had neither seen the walls of Babylon
and Susa nor conversed with any one who
had; that he never saw Antinous in life, though
he had seen statues and paintings of him; and
that he had not heard the trout sing like thrushes
in the river Aroanius, though he tarried by the
107river until sunset, when they were said to sing
loudest. These are the confessions of an
honest man, inclined perhaps to credulity, but
yet who will not deceive others by professing
to have seen sights, whether marvellous or
otherwise, which he has not seen. Again, when
he quotes a book at second hand he is careful
to tell us so. Thus, after citing some lines
from the Atthis of Hegesinus, he goes on:
“This poem of Hegesinus I have not read: it
was lost before my time; but the verses are
quoted as evidence by Callippus of Corinth in
his history of Orchomenus, and I have profited
by his information to do the same.” Again,
after quoting a couple of verses of an Orchomenian
poet Chersias, he adds. “The poetry
of Chersias is now lost, but these verses also
are quoted by Callippus in the same work of
his on Orchomenus.” These statements, like
the foregoing, will hardly be disputed even by
the most sceptical. No one will be likely to
insist that Pausanias read books which he tells
us he did not. Therefore in fairness we are
bound to believe him when he says that he did
read certain other works, such as the memoirs
of some obscure historians, a treatise on rhetoric
purporting to be by Pittheus, the epics Eoeae
and Naupactia, a poem attributed to Linus,
verses of Erato, a poem on soothsaying which
passed under the name of Hesiod, and the
108oracles of Euclus, Musaeus, and Bacis. If we
take the word of Pausanias for what he tells us
he did not see and did not read, we must take
it also for what he tells us he did see and did
read. At least if we are to accept as true all
those statements of an author which tell against
himself and to reject as false all those which
tell in his favour, there is an end of even the
pretence of fair and rational criticism.
Literary
style of
Pausanias.
The literary style of Pausanias is no exception
to the rule that the style of a writer
reflects the character of the man. Pausanias
was neither a great man nor a great writer.
He was an honest, laborious, plodding man of
plain good sense, without either genius or
imagination, and his style is a faithful mirror
of his character. It is plain and unadorned,
yet heavy and laboured, as if the writer had
had to cast about for the proper words and
then fit them painfully together like the pieces
in a Chinese puzzle. There is a sense of strain
and effort about 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. It is a loose,
clumsy, ill-jointed, ill-compacted, rickety, ramshackle
109style, without ease or grace or elegance
of any sort. Yet Pausanias had studied good
models. He knew Thucydides and his writings
abound with echoes of Herodotus. But a style
that has less of the unruffled flow, the limpid
clearness, the exquisite grace, the sweet simplicity
of the Herodotean prose it might be
hard to discover. The sound of the one is like
the chiming of a silver bell; that of the other
like the creaking of a corn-crake. With all its
defects, however, the style of Pausanias is not
careless and slovenly. The author bestrides
his high horse; he bobs up and down and
clumps about on it with great solemnity; it is
not his fault if his Pegasus is a wooden hobby-horse
instead of a winged charger.
He perhaps
modelled
his style on
that of
Hegesias.
This union of seemingly opposite faults, this
plainness without simplicity, this elaboration
without richness, may perhaps be best explained
by Boeckh’s hypothesis, that he modelled his
style on that of his countryman Hegesias of
Magnesia, a leader of the Asiatic school of
rhetoric, who, aping the unadorned simplicity of
Lysias’s manner, fell into an abrupt and jerky,
yet affected and mincing style, laboriously
chopping and dislocating his sentences so that
they never ran smooth, never by any chance
slid into a rounded period with an easy cadence.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus declares peevishly
that in all the voluminous works of Hegesias
110there was not a single well-written page, and
that the man must have gone wrong not from
stupidity but of set purpose and malice prepense,
otherwise he could not have helped
writing a good sentence now and then by
accident. Frigid conceits and a puerile play
upon words were mistaken by this perverse
writer for literary beauties, and in the effort to
stud his pages with these false jewels he sacrificed
both pathos and truth. In this respect,
indeed, Pausanias happily did not follow the
bad example of his predecessor. His writings
are entirely free from paltry conceits and verbal
quibbles. The thought is always manly and
direct, however tortuous may be the sentence
in which he seeks to express it. If he imitated
Hegesias, it was apparently in the arrangement
of the words and sentences alone.
Whatever may be thought of this theory,
the attention which Pausanias obviously bestowed
on literary style is in itself wholly laudable.
Such attention is a simple duty which
every author owes to his readers. Pausanias
cannot be blamed for trying to write well; the
pity is that with all his pains he did not write
better. He was anxious not to be needlessly
tedious, not to inflict on the reader mere bald
lists of monuments strung together on a topographical
thread. He aimed at varying the
phraseology, at shunning the eternal repetition
111of the same words in the same order. Yet he
steered clear of one shoal only to run aground
on another. If to some extent he avoided
monotony and attained variety of expression, it
was too often at the cost of simplicity and
clearness. The natural order of the words was
sacrificed and a crabbed contorted one substituted
for it merely in order to vary the run
of the sentences. For the same reason a direct
statement was often discarded in favour of an
indirect one, with the result that a reader who
happens to be unfamiliar with the author’s
manner is sometimes at a loss as to his meaning.
For example, it has been questioned
whether he means that there was a statue of
Aeschylus in the theatre at Athens and one of
Oenobius on the Acropolis. Yet any person
conversant with his style must feel sure that in
both these cases Pausanias intends to intimate
the existence of the statue, and that if he does
not affirm it in so many words this is due to
no other cause than a wish to turn the sentence
in another way. Similar instances could easily
be multiplied. The ambiguity which so often
arises from this indirect mode of statement is
one of the many blots on the style of Pausanias.
Such as it is, his style is seen at its best in
some of the longer historical passages, notably
in the spirited narratives of the Messenian wars
and the Gallic invasion. Here he occasionally
112rises to a fair level of literary merit, as for
example in describing the evil omens that preceded
and hastened the death of the patriot
king Aristodemus, and again in relating the
impious attack of the Gauls on Delphi and
their overwhelming repulse. Through the latter
narrative there runs, like a strain of solemn
music, an undertone of religious faith and fervour
which greatly heightens the effect.
Pausanias’s
use of
previous
writers.
In these and similar historical episodes we
must allow something for the influence on
Pausanias’s style of the literary authorities
whom he followed. The warmer tinge of the
descriptions, the easier flow of the sentences
may not be wholly due to the ardour of the
writer’s piety, to the swell of his patriotic feelings.
Something of the movement, the glow,
the solemn strain, the martial fire may have
been caught by him from better models. This
brings us to the enquiry, What books did Pausanias
use in writing his own? and how did
he use them? Unfortunately we are not and
probably never shall be in a position to answer
these questions fully. Like most ancient writers
Pausanias is sparing in the citation of his
authorities, and it is clear that he must have
consulted books of which he makes no mention.
And when to this we add that the works of
most of the writers whom he does cite have
perished or survive only in a few disjointed
113fragments, it becomes clear that any hope of
acquiring a complete knowledge of his literary
sources and mode of using them must be abandoned.
Many attempts have been made of
late years to identify the lost books consulted
by Pausanias; but from the nature of the case
it is plain that such attempts must be fruitless.
One of them will be noticed presently. Meantime
all that I propose to do is to indicate some
of the chief literary and documentary sources
which Pausanias expressly cites, and to illustrate
by examples his method of dealing with them.
Distinction
between
the historical
and
descriptive
parts of
Pausanias’s
work.
