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STUDIES
IN
GREEK SCENERY, LEGEND
AND HISTORY
SELECTED FROM HIS COMMENTARY ON
PAUSANIAS’ ‘DESCRIPTION OF GREECE’
BY
SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER
FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
AUTHOR OF ‘THE GOLDEN BOUGH’
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1917
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_First published under the title, “Pausanias and other Greek Sketches,”
1900_
_Reprinted 1917_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
The Englishman in Greece who pays any heed to the remains of classical
antiquity is apt, if he be no scholar, to wonder who a certain Pausanias
was whose authority he finds often quoted on questions of ancient
buildings and sites. The first of the following sketches may do
something to satisfy his curiosity on this head. It has already served
as an introduction to a version of Pausanias’s _Description of Greece_
which I published with a commentary two years ago. The account of
Pericles was contributed to the ninth edition of the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_. I desire to thank Messrs. A. and C. Black for their
courteous permission to republish it. The other sketches are reprinted,
with some small changes and adjustments of detail, from my commentary on
Pausanias. References to authorities have been omitted as needless in a
book which is not specially addressed to the learned. Any one who wishes
to pursue the subject further will find my authorities amply cited in
the original volumes. Among works from which I have borrowed both
outlines and colours for some of my sketches of Greek landscape I will
here mention only two—the _Erinnerungen und Eindrücke aus Griechenland_
of the Swiss scholar W. Vischer, and the _Peloponnes_ of the German
geologist Mr. A. Philippson. Slight and fragmentary as these sketches
are, I am not without hope that they may convey to readers who have
never seen Greece something of the eternal charm of its scenery. To such
as already know and love the country they will yet be welcome, if here
and there they revive some beautiful or historic scene on those tablets
of the mind from which even the brightest hues so quickly fade.
J. G. F.
CAMBRIDGE, _March 30, 1900_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
1. PAUSANIAS AND HIS DESCRIPTION OF GREECE 1
2. OROPUS 160
3. RHAMNUS 163
4. MARATHON 165
5. PRASIAE 174
6. MOUNT HYMETTUS 178
7. MOUNT PENTELICUS 182
8. PHYLE 187
9. THE PORT OF ATHENS 191
10. THE SACRED WAY 209
11. THE HALL OF INITIATION AT ELEUSIS 214
12. ELEUTHERAE 216
13. MEGARA 219
14. THE SCIRONIAN ROAD 220
15. THE ISTHMUS OF CORINTH 223
16. THE BATH OF APHRODITE 226
17. THE PROSPECT FROM ACRO-CORINTH 227
18. THE CAPTURE OF CORINTH BY ARATUS 228
19. SICYON 232
20. PHLIASIA 233
21. NEMEA 237
22. THE PASS OF THE TRETUS 238
23. MYCENAE 242
24. THE END OF THE MYCENAEAN AGE 245
25. MOUNT ARACHNAEUS 248
26. EPIDAURUS 249
27. THE TEMPLE IN AEGINA 251
28. THE SANCTUARY OF POSEIDON IN CALAURIA 252
29. TROEZEN 253
30. FROM TROEZEN TO EPIDAURUS 255
31. METHANA 260
32. NAUPLIA 261
33. THE SPRINGS OF THE ERASINUS 263
34. THE LERNEAN MARSH 266
35. THE ANIGRAEAN ROAD 269
36. THE BATTLEFIELD OF SELLASIA 270
37. SPARTA 271
38. MISTRA 274
39. ON THE ROAD FROM SPARTA TO ARCADIA 278
40. CAPE MALEA 279
41. MONEMVASIA 281
42. MAINA 282
43. PHARAE AND THE MESSENIAN PLAIN 284
44. MESSENE 285
45. ON THE ROAD TO OLYMPIA 287
46. OLYMPIA 290
47. PHIDIAS’S IMAGE OF OLYMPIAN ZEUS 292
48. THE HERMES OF PRAXITELES 293
49. LASION 296
50. THE ERYMANTHUS 299
51. THE MONASTERY OF MEGASPELEUM 300
52. THE GULF OF CORINTH 301
53. ON THE COAST OF ACHAIA 303
54. PELLENE 304
55. THE ROAD FROM ARGOS TO ARCADIA 306
56. MANTINEA 308
57. THE ROAD TO STYMPHALUS 310
58. THE LAKE AND VALLEY OF STYMPHALUS 312
59. THE LAKE OF PHENEUS 315
60. FROM PHENEUS TO NONACRIS 320
61. THE FALL OF THE STYX 324
62. THE VALLEY OF THE AROANIUS 330
63. THE SPRINGS OF THE LADON 331
64. THE GORGE OF THE LADON 333
65. ALIPHERA 336
66. DIMITSANA 337
67. GORTYS 338
68. THE PLAIN OF MEGALOPOLIS 342
69. THE CAVE OF THE BLACK DEMETER 343
70. THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT BASSAE 345
71. THE TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS AT AULIS 346
72. GLAUCUS’S LEAP 347
73. EVENING ON THE EURIPUS 349
74. THE COPAIC LAKE 349
75. THE GREAT KATAVOTHRA 355
76. THE VALE OF THE MUSES 357
77. HIPPOCRENE 358
78. LEBADEA 359
79. THE BOEOTIAN ORCHOMENUS 361
80. THE PLAIN OF CHAERONEA 364
81. PANOPEUS 364
82. NEAR HYAMPOLIS 365
83. TITHOREA 366
84. FROM AMPHISSA TO GRAVIA 369
85. DAULIS 371
86. THE CLEFT WAY 373
87. DELPHI 374
88. AESCHINES AT DELPHI 378
89. THE PYTHIAN TUNE 379
90. THE LACEDAEMONIAN TROPHY AT DELPHI 380
91. THE GODS IN BATTLE 382
92. THE SIBYL’S WISH 384
93. ORPHEUS IN HELL 386
94. THE ACHERON 387
95. A RIDE ACROSS PARNASSUS 389
96. PERICLES 392
PAUSANIAS | AND OTHER GREEK SKETCHES
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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
[Sidenote: 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
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.”
[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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.
-----
Footnote 1:
“Antoninus the Second,” he tells us (viii. 43. 6), “inflicted
punishment on the Germans, the most numerous and warlike barbarians in
Europe.”
-----
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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. 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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!’
-----
Footnote 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 fortitude. 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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!
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.”
[Sidenote: His
scepticism
as to hell.]