Pausanias - Guide to Greece: Southern Greece

Any commentary on Pausanias, even the thinnest, must rest on a huge structure of other peoples knowledge; no one could possibly be his own expert in everything Pausanias talked about. It is inevitable that in some field or other, perhaps in many, one will have missed important recent or old contributions to the understanding of what Pausanias wrote. If I have made mistakes of this kind (as I am bound to have done) I would be most grateful to hear of them, and in the cause of public utility to correct them either in a future edition of this book or at least in a much fuller commentary on which I am now working.

I would like to thank friends and colleagues for tolerance and for assistance. I owe more than I can express to the kindness and encouragement of Professor E. R. Dodds and Professor Eduard Fraenkel. Without their blessing I should not have undertaken this or any other work on a classical author. This book owes its existence also to the friendly interest of Professor Martin Robertson and Mr John Boardman, and most of all to the delightful and inspiring conversation and sympathetic friendship of Miss Nancy Sandars.

It is hard to know how to thank ones friends whom one feels one ought always to be thanking, but over this book I do owe particular thanks to Mr John Newberry for his drawings, to Mr Philip Sherrard and to Canon Francis Bartlett, to Mr Cyril Connolly, Mr and Mrs Watson, Mr George Pavlopoulos, Mr Takis Loumiotis and to Sir Maurice Bowra. Within the charmed circle of Campion Hall, links are too close for thanks to be permitted. Finally I should like to express my sincere thanks to the members of the British School of Archaeology in Athens in 1965-7 for many constant pleasures and for constant and most practical help and advice, particularly to Mr Geoffrey Waywell, Miss Jeffery and Lord William Taylour.

Campion Hall, Oxford September 1969

Virtually everything we know about the author of this book depends on the internal evidence of the book itself. Pausanias seems to have lived for a time in an inland Greek city near Mount Sipylos in Asia Minor, presumably Magnesia, and was perhaps born there. He had already passed the middle of his life when he began to write, and worked on his Guide toGreece for at least fourteen years between the late fifties and the late seventies of the second century A.D. , in what seems to us to be the lucid and inspiring afterglow of the Antonine age. He wrote for Roman philhellenes in the Greek language, sometimes elaborately and sometimes carelessly there are passages in his work which read like hasty dictation at a miraculously chosen moment. Nero had stolen some treasures, Akarnania and Achaia were poverty-stricken and depopulated to build Augustuss great Roman cities: Thebes of course had been broken to pieces by the Macedonians and ancient Corinth by Rome: but every other important monument of Greek antiquity was still standing in his time. Here and there a temple had been moved bodily, ivy had covered an inscription, a roof had fallen in, but his was the only lifetime in which the final embellishments of Hadrian and of Herod of Athens could be seen, yet the seventeen centuries of neglect had not begun. Pausanias was not the first to write this kind of book; Strabo, writing under Augustus, and the fragments of Dikaiarchos are enough to prove it was a recognized genre. But the value of Pausanias to archaeologists and to all classical scholars is unique and astonishing.

Of course he used textbooks and compilations which existed in his day but which have since perished. The marked variations in his prose style often reflect a change of sources. But we know that he actually visited the sites he talks about, since he tells us so in so many words. His criteria for what to believe and what not to believe involved observation and personal reasoning, but they were also conventional: they are clearly stated by his contemporary Artemidoros (Oneirocrit. 4, 47) with some of the same examples. In Athens he belonged to a circle of almost professional antiquaries; he worked in great libraries; he consulted the sacred officials and city guides whom Plutarch describes at Delphi and who existed in every city. Pausanias seems to have been a doctor; he was interested in questions of anatomy and personally devoted to the healing god Asklepios. When he was old he became addicted to bird-watching, and complained about steep hills and bad roads. He had the kind of interest in natural science one might expect in an early member of the Royal Society. As a young man he seems to have been an expert on Homeric questions, but the bitterness and malice of scholars in this field drove him to abandon literary criticism.