CONTENTS (continued 2)

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, 68the 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 69yield to that temptation of distorting and discolouring the facts to which men of bright fancy are peculiarly exposed, of whom it has been well said that they are like the angels who veil their faces with their wings.

Character of Pausanias.

In truth Pausanias was a man made of common stuff and cast in a common mould. His intelligence and abilities seem to have been little above the average, his opinions not very different from those of his contemporaries. |His political opinions.| While he looked back with regret to the great age of Greek freedom, he appears to have acquiesced in the Roman dominion as inevitable, acknowledging the incapacity of the degenerate Greeks to govern themselves, the general clemency of the Roman rule, and especially the wisdom and beneficence of the good emperors under whom it was his happiness to live. Of democracy he had no admiration. He thought the Athenians the only people who ever throve under it, and on observing that the slaves who fought and died for Athens were buried with their masters, he remarks with apparent surprise that even a democracy can occasionally be just. With his turn for study and for brooding over the past, it was natural that he should prefer a life of privacy to the cares and turmoils of a public career. Accordingly we find that he admired the prudence of Isocrates who lived placidly to old age in the shade and tranquillity 70of 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 71Megalopolis lying in ruins brings to his mind the high hopes with which it had been founded, and that again ushers in a train of melancholy reflexions on the instability of human affairs. He thinks how from so many golden cities of the ancient world—from Nineveh and Babylon, from Thebes and Mycenae—the glory had passed away; how nature itself, which seems so stable, is subject to great mutations; how transitory, then, is earthly glory, how brief and frail the life of man!

His ethical views.

On the passions which move men and make history he seems to have thought much like other people. He knew that avarice is the cause of many crimes, and that love is the source both of great happiness and of great misery. Yet he appears to have held that the mischief wrought by the passion of love outweighs the good it brings; for after telling how, by washing in the river Selemnus, men and women were supposed to forget their love, he adds that if there is any truth in this story great riches are less precious to mankind than the water of the Selemnus. Again, he has a sincere admiration for the heroic virtues, and a genuine detestation of baseness and depravity of all sorts. Treason he stigmatises as the foulest of crimes. He considers that the bold and disinterested patriot Thrasybulus, who freed his country and healed her dissensions, was the best of all the famous 72men of Athens, and that the deed of Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae was the most splendid feat of arms in Grecian history. He praises his Spartan namesake for his courteous treatment of the captive Coan lady and for rejecting the base proposal of the wretch who would have had him mutilate the corpse of the gallant Mardonius. He speaks with sympathy of the brave men worthy of a happier fate who fell on the tyrant Lachares, of those who would have wrested Piraeus from the Macedonians had they not been done by their confederates to death, and of those others whom on the great day Cimon led to victory by sea and land. He tells how in the last fight with the Romans, before the day was lost, the Achaean general fled, leaving his men to shift for themselves, and he contrasts his selfish cowardice with the soldierly devotion of an Athenian cavalry officer who on the disastrous retreat from Syracuse brought off his regiment safe, then wheeled about and, riding back alone, found the death he sought in the midst of the enemy.

His religious opinions. Belief in the gods.

In religion as in morals Pausanias seems to have occupied a position not unlike that of his contemporaries. That it did not occur to him to doubt the existence of the gods and heroes of Greek mythology is clear from the tenour of his work as well as from many observations which he lets fall. Thus for example, he tells 73us 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, 74cherishes an unfaltering faith in the reality of the goddess. Again, he denies that Semele was ever, as Greek tradition would have it, rescued from hell by Dionysus, and the reason he gives for his incredulity is that Semele was the wife of Zeus and therefore could not die. Yet again, after telling the legend of Eurypylus and the wonderful chest in which he kept a portable god, he mentions only to reject the tradition that Eurypylus received the chest from Hercules. “Sure am I,” says he, “that Hercules knew all about the chest, if it really was such a wonderful chest, and I do not believe that knowing about it he would ever have given it away to a comrade in arms.” Once more, Pausanias cannot bring himself to believe that Hercules ever carried his anger at a friend’s daughter so far as to condemn her to remain a spinster for the rest of her days and to serve him in that capacity as his priestess. He opines that while Hercules was still among men, “punishing other people for presumption and especially for impiety, it is not likely that he would have established a temple with a priestess all for himself, just as if he were a god.”

His scepticism as to hell.

