Pausanias (geographer)

For other people by this name, see Pausanias.

Pausanias
Illustrated page of a 1485 manuscript of Description of Greece by Pausanias (Laurentian Library collection in Florence)
Born	c. 110 AD Lydia, Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey)
Died	c. 180 AD (aged about 70)
Occupation(s)	Traveler and geographer

Pausanias (/pɔːˈseɪniəs/ paw-SAY-nee-əs; Greek: Παυσανίας; c. 110 – c. 180) was a Greek traveler and geographer of the second century AD. He is famous for his Description of Greece (Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις, Hēlládos Periḗgēsis), a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from his firsthand observations. Description of Greece provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology, which is providing evidence of the sites and cultural details he mentions although knowledge of their existence may have become lost or relegated to myth or legend.

Biography

Nothing is known about Pausanias apart from what historians can piece together from his own writing. However, it is probable that he was born c. 110 AD into a Greek family and was probably a native of Lydia in Asia Minor. From c. 150 until his death around 180, Pausanias travelled throughout the mainland of Greece, writing about various monuments, sacred spaces, and significant geographical sites along the way. In writing his Description of Greece, Pausanias sought to put together a lasting written account of "all things Greek", or panta ta hellenika.

Living in the Roman Empire

Being born in Asia Minor, Pausanias was of Greek heritage. He grew up and lived under the rule of the Roman Empire, but valued his Greek identity, history, and culture. He was keen to describe the glories of a Greek past that still was relevant in his lifetime, even if the country was beholden to Rome as a dominating imperial force. Pausanias's pilgrimage throughout the land of his ancestors was his own attempt to establish a place in the world for this new Roman Greece, connecting myths and stories of ancient culture to those of his own time.

Writing style

Pausanias has a straightforward and simple writing style. He is, overall, direct in his language, writing his stories and descriptions unelaborately. However, some translators have noted that Pausanias's use of various prepositions and tenses may be confusing and difficult to render in English. For example, Pausanias may use a past tense verb rather than the present tense in some instances. Their interpretation is that he did this in order to make it seem as if he were in the same temporal setting as his audience.

Unlike a modern day travel guide, in Description of Greece Pausanias tends to elaborate with discussion of an ancient ritual or to impart a myth related to the site he is visiting. His style of writing would not become popular again until the early nineteenth century when contemporary travel guides resembled his. In the topographical aspect of his work, Pausanias makes many natural history digressions on the wonders of nature documented at the time, the signs that herald the approach of an earthquake, the phenomena of the tides, the ice-bound seas of the north, and that at the summer solstice the noonday sun casts no shadow at Syene (Aswan).

While he never doubts the existence of the deities and heroes, he criticizes some of the myths and legends he encountered during his travels as differing from earlier cultural traditions that he relates or notes. His descriptions of monuments of art are plain and unadorned, bearing a solid impression of reality.

Pausanias is frank in acknowledging personal limitations. When he quotes information at second hand rather than relating his own experiences, he is honest about his sourcing, sometimes confirming contemporary knowledge by him that may be lost to modern researchers.

Modern views of Pausanias

Until twentieth-century archaeologists concluded that Pausanias was a reliable guide to sites being excavated, classicists largely had dismissed the writings of Pausanias as purely literary. Following their presumed authoritative contemporary Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, classicists tended to regard him as little more than a purveyor of second-hand accounts and believed that Pausanias had not visited most of the places that he described. Modern archaeological research, however, has been revealing the accuracy of information imparted by Pausanias, and even its potential as a guide for further investigations. Research into Tartessos exemplifies where his writing about it is aiding contemporary archaeological research into its existence, location, and culture.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Pausanias (traveller)". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 20 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography

• Diller, Aubrey (1957). "The Manuscripts of Pausanias". Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. 88: 169–188. doi:10.2307/283902. JSTOR 283902.
• Elsner, John (1992). "Pausanias: a Greek pilgrim in the Roman world". Past and Present (135): 3–29. doi:10.1093/past/135.1.3. JSTOR 650969.
• Fowler, Harold N. (September 1898). "Pausanias's Description of Greece". American Journal of Archaeology. 2 (5): 357–366. doi:10.2307/496590. JSTOR 496590. S2CID 192974043.
• Habicht, Christian (1985). "An Ancient Baedeker and His Critics: Pausanias' 'Guide to Greece'". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 129 (2): 220–224. JSTOR 986990.
• Habicht, Christian (April 1984). "Pausanias and the Evidence of Inscriptions". Classical Antiquity. 3 (1): 40–56. doi:10.2307/25010806. JSTOR 25010806.
• Habicht, Christian (1985). Pausanias' Guide to Ancient Greece. University of California Press. doi:10.1525/9780520342200. ISBN 978-0-520-34220-0.
• Howard, Michael C. (2012). Transnationalism in Ancient and Medieval Societies: The Role of Cross-Border Trade and Travel. McFarland. p. 178.
• Hutton, William. Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Jacob, Christian; Mullen-Hohl, Anne (1980). "The Greek Traveler's Areas of Knowledge: Myths and Other Discourses in Pausanias' Description of Greece". Yale French Studies (59): 65–85. doi:10.2307/2929815. JSTOR 2929815.
• MacCormack, S. (November 2010). "Pausanias and his commentator Sir James George Frazer". Classical Receptions Journal. 2 (2): 287–313. doi:10.1093/crj/clq010.
• Pausanias (1918). Description of Greece. Vol. 1. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-434-99093-1.
• Sidebottom, H. (December 2002). "Pausanias: Past, Present, and Closure". The Classical Quarterly. 52 (2): 494–499. doi:10.1093/cq/52.2.494.

Further reading

• Akujärvi, J. (2005). Researcher, Traveller, Narrator: Studies in Pausanias' Periegesis. Studia graeca et Latina lundensia 12. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.
• Alcock, Susan E.; Cherry, John F.; Elsner, Jas, eds. (9 October 2003). Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-534683-1.
• Arafat, K. W. (1992). "Pausanias' Attitude to Antiquities". The Annual of the British School at Athens. 87: 387–409. doi:10.1017/S0068245400015227. JSTOR 30103516. S2CID 176428187.
• Arafat, K. (1996). Pausanias' Greece: Ancient Artists and Roman Rulers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Diller, Aubrey (1956). "Pausanias in the Middle Ages". Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. 87: 84–97. doi:10.2307/283874. JSTOR 283874.
• Dunn, Francis M. (1995). "Pausanias on the Tomb of Medea's Children". Mnemosyne. 48 (3): 348–351. JSTOR 4432507.
• Hernández, Juan Pablo Sánchez (2016). "Pausanias and Rome's Eastern Trade". Mnemosyne. 69 (6): 955–977. doi:10.1163/1568525X-12341878. JSTOR 44505014.
• Hutton, W. E. (2005). Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias. Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Pirenne-Delforge, V. (2008). Retour à la Source: Pausanias et la Religion Grecque. Kernos Supplément 20. Liège, Belgium: Centre International d‘Étude de la Religion Grecque.
• Pretzler, Maria (2004). "Turning Travel into Text: Pausanias at Work". Greece & Rome. 51 (2): 199–216. doi:10.1093/gr/51.2.199. JSTOR 3567811. ProQuest 200048503.
• Pretzler, Maria (2005). "Pausanias and Oral Tradition". The Classical Quarterly. 55 (1): 235–249. doi:10.1093/cq/bmi017. JSTOR 3556252. ProQuest 201669878.
• Pretzler, Maria (2007). Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece. Classical Literature and Society. London: Duckworth.

External links

• Pausanias Description of Greece, tr. with a commentary by J.G. Frazer, 6 volumes (1898) (also at the Internet Archive)
• Pausanias at the Perseus Project: Greek; English (Jones trans. 1918)
• Description of Greece, Jones translation at Theoi Project
• New translation by Gregory Nagy of Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies (incomplete). (archived, 2020)
• Bibliography (in French)
• "The Oldest Guide-Book in the World", Charles Whibley in Macmillan's Magazine, Vol. LXXVII, Nov. 1897 to Apr. 1898, pp. 415–421.
• Andrew Stewart, One Hundred Greek Sculptors, Their Careers and Extant Works
• G. Hawes, Rationalizing myth in antiquity. Oxford: OUP, 2013 ISBN 9780199672776 contains much discussion of Pausanias' sceptical approaches to myth.