Before doing so it is desirable to point out
explicitly a distinction which, though obvious
in itself, has apparently been overlooked or
slurred over by some of Pausanias’s critics. The
matter of his work is of two sorts, historical
and descriptive: the one deals with events in
the past, the other with things existing in the
present. For his knowledge of past events,
except in so far as they fell within his own lifetime
and observation, Pausanias was necessarily
dependent either on written documents or on
oral testimony, in short on the evidence of
others; no other source of information was
open to him. For his knowledge of things
existing in the present, on the other hand, he
need not have been indebted to the evidence of
others, he may have seen them for himself. It
does not, of course, follow that what he may
114have seen he did actually see. His descriptions
of places and things, like his narratives of
events that happened before his time, may all
have been taken from books or from the mouths
of other people; only it is not, as in the case
of the historical narratives, absolutely necessary
that they should be so derived. This distinction
is so elementary and obvious that to call
attention to it may be deemed superfluous.
Yet some of the critics appear to labour under
an impression that, if they can show the
historical parts of Pausanias’s work to have
been taken from books, they have raised a
presumption that the descriptive or topographical
parts were also so taken. They do
not, indeed, put so crass a misapprehension
into words, but they seem to be influenced by
it. To brush away these mental cobwebs it
is only needful to realise clearly that, though
Pausanias certainly could not have witnessed
events which happened before he was born, he
was not therefore necessarily debarred from seeing
things which existed in his own lifetime. In
investigating the sources of his information it is
desirable to keep the historical and the descriptive
parts of his work quite distinct from each other
and to enquire into each of them separately.
Poets
used by
Pausanias.
To begin with the historical, in the widest
sense of the word, we find that Pausanias drew
his accounts of the mythical and heroic ages
115in large measure from the poets. Homer is
his chief poetical authority, but he also makes
use of the later epics such as the Cypria, the
Eoeae, the Little Iliad, the Minyad, the Naupactia,
the Oedipodia, the Returns (Nostoi), the Sack
of Ilium by Lesches, the Thebaid, and the
Thesprotis. Of these the Thebaid was esteemed
by him next to the Iliad and Odyssey. On
questions of genealogy he often cites the early
poets Asius and Cinaethon. Among the works
attributed to Hesiod he frequently refers to the
Theogony and the Catalogue of Women, and he
once quotes the Argonautica of Apollonius
Rhodius. That he knew the Alexandrian
poet Euphorion of Chalcis is shown by two
references to his writings. The most ancient
Greek hymns in his opinion were those of
Olen; he cites several of them. Again, the
testimony of Pamphos, author of the oldest
Athenian hymns, is often appealed to by Pausanias.
Among the lyric poets whose works he
knew, such as Alcaeus, Alcman, Archilochus,
Pindar, Sappho, and Stesichorus, he appears to
have ranked Pindar first; at least he refers to
his poems far oftener than to those of the
others. Among the elegiac poets he quotes
Tyrtaeus and Simonides. With the great
tragic and comic poets he shows but little
acquaintance; Aeschylus is the only one whose
authority he appeals to repeatedly. He refers
116once to the testimony of Sophocles, but only
to reject it; once to that of Aristophanes;
never to that of Euripides. On the other
hand, he seems to have devoted a good deal of
attention to the critical study of the older poets.
He had investigated the dates of Homer and
Hesiod and the question of Homer’s native
country. Nor did he neglect to enquire into
the genuineness of many poems that passed
under famous names. He tells admiringly
how a contemporary of his own, Arrhiphon
of Triconium, detected the spuriousness of
certain verses attributed to an old Argive poet
Philammon, by pointing out that the verses
were in the Doric dialect which had not
yet been introduced into Argolis in Philammon’s
time. Among the works ascribed to
Musaeus he held that nothing was genuine
except the hymn to Demeter composed for the
Lycomids; some of the verses which passed
under the name of Musaeus he set down as
forgeries of Onomacritus. The hymns of
Orpheus were ranked by him next to those of
Homer for poetical beauty, but he saw that
some of the verses attributed to Orpheus were
spurious. He had grave doubts as to the
Theogony being a genuine work of Hesiod;
and he informs us that the reading of a poem
fathered on Linus sufficed to convince him of
its spuriousness. Of the works which circulated
117under the name of the early Corinthian poet
Eumelus one only, he tells us, was held to be
genuine. He could not believe that Anaximenes
had written a certain epic on Alexander the
Great. As to the epic called the Thebaid, which
he admired, he reports the view of Callinus
that the author was Homer, adding that “many
respectable persons have shared his opinion.”
Historians
used by
Pausanias.
The historian whom Pausanias seems to
have studied most carefully and whom he cites
most frequently is Herodotus. Though he
only once refers to the history of Thucydides
and once to that of Xenophon, it is probable
that he used both authors in several passages
where he does not mention their names. Other
historians whom he refers to are Anaximenes,
Antiochus of Syracuse, Charon of Lampsacus,
Ctesias, Hecataeus, Hellanicus, Hieronymus of
Cardia, Myron of Priene, Philistus, Polybius,
and Theopompus. Besides these he cites
several local histories, such as the histories of
Attica by Androtion and Clitodemus, a history
of Corinth attributed to Eumelus, a history of
Orchomenus by Callippus, and what seems to
have been a versified history of Argos by
Lyceas. Further, he had read the memoirs
of certain obscure historians whose names he
does not mention. In his use of the historical
materials at his disposal Pausanias appears to
have done his best to follow the same critical
118principles which he applied to the mythical and
legendary lore of Greece. When the accounts
conflicted he weighed them one against the
other and accepted that which on the whole
seemed to him to be the more probable or the
better authenticated. Thus before proceeding
to narrate the history of the Messenian wars he
mentions his two chief authorities, namely a
prose history of the first war by Myron of
Priene and a versified history of the second
war by Rhianus of Bene; then he points out a
glaring discrepancy between the two in regard
to the date of Aristomenes—the William Tell
or Sir William Wallace of Messenia—and gives
his reasons for accepting the testimony of
Rhianus and rejecting that of Myron, whose
writings, according to him, revealed an indifference
to truth and probability of which
he gives a striking instance. Again, Pausanias
was able to allow for the bias of prejudice in
an historian. Thus he points out that the
history of Hieronymus the Cardian was coloured
by a partiality for Antigonus and a dislike of
Lysimachus, of whom the latter had destroyed
the historian’s native city; that the historian
Philistus concealed the worst excesses of
Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, because he hoped
to be allowed by the tyrant to return to that
city; and that Androtion, the historian of
Attica, had apparently introduced a certain
119narrative for the sole purpose of casting reproach
on the Lacedaemonians.
The Elean
register.
An historical document of which Pausanias
made much use was the Elean register of
Olympic victors. He often refers to it. We
need not suppose that he consulted the original
documents in the archives at Elis. The register
had been published many centuries before by
Hippias of Elis, and copies may have been in
common circulation. Wherever he may have
seen it, Pausanias appears to have studied it
carefully, and sometimes he turns the information
thus acquired to good account. Thus he
points out that a statement of the Elean guides
was at variance with an entry in the register, and
that the runner Oebotas could not possibly have
fought at the battle of Plataea in 479 B.C. since
his Olympic victory was won in Ol. 6 (756 B.C.).
Inscriptions.
Another trustworthy source from which
Pausanias derived many of his historical facts
was inscriptions. What copious use he made
of them may be gathered from a slight inspection
of his work, particularly his description
of Olympia, and that on the whole he read
them correctly is proved by inscriptions still
extant of which he has given us either the
text or the general purport. Yet he did not
accept their testimony blindfold. In some of
his references to them we can perceive the
same discrimination, the same desire to sift and
120weigh the evidence which we have found to
characterise his procedure in other enquiries.
