Description of Greece

Description of Greece

Illustrated page of a 1485 manuscript of Description of Greece (Laurentian Library collection in Florence)
Author	Pausanias
Original title	Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις
Language	Greek
Subject	geography
Published	the second century AD
Publication place	Ancient Greece
Text	Description of Greece at Wikisource

Description of Greece (Ancient Greek: Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις, romanized: Helládos Periḗgēsis) is the only surviving work by the ancient "geographer" or tourist Pausanias (c. 110 – c. 180).

Map from Pausanias's Description of Greece. Translated with a commentary by J. G. Frazer (1898)

Pausanias' Description of Greece comprises ten books, each of them dedicated to some part of mainland Greece. He is essentially describing his own travels, and large parts of Greece are not covered, including the islands. His tour begins in Attica (Ἀττικά) and continues with Athens, including its suburbs or demes. Then the work goes with Corinthia (Κορινθιακά), Laconia (Λακωνικά), Messenia (Μεσσηνιακά), Elis (Ἠλιακά), Achaea (Ἀχαϊκά), Arcadia (Ἀρκαδικά), Boeotia (Βοιωτικά), Phocis (Φωκικά), and Ozolian Locris (Λοκρῶν Ὀζόλων).

The work is rather erratic on described topography; its main interest is the cultural geography of ancient Greece, especially its religious sites, in which Pausanias not only mentioned, and occasionally described, architectural and artistic objects, but also reviewed the historical and mythological underpinnings of the culture that created them. Recent decades, during which archaeology has confirmed various of his descriptions, have increased his credibility as a witness among scholars. In the 19th century his accounts were often regarded as unreliable.

We know nothing about Pausanias except what can be deduced from his book. There are no ancient mentions of either until the 6th century AD, and the book seems to have survived to the Middle Ages in a single manuscript, itself now lost. However, it attracted great interest in the Renaissance, and was copied in manuscript several times, before being first printed in 1516.

Description

Pausanias was motivated by his interest in religion, mythology, and the local legends around religious sites. His work has been regarded as some kind of "journey into identity", referring to that of the Greek beliefs and heritage. Pausanias describes the religious art and sacred architecture of many famous sites such as Olympia and Delphi. Although as a critic of art and architecture he is usually vague and frustratingly brief, his few words are often or usually the only surviving literary source from antiquity, and of great interest to historians and archaeologists.

Even in the most remote Greek regions, he was fascinated by many kinds of holy relics, depictions of deities, and other mysterious and sacred things. For example, at Thebes, Pausanias views the ruins of the house of the poet Pindar, the shields of warriors who died at the famous Battle of Leuctra, the statues of Arion, Hesiod, Orpheus, and Thamyris. He also visited the grove of the Muses on Helicon and saw the portraits of Polybius and of Corinna at Tanagra in Arcadia.

Pausanias was mostly interested in relics of antiquity, rather than contemporary architecture or sacred spaces. As Christian Habicht, a modern day classicist who wrote a multitude of scholarly articles on Pausanias, says: "He definitely prefers the sacred to the profane and the old to the new, and there is much more about classical art of Greece than the about contemporary, more about gods, altars, and temples, than about statues of politicians or public buildings."

Although he was no naturalist, he often gives brief comments on the physical aspects of the ancient landscapes he passed through. Pausanias wrote about the pine trees located on the coast of Ancient Elis, the wild boars and the deer in the oak woods of Seliana (Phelloe), and the crows amid the oak trees in Alalcomenae. Towards the end of Description of Greece, Pausanias touches on the fruits of nature and products, such as the date palms of ancient Aulis, the wild strawberries at Mount Helicon, the olive oil in Tithorea, as well as the "white blackbirds" of Mount Kyllini (Cyllene) and the tortoises of Arcadia.

The end of Description of Greece remains mysterious: some believe that Pausanias died before finishing his work, and others believe his strange ending was intentional. He concludes his Periegesis with a story about a Greek author, thought to be Anyte of Tegea, who has a divine dream. In the dream, she is told to present the text of Description of Greece to a wider Greek audience in order to open their eyes to "all things Greek".

Reception

Title page of the Amaseo edition, Frankfurt, 1583.

