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 in 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 and 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 by 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 is 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.

From 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 in 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., the 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.| Amongst 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 that 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 professors 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 weeping 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.

Some 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.

That 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 home 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 Tibur, 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 proceed, 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 them, 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 book, 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 capital, 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 readers 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 description, 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 to 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 mention 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 man 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 occasion 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 offered 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; that 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 |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 |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 the 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 plains 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 blue, 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 is 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 to 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 of 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 Greece—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 |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 whom 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.

1. “Antoninus the Second,” he tells us (viii. 43. 6), “inflicted punishment on the Germans, the most numerous and warlike barbarians in Europe.”

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. Thus 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 himself 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 of 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, he 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; an 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.

Again, 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, while 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 the 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. |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 conquest 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 united 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 market-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 the 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 herald 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 of 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 passed 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 not 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 arrival 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 friendship. 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 decent 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!’

2. This is an odd mistake. In point of fact half of the way is up hill and the other half is down hill. The road rises first gently and then steeply to the summit of the pass over Mount Parnes not far from the ancient Decelea; thence it descends, at first rapidly in sharp serpentine curves, then gradually through a rolling woodland country to the sea at Oropus.

“ 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 hanker 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 underground 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 water. 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.

“ 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 commerce 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 money 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, its 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 with 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, the 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 yield 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 of 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 Megalopolis 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 men 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 us 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, cherishes 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 have 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 in 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 measure 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 and 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 for 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 soldiers 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 infallible 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 he 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 men 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, without 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 not 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 for 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 out; 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 temperament 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 married 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 laws 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 Messenia, 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 chary 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 somewhat 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 |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 judgment 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 |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.

3. The date of Damophon is uncertain, but on the whole the evidence seems to point to his having been at work in the first half of the fourth century B.C. Pausanias’s appreciation of Damophon is one more proof of the independence of his judgment in matters of art; for Damophon is mentioned by no other writer of antiquity.

4. However, he admired Scopas as an architect if not as a sculptor (viii. 45. 5). The same may be said of Polyclitus (ii. 27. 5), though the building which Pausanias admired turns out to be by the younger and less distinguished artist of that name.

It may be noted as significant of Pausanias’s interest in the older sculpture that the only artists 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 |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 |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 in 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 Pausanias 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 built 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 of 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 his 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 of 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 a 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 river 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 oracles 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 style, 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 there 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 of 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 rises 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 fragments, 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 have 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 in 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 once 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 under 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 principles 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 narrative 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 weigh 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 the 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 note 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 few 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 |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 place 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 and 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 first 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 them 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 to 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 he 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.

More 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 have 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 proof 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, all 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 with 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 Pausanias 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.

Fragment 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 Argolis 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 she 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.

Fragment 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 sanctuary 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 Polemo. 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 minute 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 of 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.

All 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.

Yet 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, be 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 should 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 was 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 Strabo 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 to 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 earth 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.

5. When I last visited Mantinea, in October 1895, most of the ruins about the market-place, which were excavated by the French some ten years ago, had again disappeared beneath the soil.

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 disputed. 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 the 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 sculptures 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 might 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 of 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.

The 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, that 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.