Thus in an old gymnasium at Anticyra he saw
the bronze statue of a native athlete Xenodamus
with an inscription setting forth that the man
had won the prize in the pancratium at Olympia.
Pausanias accordingly consulted the Olympic
register and finding no such victor mentioned
in it came to the conclusion that, if the inscription
were not lying, the victory of Xenodamus
must have fallen in Ol. 211 (65 A.D.), the only
Olympiad which had been struck out of the
register. Again, at Olympia he saw a tablet
inscribed with the victories of Chionis, a
Lacedaemonian runner, who lived in the first
half of the seventh century B.C. In the inscription
it was mentioned that the race in armour
had not yet been instituted in the time of
Chionis; indeed we know from Pausanias that
more than a century elapsed after the time of
Chionis before the race in armour was introduced.
Hence Pausanias concludes very
sensibly that the inscription could not, as
some people supposed, have been set up by
the runner himself, for how could he have foreseen
that the race in armour ever would be
instituted long after he was dead and buried?
Again, he infers that the Gelo who dedicated
a chariot at Olympia cannot have been, as was
commonly assumed, the tyrant Gelo, because in
121the inscription on the pedestal Gelo described
himself as a citizen of Gela, whereas, according
to Pausanias, at the time when the chariot was
dedicated Gelo had already made himself master
of Syracuse and would therefore have described
himself as a Syracusan, not as a native of Gela.
The argument falls to the ground because
Pausanias mistook the date of Gelo’s subjugation
of Syracuse by several years; none the
less his criticism of the current view testifies to
the attention he bestowed on inscriptions.
Writers
on art.
The image of Zeus which the united Greeks
dedicated at Olympia as a trophy of the battle
of Plataea was made, Pausanias tells us, by a
sculptor of Aegina named Anaxagoras, as to
whom he remarks that “the name of this
sculptor is omitted by the historians of sculpture.”
This passage proves that Pausanias consulted,
as might have been anticipated, some of
the many ancient works on the history of art,
but what they were he has not told us and
it would be vain to guess. He alludes to
them elsewhere.
The local
guides.
Yet another source which furnished Pausanias
with information, more or less trustworthy, on
matters of history and tradition was the discourse
of the local guides whom he encountered
at many or all of the chief places of interest.
We know from other ancient writers that in
antiquity, as at the present day, towns of any
122note were infested by persons of this class who
lay in wait for and pounced on the stranger as
their natural prey, wrangled over his body, and
having secured their victim led him about from
place to place, pointing out the chief sights
to him and pouring into his ear a stream of
anecdotes and explanations, indifferent to his
anguish and deaf to his entreaties to stop, until
having exhausted their learning and his patience
they pocketed their fee and took their leave.
An educated traveller could often have dispensed
with their explanations, but if he were good-natured
he would sometimes let them run on,
while he listened with seeming deference to the
rigmarole by which the poor men earned their
daily bread. A question interposed in the torrent
of their glib discourse was too apt to bring
them to a dead stand. Outside the beaten
round of their narrow circle they were helpless.
That Pausanias should have fallen into their
clutches was inevitable. He seems to have
submitted to his fate with a good grace, was
led about by them to see the usual sights,
heard the usual stories, argued with them about
some, and posed them with questions which
they could not answer about others. Often
no doubt their services were useful and the
information they gave both true and interesting.
Among the many traditions which Pausanias
has embodied in his work there may be not a
123few which he picked up from the guides. We
may conjecture, too, that the measurements of
buildings and images which he occasionally
records were, at least in some cases, derived by
him from the same source.
So much for the sources of historical and
traditionary lore on which Pausanias drew.
That he always used them correctly cannot
be maintained. We can show that he sometimes
mistook the purport of inscriptions and
blundered as to historical events and personages,
but these mistakes are not more numerous
than can be reasonably allowed for in a work
embracing so great and multifarious a collection
of facts.
Did
Pausanias
describe
Greece
from books
or from
personal
observation?
Coming now to the descriptive or topographical
part, which forms the staple of
Pausanias’s work, we have to ask, Whence did
he derive his knowledge of the places and
and monuments he describes? from observation?
or from books? or from both? To these
questions Pausanias himself gives no full and
direct answer. He neither professes to have
seen everything that he describes nor does
he acknowledge to have borrowed any of his
descriptions from previous writers, whom he
barely alludes to and never mentions by name.
On the other hand he sometimes affirms in the
most unambiguous language that he saw the
things which he describes, and as there is no
124|He affirms
that he saw
many
things
which he
describes.|
reason to doubt his word we may accept these
affirmations unconditionally, and believe that
he describes some things at least as an eye-witness.
But such assertions of personal knowledge
are only incidental, and the total number
of them is exceedingly small in comparison
with the number of places and things which he
describes without saying whether he saw them
or not. Thus in regard to the vast majority of
Pausanias’s descriptions we have still to ask,
Are they based on personal observation or
taken from books? In endeavouring to answer
this question we must first of all bear in mind
that if Pausanias saw all that he professes to
have seen it is inevitable that he should have
seen a great deal more. For example, he
could not have seen, as he professes to have
done, certain statues on the Acropolis of Athens
without also seeing the Parthenon, the Erechtheum,
and the Propylaea, which he does not
expressly say that he saw. He could not have
seen, as he says he did, the statue of Anaximenes
and the Sicyonian treasury at Olympia
without also seeing the temples of Zeus and
Hera and a multitude of buildings and statues
besides. In short, in all the places which he
appears on his own showing to have visited, we
may and must assume that he saw much more
than he claims in so many words to have seen.
Further, since he was not transported from one
125place to another by magic, he must have
travelled over the roads which joined the
various places that he visited. Thus by plotting
out on the map the places which he saw
and joining them by the routes he describes,
we can form some general notion of the extent
of Pausanias’s travels in Greece. Yet the
notion thus formed must necessarily be very
rough and imperfect. For, in the first place,
we cannot always be sure of the route which
he took from one town or village to another.
Thus, for example, he describes two roads from
Argos over Mount Artemisius to Mantinea;
but there is nothing to show which he took or
even that he took either. He may, like most
travellers, have reached Mantinea from Argos
by neither of the direct passes over the
mountains, but by the circuitous route that
goes by Lerna and Tegea. In the second
place, it would be very rash to assume that he
visited only those places where he is proved by
some incidental assertion of personal knowledge
to have been. Possibly or rather probably he
visited many more. If he did not think it
worth while to assure us that he saw the
Parthenon and the Erechtheum at Athens, and
the temples of Zeus and Hera at Olympia,
he need not have thought it worth while to
depose to having seen every insignificant shrine
and image that he describes in the petty towns
126and obscure villages through which he passed.
Thus the indications which he has given us are
far too meagre to permit us to make out his
itinerary in Greece with any approach to
certainty.
Descriptions
which
he may
have taken
from
books.
But if we cannot be sure that many of his
descriptions are based on personal knowledge,
have we any grounds for supposing that they
are borrowed, without acknowledgment, from
books? Such a supposition would be, on the
face of it, neither unreasonable nor improbable.
In the historical parts of his work Pausanias
must have used many books which he does not
mention, and he may have done the same thing
in the topographical or descriptive parts. The
grounds on which it could be proved or made
probable that he borrowed his descriptions from
books are various. The most obvious and
certain would be the existence in an older
writer of a description agreeing in form as well
as in substance so closely with a description in
Pausanias that no alternative would be left us
but to suppose, either that Pausanias copied
from this older writer, or that both of them
copied from some common original. Or again
it might be that the descriptions of Pausanias
contained information which he could hardly
have ascertained for himself, or mistakes into
which he could scarcely have fallen if he had
seen the things for himself. In regard to the
127first of these grounds it may be said at once
that in the extant literature of antiquity, so far
as the present writer is aware, there is no
description of any place or monument agreeing
in form and substance so closely with a description
in Pausanias as to make it probable
that he copied it. The slight and superficial
resemblances which have been traced between
passages of Strabo and passages of Pausanias
are no more than such as may easily or necessarily
arise when two writers are describing
independently the same places.