Description of Greece left only faint traces in the known Greek corpus. "It was not read", Habicht relates, "there is not a single quotation from it, not even a single mention of the author, not a whisper before the sixth century (Stephanus Byzantius), and only three or two references to it throughout the Middle Ages." Eighteen surviving manuscripts of Pausanias were known in the 1830s, copies from the fifteenth or sixteenth century, with three perhaps older than the rest. They are full of lacunae and errors, and all appear to depend on a single manuscript, now missing, that managed to be copied. Niccolò Niccoli, a collector of manuscripts from antiquity, had this archetype in Florence around 1418. After his death in 1437, it was sent to the library of San Marco, Florence, ultimately disappearing after 1500.

The first printed edition (editio princeps) was printed in 1516 in Venice, by the firm of Aldus Manutius (who had died the previous year). The editor was Marcus Musurus (Greek: Μάρκος Μουσοῦρος Markos Mousouros; Italian: Marco Musuro; c. 1470 – 1517) from Venetian Crete who had made his career in Italy, and already edited many classic Greek authors.

It was translated into Latin by Romolo Amaseo, printed in Rome in 1547, with a combined Greek and Latin edition from Thomas Fritsch of Leipzig in 1696. An Italian translation followed in 1593 (Mantua by Alfonso Bonacciuoli). A French translation by Nicolas Gédoyn was published in 1731. It was again translated into Latin by Germans, published in 1896.

English translations

Translations into English begin rather late, with Thomas Taylor (London, 1794). A widely known version of the text was translated by William Henry Samuel Jones and is available through the Loeb Classical Library. The translation as Guide to Greece by Peter Levi is popular among English speakers, but is often thought to be a loose translation of the original text: Levi took liberties with his translation that restructured Description of Greece to function like a general guidebook to mainland Greece. Sir James George Frazer also published six volumes of translation and commentary of Description of Greece; his translation remains a credible work of scholarship to readers of Pausanias today.

See also

• Ptolemy's Geography
• Strabo's Geography

References

• Diller, Aubrey (1957). "The Manuscripts of Pausanias". Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. 88: 169–188. doi:10.2307/283902. JSTOR 283902.
• Elsner, John (1992). "Pausanias: a Greek pilgrim in the Roman world". Past and Present. 135 (1): 3–29. doi:10.1093/past/135.1.3. JSTOR 650969.
• Habicht, Christian (1985). "An Ancient Baedeker and His Critics: Pausanias' 'Guide to Greece'". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 129 (2): 220–224. JSTOR 986990.
• Habicht, Christian (April 1984). "Pausanias and the Evidence of Inscriptions". Classical Antiquity. 3 (1): 40–56. doi:10.2307/25010806. JSTOR 25010806.
• Habicht, Christian (1985). Pausanias' Guide to Ancient Greece. University of California Press. doi:10.1525/9780520342200. ISBN 978-0-520-34220-0.
• MacCormack, S. (November 2010). "Pausanias and his commentator Sir James George Frazer". Classical Receptions Journal. 2 (2): 287–313. doi:10.1093/crj/clq010.
• Pausanias (1918). Description of Greece. Vol. 1. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-434-99093-1.
• Sidebottom, H. (December 2002). "Pausanias: Past, Present, and Closure". The Classical Quarterly. 52 (2): 494–499. doi:10.1093/cq/52.2.494.

Further reading

• Fowler, Harold N. (1 September 1898). "Pausanias's Description of Greece". American Journal of Archaeology. 2 (5): 357–366. doi:10.2307/496590. JSTOR 496590. S2CID 192974043.
• Howard, Michael C. (2012). Transnationalism in Ancient and Medieval Societies: The Role of Cross-Border Trade and Travel. McFarland. p. 178.
• Hutton, William. Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Jacob, Christian; Mullen-Hohl, Anne (1980). "The Greek Traveler's Areas of Knowledge: Myths and Other Discourses in Pausanias' Description of Greece". Yale French Studies (59): 65–85. doi:10.2307/2929815. JSTOR 2929815.

External links

Media related to Pausanias's Description of Greece at Wikimedia Commons

• Online text (the Jones translation) www.theoi.com