Measurements
of
monuments
and of
distances.
When we ask whether the descriptions of
Pausanias contain matter which he could not
easily have ascertained for himself, we are
reminded first of his measurements of temples
and images, and second of his estimates of
the exact distances in furlongs between one
place and another. The measurements of
temples and images were probably derived either
from the local guides or from books. Some of
them he may perhaps have taken for himself;
but that he should, for example, have measured
for himself the height of the temple of Zeus at
Olympia is highly improbable. The distances
by land, estimated in furlongs, may have been
drawn by Pausanias from Roman milestones or
from books or from a map like the Tabula
Peutingeriana. Distances by sea he can hardly
have measured for himself; if he did not borrow
128them from a book or a map, he may have had
them from the sailors with whom he voyaged.
In all these cases it is possible, perhaps probable,
that Pausanias drew his information from
literary sources; but what particular books or
maps he used, if he used any, we do not know,
and it would be vain to guess.
Description
of the
coast of
Hermionis.
When we next enquire whether the descriptions
of Pausanias contain errors into
which he could scarcely have fallen if he had
seen the places and things which he describes,
a student of Pausanias is at once reminded of
the author’s description of the coast of Hermionis,
which it is difficult or impossible to
reconcile with the actual features of the coast.
That the description contains grave errors is
almost certain. How these errors are to be
explained is much more doubtful. It is easy
to suggest, as has been done, that Pausanias
did not himself sail along the coast, but
borrowed his description from one of those
Periploi or Coasting Voyages, which enumerated
the places on a coast in topographical order
and recorded the distances between them. Yet
this supposition by itself would hardly explain
the confusion into which Pausanias has fallen.
Specimens of these Coasting Voyages have come
down to us, and they are so exceedingly clear,
concise, and business-like, that it is difficult to
understand how any one who simply set himself
129to copy from them could have blundered so
egregiously as Pausanias appears to have done.
More plausible is the suggestion that, while
Pausanias was obliged by the plan of his
itinerary to describe the coast in one direction,
the Coasting Voyage which lay before him
described it in the reverse direction, and that
in his effort to throw the information supplied
by the Voyage into the form that suited his
itinerary Pausanias made the jumble which has
caused his critics so much trouble. This may
be the true explanation. It would have the
further advantage of helping us to understand
how Pausanias obtained his knowledge of the
exact distances between places on various parts
of the coasts of Greece, notably on the coast of
Achaia and on the wild inhospitable coast of
Laconia. The Coasting Voyage which he used
may, like the extant Coasting Voyage of Scylax,
have comprised a description of the whole
coast of Greece, and from it Pausanias may
have borrowed his estimates of distances and
perhaps other features of his description as
well. This is Mr. Heberdey’s theory, and it is
a perfectly tenable one, though in the absence
of direct evidence it must remain only a more
or less probable hypothesis. Yet when we
remember that Pausanias’s topographical indications
are nowhere more full and exact than
in Arcadia, where by the nature of the case
130he cannot have used a Coasting Voyage, the
hypothesis that he used one in other parts of
his work seems superfluous, if not improbable.
It is quite possible that he described the coast
of Hermionis from notes he had made for
himself in sailing along it, and that either he
failed at the time to take in the natural
features correctly or that afterwards in redacting
his notes at home he misunderstood what
he had written on the spot. Perhaps I may be
allowed to say that having repeatedly sailed
along the coast in question I can testify from
personal experience how difficult it is to
identify by sight the places from a ship, so
bewildering is the moving panorama of capes,
islands, bays, and mountains. It would be no
great wonder if Pausanias’s head swam a little
in this geographical maze.
Roads from
Lepreus.
Another passage where error and confusion
of some sort seem to have crept in is the
mention of the three roads that led from
Lepreus to Samicum, Olympia, and Elis.
Here, again, Pausanias may have used and
misunderstood some literary source, or he may
have blundered on the spot, or his notes may
have been lost, or his memory may have played
him false. Any of these explanations is
possible. To attempt to decide between them
in the absence of any positive evidence would
be fruitless.
The Enneacrunus
episode.
131More famous than either of these difficulties
is one which occurs in Pausanias’s account of
Athens. Here in the middle of describing the
market-place, which lay to the north-west of
the Acropolis, he suddenly without a word of
warning transports the reader to the Enneacrunus
fountain, which lay in the bed of
the Ilissus, not far from the Olympieum, at
the opposite extremity of the city; then,
having despatched the fountain and some
buildings in its neighbourhood, he whirls the
reader back to the market-place, and proceeds
with his description of it as if nothing had
happened. Of the many attempts to clear up
this mystery, as by supposing either a dislocation
of the text or a confusion in the author’s
notes or the existence of another fountain near
the market-place which may have been shown
to him as the Enneacrunus, none is free from
serious difficulties. That he fell into error
through copying blindly and unintelligently
from a book is possible but very improbable.
As it is practically certain that he visited
Athens and saw both the market-place and the
Olympieum, the chances that he should not
have seen the Enneacrunus and should therefore
have been driven to borrow his description of it
from a book are so small that they may be
neglected.
Law-courts
at Athens
and altars
at Olympia.
Other passages which Pausanias may perhaps
132have taken either wholly or in part from
books are his account of the Athenian law-courts
and his list of the altars at Olympia.
Neither of these passages, it is true, is demonstrably
infected by error or confusion, though
there is some ground for suspecting the existence
of confusion in the enumeration of the
altars. But in both of them the author departs
from the topographical order of description,
which is so characteristic of his method, and
arranges the monuments together simply on
the ground of their belonging to the same
class. These departures from his usual principle
of order suggest that in both cases
Pausanias may have borrowed from written
documents in which the monuments were
grouped together according to kind rather
than in topographical order. Another set of
monuments which Pausanias links together
by a chain other than the topographical are
the buildings erected by Hadrian in Athens.
It is possible that he may have taken his list
of them from the inscription in the Athenian
Pantheon which recorded them all.
These are perhaps the most notable passages
in Pausanias, which might be thought to bear
traces of having been derived either wholly or
in part from written documents rather than
from personal observation. In none of them
are the indications so clear as to amount to a
133proof of borrowing. At most they raise a
probability of it, nothing more.
Predecessors
of
Pausanias.
It would be neither surprising nor unnatural
if in writing his Description of Greece Pausanias
not only consulted, as we know he did, but
borrowed from the works of previous writers
on the same subject. Any one who undertakes
to write a guide-book to a country may
legitimately borrow from his predecessors, provided
he has taken the trouble to ascertain
for himself that their descriptions are still
applicable to the country at the time he is
writing. Pausanias in his character of the
Camden of ancient Greece had many predecessors
whose writings he may and indeed
ought to have consulted. But of their works
only the titles and a few fragments have come
down to us, and these contain nothing to show
that Pausanias copied or had even read them.
The most considerable of the fragments—those
which pass under the name of Dicaearchus the
Messenian—have been already examined, and
we have seen how different in scope and style
was the work to which they belonged from
that which Pausanias has left us. No one
would dream of maintaining that Pausanias
copied his description of Greece from the
pseudo-Dicaearchus. The most famous of the
antiquaries who preceded Pausanias seem to
have been Diodorus, Polemo, and Heliodorus,
134all of whom earned by their writings the title
of The Periegete or Cicerone. |Diodorus.| Of these the
earliest was Diodorus, who is not to be confounded
with the Sicilian historian of that
name. He published works on the tombs and
townships of Attica, of which a few fragments
survive. |Heliodorus.| They seem to have been composed
before 308 B.C. Heliodorus lived in the reign
of Ptolemy Epiphanes and wrote a work on
the Acropolis of Athens in no less than fifteen
books, of which only a few brief fragments
have come down to us. There is some reason
to think that Pausanias cannot have consulted
it. |Polemo.| Polemo of Ilium flourished in the first part
of the second century B.C., and was the author
of many special treatises on the monuments of
Greece. Amongst them were works on the
Acropolis of Athens, on the eponymous heroes
of the Attic townships and tribes, on the Sacred
Way, on the Painted Colonnade at Sicyon, on
the votive offerings at Lacedaemon, on the
founding of the cities of Phocis, on the treasuries
at Delphi, and many more. More than a
hundred extracts from or references to his
works have come down to us; and if we may
judge from them, from the number and variety
of the treatises he published, and from the
praise of Plutarch we shall be inclined to
pronounce Polemo the most learned of all
Greek antiquaries. His acquaintance both
135with the monuments and with the literature
seems to have been extensive and profound.
The attention which he bestowed on inscriptions
earned for him the nickname of the ‘monument-tapper.’
His works were certainly extant later
than the time of Pausanias, since they are
freely quoted by Athenaeus. It would, therefore,
be strange if Pausanias did not study
them, dealing as many of them did with the
same subjects on which he touched in his
Description of Greece. Yet the existing fragments
of Polemo hardly justify us in supposing
that Pausanias was acquainted with the writings
of his learned predecessor. Certainly they lend
no countenance to the view that he borrowed
descriptions of places and monuments from
them. This will appear from an examination
of those fragments of Polemo which deal with
subjects falling within the scope of Pausanias’s
work. We shall look, first, at the things
mentioned by both writers, and, second, at
the things mentioned by Polemo alone. The
fragments are numbered as in the editions of
L. Preller and Ch. Müller, to which the reader
is referred for the Greek text.
First, then, let us take the things mentioned
by both Polemo and Pausanias.
Polemo
and
Pausanias
compared.
Fragment ii. In his description of the
Acropolis at Athens, Polemo mentioned a
sculptor Lycius, son of Myron. So does
136Pausanias in his description of the Acropolis.
Fragment iii. In his description of the
Acropolis, Polemo mentioned a decree forbidding
women of loose character to take the
names of any of the great quadriennial festivals.
Pausanias mentions no such decree, but among
the paintings which he describes in the Propylaea
is one of Alcibiades “containing emblems of
the victory won by his team at Nemea.” Now
we know from other writers that in this picture
Alcibiades was portrayed reclining in the lap
of Nemea. The model who sat for the personification
of Nemea was probably a woman
of the sort who were forbidden by the decree
to take the name of a quadriennial festival,
and the sight of the picture may have led
Polemo to mention the decree. If this was so—and
the reasoning though a little circuitous
is plausible—it becomes probable that Polemo
saw and described the picture of Alcibiades
to which Pausanias refers. The probability is
strengthened, almost to the point of certainty,
by our knowledge that Polemo did describe
the paintings in the Propylaea, though no
details of his description have survived.
Fragment iv. In his description of the
Acropolis, Polemo mentioned that Thucydides
was buried at the Melitian gate. So does
Pausanias in his description of the Acropolis.
137Fragment vi. In his description of the
pictures in the Propylaea, which probably
formed part of his treatise in four books on the
Acropolis, Polemo mentioned three Athenian festivals
at which torch-races were held, namely the
Panathenian festival, the festival of Hephaestus,
and the festival of Prometheus. Pausanias in
his description of the Academy mentions that
torch-races were run from an altar of Prometheus
in the Academy to the city.
Fragment x. Polemo told the story of the
capture of Aphidna in Attica by the Dioscuri,
and mentioned that in the affair Castor was
wounded by king Aphidnus in the right thigh.
Pausanias repeatedly refers to the capture of
Aphidna by the Dioscuri, but he expresses a
belief that the place was taken without fighting,
and he gives reasons for thinking so.
Fragment xi. In one of his works which
is cited as The Greek History Polemo mentioned
that Poseidon contended with Hera for the
possession of Argos and was worsted, and
that the two deities did not exhibit tokens in
support of their claims as they did at Athens.
Pausanias in his description of Argolis twice
mentions the defeat of Poseidon in his dispute
with Hera for the possession of the land, but
he says nothing about the absence of tokens.
Fragment xii. According to Polemo, the
Argives related how the first corn sown in
138Argolis had been fetched by Argus from
Libya. According to Pausanias, they asserted
that they had received the first corn from
Demeter.
Fragment xviii. In his work on the votive
offerings at Lacedaemon, Polemo mentioned
“a chapel of Cottina, close to Colone, where is
the sanctuary of Dionysus, a splendid edifice
known to many in the city.” Pausanias in
his description of Sparta mentions “the place
named Colona, and a temple of Dionysus
Colonatas.”
Fragment xxii. Polemo mentioned at
Olympia the old temple of Hera, the temple of
the Metapontines, and the temple of the Byzantines.
Pausanias describes all three buildings,
but he designates the two latter correctly as
treasuries, not temples.
Fragment xxiii. Polemo related that for a
time a race had been run at Olympia between
carts drawn by mules, but that after thirteen
victories had been won the race was abolished
in Ol. 84. He further said that the name for
a mule-cart (apene) was a Tegean word. Pausanias
mentions that the race between mule-carts
at Olympia was instituted in Ol. 70 and
abolished in Ol. 84. He says nothing about
the name for a mule-cart being Tegean.
Fragment xxiv. Polemo said that Athena
was wounded by Ornytus. Pausanias says that
139she was wounded by Teuthis, but that some
people called her assailant Ornytus.
Fragment xxvii. In his work on the
treasuries at Delphi, Polemo mentioned the
Sicyonian treasury. So does Pausanias in his
description of Delphi.
Fragment xxix. Polemo told how the
Delphians honoured the wolf because a wolf
had discovered a sacred jewel of gold that had
been stolen from Delphi and buried on Mount
Parnassus. Pausanias says that the Delphians
dedicated a bronze figure of a wolf in the
sanctuary of Apollo, because a man who had
stolen some sacred treasures and hidden them
in the forest on Parnassus was killed by a wolf,
which then went daily to the city and howled,
till people followed it and so found the stolen
treasure.
Fragment xxxii. Polemo told how Palamedes
invented dice to amuse the Greek army
before Troy when they were distressed by
famine. Pausanias says simply that dice were
an invention of Palamedes.
Fragment xli. Polemo said that at Athens
there were three images of the Furies, two made
by Scopas out of the stone called luchneus (probably
Parian marble), and the middle one made
by Calamis. Pausanias notices the images of
the Furies without mentioning their number,
their material, or the artists who made them.
140Fragment xlii. In speaking of wineless
libations Polemo remarked on the scrupulousness
of the Athenians in matters of ritual.
Pausanias observes, in different connexions,
that the Athenians were more pious and
more zealous in religious matters than other
people.
Fragment xliv. Polemo said that Lais was
born at Hyccara in Sicily and was murdered in
Thessaly, whither she had gone for love of a
Thessalian named Pausanias; and he described
her grave beside the Peneus with the epitaph and
the urn on the tombstone. Pausanias says that
Lais was a native of Hycara (sic) in Sicily and
that her grave was at Corinth, where it was surmounted
by the figure of a lion holding a ram in
its paws. He adds that in Thessaly, whither she
had gone for the love of a certain Hippostratus,
there was another tomb which claimed to be hers.
Fragment xlviii. Polemo said that copies
of the laws of Solon were kept in the Prytaneum
engraved on square wooden tablets which revolved
on pivots in such a way that when the
tablets were turned at an angle they seemed to
be triangular. Pausanias says briefly that the
laws of Solon were inscribed in the Prytaneum.
Fragment lv. Polemo said that wrestling
was invented by Phorbas. Pausanias says that
it was invented by Theseus.
Fragment lxxviii. Polemo mentioned the
141sanctuary of Hercules at Cynosarges. So does
Pausanias.
Fragment lxxxiii. Polemo described two
pools in Sicily, beside which the Sicilians took
their most solemn oaths, perjury being followed
by death. Pausanias describes how people
threw offerings into the craters of Etna and
watched whether the offerings sank or were
ejected by the volcanic fires. Some modern
writers have supposed that Pausanias meant to
describe the place and the oath described by
Polemo, but that he mistook the water for fire
and the offering for an oath. The supposition
is very unlikely.
Fragment lxxxvi. Polemo mentioned the
Tiasa, a river near Sparta. So does Pausanias.
No evidence
that
Pausanias
copied
Polemo.
These are, I believe, all the existing fragments
of Polemo in which he mentions the
same things as Pausanias. Not one of them
supports the theory that Pausanias copied from
Polemo. In some of them the writer mentions
the same places, buildings, and works of art
that are mentioned by Pausanias. But this
was almost inevitable. When two men describe
the same places correctly they can hardly help
mentioning some of the same things. In no
case does the coincidence go beyond a bare
mention. Again, Polemo sometimes referred
to the same myth or legend as Pausanias; but
this is no proof that Pausanias copied from
142Polemo. A multitude of myths and legends
were the commonplaces of every educated
Greek, whether he had read Polemo or not.
The passage of Polemo as to the race between
mule-carts at Olympia agrees in substance, not
in language, with the corresponding passage of
Pausanias. Both writers, it may be assumed,
derived their information from the best source,
the Olympic register, which, as we have seen,
was published and accessible to all. The
Delphian story of the wolf that disclosed the
stolen treasure may have been narrated by both
writers in the same way, though from the
abridged form in which Polemo’s version is
reported by Aelian we cannot be sure of this.
No doubt the story was told in much the same
way by the Delphian guides to all visitors, who
may have been surprised to find a statue of
a wolf dedicated to Apollo, the old mythical
relationship of the god with wolves having long
fallen into the background. Again, Polemo,
like Pausanias, remarked on the scrupulous
piety of the Athenians. So, too, for that
matter did St. Paul, but nobody suspects him
of having borrowed the remark from Polemo.
The mention of the sculptor Lycius, of the
grave of Thucydides, and of the torch-race by
the two writers proves nothing as to the dependence
of the one on the other. Some of the
fragments of Polemo show that he described in
143minute detail things which Pausanias has merely
mentioned. Finally, in a number of the fragments
Polemo makes statements which are
explicitly or implicitly contradicted by Pausanias.
This proves that if Pausanias was
acquainted with the works of Polemo, he at
least exercised complete freedom of judgment
in accepting or rejecting the opinions of his
predecessor. Another proof of his independence
is furnished by his speaking of the treasuries
at Olympia as treasuries, whereas Polemo
had designated the same buildings less correctly
as temples.
Things
mentioned
by Polemo
but not by
Pausanias.
Second, let us take the things mentioned by
Polemo, but not by Pausanias. They include
at Munychia the worship of the hero Acratopotes;
at Athens a picture of the marriage of
Pirithous, an inscription relating to the sacrifices
offered to Hercules at Cynosarges, and cups
dedicated by a certain Neoptolemus, apparently
on the Acropolis; in Attica a township called
Crius; at Sicyon the Painted Colonnade (to
which Polemo seems to have devoted a special
treatise), pictures by the painters Aristides,
Pausanias, and Nicophanes, a portrait of the
tyrant Aristratus partly painted by Apelles,
and an obscene worship of Dionysus; at Phlius
a colonnade called the Colonnade of the Polemarch
and containing a painting or paintings
by Sillax of Rhegium; at Argos a sanctuary
144of Libyan Demeter; at Sparta a chapel and
bronze statue of Cottina, a bronze ox dedicated
by her, a sanctuary of Corythallian Artemis, a
festival called kopis (described by Polemo in
detail), and the worship of two heroes Matton
and Ceraon; at Olympia a hundred and thirty-two
silver cups, two silver wine-jugs, one silver
sacrificial vessel, and three gilt cups, all preserved
in the treasury of the Metapontines, a
cedar-wood figure of a Triton holding a silver
cup, a silver siren, three silver cups of various
shapes, a golden wine-jug, and two drinking-horns,
all preserved in the treasury of the
Byzantines, thirty-three silver cups of various
shapes, a silver pot, a golden sacrificial vessel,
and a golden bowl, all preserved in the temple
of Hera, and a statue of a Lacedaemonian
named Leon who won a victory in the chariot-race;
at Elis the worship of Gourmand Apollo;
at Scolus in Boeotia the worship of Big-loaf
Demeter; at Thebes a temple of Aphrodite
Lamia, a statue of the bard Cleon (about which
Polemo told an anecdote), and games held in
honour of Hercules; and finally at Delphi a
golden book of the poetess Aristomache in the
Sicyonian treasury, a treasury of the Spinatians
containing two marble statues of boys, a sanctuary
of Demeter Hermuchus, and a curious
custom of offering to Latona at the festival of the
Theoxenia the largest leek that was to be found.
145All these are mentioned by Polemo as things
existing or customs practised within that portion
of Greece which Pausanias has described.
When we remember that the mention of them
occurs in a few brief fragments, which are all
that remain to us of the voluminous works of
Polemo, we can imagine what a multitude of
things must have been described by Polemo,
which are passed over in total silence by
Pausanias.
Result of
comparison
between
Polemo and
Pausanias.
To sum up the result of this comparison of
Polemo with Pausanias, we find that both
writers mention some of the same things and
record some of the same traditions, but that
this agreement never amounts to a verbal coincidence;
that Polemo mentions many things
which are not noticed by Pausanias; and that
Pausanias repeatedly adopts views which differ
from or contradict views expressed by Polemo.
Thus there is nothing in the remains of Polemo
to show that Pausanias, treading as he so often
did in Polemo’s footsteps, copied the works
of his predecessor; on the contrary, the very
frequent omission by Pausanias of things mentioned
by Polemo, and the not infrequent
adoption by him of opinions which contradict
those of Polemo, go to prove either that he was
unacquainted with Polemo’s writings, or that he
deliberately disregarded and tacitly controverted
them.
Theory
that
Pausanias
copied
from
Polemo
or from
writers of
Polemo’s
date.
146Yet in recent years it has been maintained
that Pausanias slavishly copied from Polemo
the best part of his descriptions of Athens,
Olympia, and Delphi, and a good deal besides,
and that he described these places substantially
not as they were in his own age but as they
had been in the time of Polemo, about three
hundred years before; for it is a part of the
same theory that Pausanias had travelled and
seen very little in Greece, had compiled the bulk
of his book from the works of earlier writers,
and had added only a few hasty jottings of his
own to give the book a modern air.
As to the proposition that Pausanias borrowed
largely from Polemo it is not needful to
say any more. We have seen that it has no
foundation in the existing remains of Polemo.
Whether it would be established or refuted by
the lost works of Polemo we cannot say. It
will be time to consider the question when these
lost works are found, if that should ever be.
Theory that
Pausanias
did not
describe
Greece as
it was in
his own
time.
On the other hand, the proposition that
Pausanias described Greece not as it was in
his own time, but as it had been in an earlier
age, while it is of wider scope than the former
is also more susceptible of verification. It
could be established very simply by proving
that he spoke of things as existing which from
other sources are known to have ceased to
exist before his time. It could not, of course,
147be established merely by showing that he
mentions little or nothing of later date than
say the age of Polemo, about 170 B.C., unless
it could be further shown that the things he
mentions had ceased to exist between that age
and his own. For obviously all the things he
notices might have existed in 170 B.C. and
still be in existence when he wrote, and in
describing them he would be as truly describing
the Greece of his own time as a writer of
the present day who, professing to record the
most notable things in Athens at the end of
the nineteenth century A.D., should choose to
mention no building or statue later than the
time of Pausanias, or even of Polemo himself.
Thus all the attempts that have been made
to invalidate the testimony of Pausanias as to
the state of Greece in the second century A.D.
by demonstrating merely that the things he describes
were in existence in the second century
B.C. must be dismissed as irrelevant. Even
if the premises be admitted, the conclusion
which it is sought to establish would not follow
from them. It remains, therefore, to examine
the evidence which has been thought to prove
that some of the things mentioned by Pausanias
as existing had ceased to exist before his time.
If this were indeed proved, then the proposition
that he did not describe Greece as it was in
his own time would be proved also, and we
148should be sure that his descriptions were
borrowed either wholly or in part from earlier
writers, even if we could not hazard any guess
as to who these writers were.
His description
of
Piraeus.
In the first place, then, it has been maintained
that the description which Pausanias
gives of the state of Piraeus did not apply to
his own time. His account of the ship-sheds,
the two market-places, the sanctuaries, the
images, and so on, implies, it is said, that the
port was in a fairly thriving state when he
wrote about the middle of the second century
A.D., and this cannot have been the case since
Piraeus was burnt by Sulla in 86 B.C., and still
lay in a forlorn condition when Strabo wrote
in the age of Augustus. This remarkable
criticism entirely overlooks the fact that between
the destruction of Piraeus by Sulla and
the time of Pausanias more than two hundred
years had elapsed, during the greater part of
which Greece had enjoyed profound peace
and had been treated with special favour and
indulgence by the Roman emperors. Is it
beyond the bounds of possibility that during
these two centuries the blackened ruins should
have been cleared away? that new buildings
should have sprung up, and population should
have gathered once more around the harbour?
Does the Palatinate, we may ask by analogy,
remain to this day the wilderness to which it
149was reduced by the armies of Louis XIV. two
centuries ago? But such questions need no
answer. In the case of Piraeus, fortunately,
we are not left merely to balance probabilities
or improbabilities against each other. We
have positive evidence of a great revival of
the port after its destruction by Sulla. A
single inscription of the first century B.C. or
the second century A.D. testifies to the existence
of the dockyards, the colonnades, the
Exchange, the government buildings, the sanctuaries.
Another, contemporary with Pausanias,
proves that Roman merchants were then settled
in the port. A third deals with the regulation
of traffic in the market. Portraits of Roman
emperors found on the spot speak of gratitude
for imperial favour, and remains of Roman
villas and Roman baths bear witness to the
return not merely of prosperity but of wealth
and luxury. In short, if Pausanias had described
Piraeus as lying in ruins, as his critic
thinks he should have done, he might have
described it as it was in the early part of the
first century B.C., but he certainly would not
have described it as it was in his own time two
hundred years later.
His description
of
Arcadia.
Again, it has been argued that Pausanias
copied his description of Arcadia from much
older writers because, it is said, he pictures
the country as in a flourishing state, whereas
150Strabo says that most of the famous cities of
Arcadia had either ceased to exist or had left
hardly a trace of themselves behind. How
little the testimony of Strabo is worth when he
speaks of the interior of Greece is shown by
his famous statement that not a vestige of
Mycenae remained. Contrast this statement
with the brief but accurate description which
Pausanias gives of the walls and the lion-gate
of Mycenae as they were in his day and as
they remain down to this; then say whether
the testimony of Strabo is to outweigh that
of Pausanias on questions of Greek topography.
In fact it is generally recognised that Strabo
had visited very few parts of Greece, perhaps
none but Corinth. We may therefore well
hesitate to confide in his vague sweeping
assertion as to the desolation of Arcadia. A
simple fact suffices to upset it. Coins of the
Roman period prove that seven out of the
eleven cities, which he says had ceased to exist
or had left hardly a trace behind, were still
inhabited and doing business long after the
agreeable, but not too scrupulously accurate,
geographer had been gathered to his fathers.
Nor, again, is it true to say that Pausanias
describes Arcadia as if it were in a prosperous
state. On the contrary, the long array of
ruined or shrunken cities, deserted villages,
and roofless shrines, which he has not failed
151to chronicle, leave on the reader, as they left
on the writer himself, a melancholy impression
of desolation and decay. The only two cities
which from his description we should gather
to have been in a tolerably thriving condition
are Tegea and Mantinea. As to the former
we have the precious testimony of Strabo himself
that “it kept pretty well together.” As
to Mantinea, if we cannot trust the evidence
of Pausanias, we can surely trust the architectural
and inscriptional evidence which proves
that in the Roman period the theatre was
rebuilt, and that not many years before Pausanias
was born Roman merchants resided in
the city, great reconstructions were carried out
in the market-place, a marble colonnade added
to it, banqueting-halls and treasuries built, a
bazaar surrounded with workshops erected, and
a semicircular hall reared which, in the words
of an inscription referring to it, “would by
itself be an ornament of the city.” The
remains of these buildings, together with the
ancient walls and gates of the city almost in
their entire extent though not to their full
height, were visible down to the year 1890
A.D. at least. [5] All this in a city which, if we
were to believe Strabo, had vanished from the
152earth before his time leaving little or no traces
of it behind. So much for the comparative
value of the testimony of Strabo and Pausanias
with regard to Arcadia.
Grove of
Poseidon at
Onchestus.
Again, in Boeotia our author is accused of
describing things that were not as if they were,
and the witness for the prosecution is again
Strabo. Pausanias says that the grove of
Poseidon at Onchestus existed in his time.
Strabo says that there were no trees in it.
Where is the inconsistency between these
statements? Strabo wrote in the reign of
Augustus; Pausanias wrote in the reign of
Marcus Aurelius. Did trees cease to grow
after the time of Strabo?
Limnae
and
Thuria in
Messenia.
Further, Pausanias has been reproached with
not knowing that Limnae in Messenia belonged
to the Messenians in his time. This is a strange
reproach. He treats of Limnae under Messenia,
and does not say that it belonged to anybody
but the Messenians. What more could he do?
Was it needful for him to say of every place in
Messenia that it belonged to the Messenians?
of every town in Arcadia that it belonged to
the Arcadians? of every temple in Athens that
it belonged to the Athenians? The ground of
the offence is Pausanias’s statement that the
neighbouring town of Thuria in Messenia had
been bestowed by Augustus on the Lacedaemonians.
The truth of this statement is not
153disputed. It is confirmed by coins which prove
that in the reign of Septimius Severus, long
after the time of Pausanias, Thuria continued
to belong to the Lacedaemonians. But the
critics have assumed quite gratuitously that
along with Thuria the emperor Augustus transferred
Limnae also to the Lacedaemonians, and
that Pausanias believed Limnae to belong to
them still in his time, although we know from
the evidence of Tacitus and of boundary stones
that in his time Limnae belonged to Messenia.
Both these assumptions are baseless. We have
no reason to suppose that Augustus gave Limnae
to the Lacedaemonians, none to suppose that
Pausanias believed it to belong to them. On
the contrary, we have, as I have just pointed
out, the best of grounds for supposing that he
held it to belong to Messenia. The truth is,
the critics have confused two distinct, though
neighbouring districts, and have shifted the
burden of this confusion to the shoulders of the
innocent Pausanias, in whose work not a shadow
of it can be detected.
Temple of
Apollo at
Delphi.
Lastly, it has been assumed that Pausanias’s
account of the temple of Apollo at Delphi is
irreconcileable with the remains of the building
and with inscriptions relating to it which have
recently been discovered by the French at
Delphi. The combined evidence of architecture
and inscriptions proves conclusively that
154the temple built by the Alcmaeonids in the
sixth century B.C. was afterwards destroyed,
probably by an earthquake, and that it was
rebuilt in the fourth century B.C. Yet Pausanias,
it is said, describes the temple of the sixth
century B.C. as if it still existed in his time.
Let us look at the facts in the light of the
French discoveries. Observe, then, that Pausanias
mentions the Gallic shields hanging on
the architrave of the temple. These shields
were captured in 279 B.C. Hence the temple
which he describes cannot have been the old
one built in the sixth century B.C., since that
temple, as we now know, was afterwards destroyed
and rebuilt in the fourth century B.C.
But did Pausanias believe it to be the old one?
There is nothing to show that he did, but on
the contrary there is a good deal to show that
he did not. In the first place, he does not say
that the temple was built by the Alcmaeonids.
He says it was built for the Amphictyons by
the architect Spintharus. The date of Spintharus
is otherwise unknown, but we have no
reason to suppose that he lived in the sixth
rather than in the fourth century B.C. In the
second place, Pausanias tells us that the first
sculptures for the gables of the temple were
executed by Praxias, a pupil of Calamis, but
that as the building lasted some time, Praxias
died before it was finished, and the rest of the
155sculptures were executed by another artist.
Now we have the evidence of Pausanias himself
that the sculptor Calamis was at work as late
as 427 B.C. His pupil Praxias may therefore
easily, at least in the opinion of Pausanias, have
been at work at the end of the fifth century
B.C. or in the early part of the fourth century
B.C., and this is precisely the time when, if we
may judge from the historical and inscriptional
evidence, the old temple was destroyed and preparations
at least for rebuilding it were being
made. At all events, Pausanias cannot possibly
have supposed that the pupil of a man
who was at work in 427 B.C. can have executed
sculptures for a temple that was built in the
sixth century B.C. In short, neither was the
temple which Pausanias describes the temple of
the sixth century B.C. nor can he possibly have
supposed it to be so. The temple he describes
was in all probability the temple of the fourth
century B.C. His statement that the temple
was long in building is amply confirmed by the
inscriptions, which prove that the process of
reconstruction dragged on over a period of
many years.
Thus in every case an analysis of the
evidence adduced to prove that Pausanias described
a state of things which had passed away
before his time, reveals only some oversight or
misapprehension on the part of his critics. We
156might take it, therefore, without further discussion
that he described Greece as it was in his
own age. But if any reader is still sceptical,
still blinded by the phantom Polemo, let him
turn to Pausanias’s description of new Corinth
|New
Corinth.| and read it with attention. Here was a city
built in 44 B.C., more than a century after the
time of Polemo, upon whom Pausanias is supposed
by some to have been slavishly dependent.
Yet he describes the city minutely and in topographical
order, following up each street as it
led out of the market-place. Amongst the
many temples he mentions in it is one of
Octavia and another of Capitolian Jupiter;
among the many waterworks is the aqueduct
by which Hadrian, the author’s contemporary,
brought the water of the Stymphalian Lake to
Corinth. And his description of the city with
its temples, images, fountains, and portals is
amply borne out by coins of the Imperial age.
In the face of this single instance it is impossible
to maintain that Pausanias must needs
have borrowed most of his descriptions from
writers who lived before 170 B.C. If he could
describe Corinth so well without their aid, why
should he not have described Athens, Olympia,
and Delphi for himself? Nor does his power
of description fail him when he comes down to
works which were produced in his own lifetime.
Not to mention his many notices of the works
157of Hadrian, such as the Olympieum at Athens
with its colossal image of gold and ivory, and
the library with its columns of Phrygian marble,
its gilded roof, its alabaster ornaments, its
statues and paintings, he has given us a minute
account of the images dedicated by his contemporary
Herodes Atticus in the temple of
Poseidon at the Isthmus. |Images
dedicated
by Herodes
Atticus
at the
Isthmus.| He describes the
images of Amphitrite and Poseidon, made of
gold and ivory, standing erect in a car drawn
by gilt horses with ivory hoofs; the image of
Palaemon, also made of gold and ivory, standing
on a dolphin; the two Tritons beside the
horses, each of them made of gold from the
waist upward and of ivory from the waist downward;
and the reliefs on the pedestal of the
images, comprising a figure of the Sea holding
up the infant Aphrodite, with Nereids and the
Dioscuri on either side. If he could describe in
such detail the work of an obscure contemporary
artist whom he does not condescend to mention,
what reason have we to think that he could not
describe for himself the famous images by the
great hand of Phidias, the image of the Virgin
at Athens and the image of Zeus at Olympia?
In short, if Pausanias copied his descriptions
from a book, it must have been from a book
written in his own lifetime, perhaps by another
man of the same name. The theory of the
copyist Pausanias reduces itself to an absurdity.
Pausanias
and the
existing
monuments.
158The best proof that Pausanias has pictured
for us Greece as it was in his own day and not
as it had ceased to be long before, is supplied
by the monuments. In all parts of the country
the truthfulness of his descriptions has been
attested by remains of the buildings which he
describes, and wherever these remains are most
numerous, as for example at Olympia, Delphi,
and Lycosura, we have most reason to admire
his minute and painstaking accuracy. That he
was infallible has never been maintained, and if
it had been, the excavations would have refuted
so foolish a contention, for they have enabled
us to detect some errors into which he fell. For
example, he mistook the figure of a girl for that
of a man in the eastern gable of the temple of
Zeus at Olympia; he misinterpreted the attitude
of Hercules and Atlas in one of the
metopes of the same temple; he affirmed that
the colossal images at Lycosura were made of
a single block of marble, whereas we know that
they were made of several blocks fitted together;
and he described the temple of Athena Alea at
Tegea as the largest in Peloponnese, though in
fact it was much smaller than the temple of
Zeus at Olympia. These and similar mistakes,
like the slips he sometimes made in reading
inscriptions, do not lend any colour to an imputation
of bad faith. All they show is that
he shared the common weaknesses of humanity,
159that his eye sometimes deceived him, that his
attention sometimes flagged, that occasionally
he may have lent too ready an ear to the talk
of the local guides. If these are sins, they
are surely not unpardonable. Those who have
followed in his footsteps in Greece and have
formed from personal experience some idea,
necessarily slight, of the magnitude of the task he
set himself and of the difficulties he had to overcome
in accomplishing it, will probably be the
readiest to make allowance for inevitable imperfections,
will be most grateful to him for what
he has done, and least disposed to censure him
for what he has left undone. Without him the
ruins of Greece would for the most part be a
labyrinth without a clue, a riddle without an
answer. His book furnishes the clue to the
labyrinth, the answer to many riddles. It will
be read and studied so long as ancient Greece
shall continue to engage the attention and
awaken the interest of mankind; and if it is
allowable to forecast the results of research in
the future from those of research in the past we
may venture to predict that, while they will
correct the descriptions of Pausanias on some
minor points, they will confirm them on many
more, and will bring to light nothing to shake
the confidence of reasonable and fair-minded
men in his honour and good faith.