There is one side, however, of Greek religion as to which Pausanias shows himself consistently sceptical, if not incredulous. He had serious doubts as to the existence of a subterranean hell. “It is not easy,” he says, “to believe that gods 75have an underground abode in which the souls of the dead assemble.” He speaks of the “supposed subterranean realm” of Pluto, and in the cave at Taenarum, which was thought to be one of the mouths of hell, he looked in vain for any passage leading down to the nether world. Cerberus in particular, the hound of hell, is roughly handled by Pausanias, who ruthlessly strips him of his superfluous heads, reduces him to a commonplace serpent, and seems to take a malicious pleasure in enumerating all the places where the animal was said to have been haled up by Hercules. But though Pausanias had his doubts as to hell, he seems to have believed in the existence of the soul after death; for in a passage which has been already quoted he speaks of the punishment that awaits the wicked in another life. At the same time his belief in the doctrine was apparently not very firm; at least he refers to it somewhat hesitatingly in mentioning the Messenian tradition that the soul of the dead hero Aristomenes had fought against his old foes the Lacedaemonians at Leuctra. “The first people,” he there tells us, “who asserted that the soul of man is immortal were the Chaldeans and the Indian magicians; and some of the Greeks believed them, especially Plato, the son of Aristo. If everybody accepts this tenet, there can be no gainsaying the view that hatred of the Lacedaemonians has rankled 76in the heart of Aristomenes through all the ages.”

His attitude to various deities.

Amongst the gods Pausanias assigns the first place to Zeus. He alone is superior to Destiny, to which all the other gods must submit; he is the ruler and guide of the Fates, and knows all that they have in store for man. Of the Fates themselves Fortune is, in our author’s opinion, the most powerful; she it is whose resistless might sweeps all things along at her will, determining the growth and decay of cities, the revolutions of nature, and the destiny of man. Yet Pausanias’s own devotions seem to have been paid rather to Demeter than to Zeus or the Fates. He visited Phigalia chiefly for the sake of the Black Demeter to whom he sacrificed at the mouth of the cave; he relates at length the history of her image; and he describes in unusual detail the sanctuary and images of Demeter and Proserpine at Lycosura. Again, he had been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries; he loves to trace their diffusion from Eleusis over the rest of Greece; he speaks of the Andanian mysteries as second in point of sanctity to the Eleusinian alone; he tells us that the Greeks of an earlier age esteemed the latter as far above all other religious exercises as the gods were above heroes; and he expresses his own conviction that there was nothing on which the blessing of God rested in so full a 77measure as on the rites of Eleusis and the Olympic games. His religious awe of the mysteries, silencing his antiquarian garrulity, forbade him to describe not only the rites but the sacred precincts in which they were celebrated. Once more, on Mount Panhellenius in Aegina he sacrificed to the images of the kindred deities Damia and Auxesia according to the ritual observed in sacrificing at Eleusis. Another deity in whom Pausanias seems to have been especially interested was Aesculapius. He examines the legends of the god’s parentage, discusses his nature, and traces the spread of his worship from Epidaurus. Along with his belief in the gods and in the resistless power of Fate our author apparently cherished a dim faith in a divine providence which watches over the affairs of man. In speaking of the exploits of Theseus in Crete he remarks that “nothing less than the hand of Providence could reasonably be supposed to have brought him and his comrades safe back, guiding him through all the mazy intricacies of the labyrinth, and leading him unseen, when his work was done, through the midst of his enemies.”

His belief in the active interference of the gods in human affairs.

The gods, in the opinion of Pausanias, were neither cold abstractions nor blessed beings who, lapped in the joys of heaven, took no thought for the affairs of earth. They actively interfered in the course of events, rewarding the virtuous 78and punishing the wicked. They were the givers of good things to men; and if their rewards had been more open and manifest in days of old, the prosperity of the pious Athenians was a standing proof that even in later times the gods had not forgotten to recompense their worshippers. Yet, like most people who lay themselves out to justify the ways of God to man, Pausanias was readier to detect the hand of the deity in the miseries and misfortunes of his fellow-creatures than in their joys and blessings. The confidence with which he lays his finger on the precise misdeed which drew down on a malefactor the wrath of a justly offended god implies an astonishing familiarity with the counsels of the Almighty. He knew that the Persians were defeated at Marathon because they had angered Nemesis by bringing, in the pride of their hearts, a block of marble which they proposed to set up as a trophy of their expected victory; that the destruction of Sparta and Helice by earthquakes was due to the wrath of Poseidon at the violation of his sanctuaries; that the ruin and death of Mithridates had been brought to pass by Apollo, whose sacred island had been sacked by the king’s general; that Sulla’s miserable end was a direct consequence of his guilt in tearing Aristion from the sanctuary of Athena; and that the wrath of the Eleusinian goddesses abode on the Megarians 79for ever because they had encroached on the sacred land and murdered a herald who warned them to desist. Again, he shrewdly suspects that the long misfortunes of the Messenians flowed directly from the anger of the Dioscuri at the impious presumption of two Messenian youths; and he surmises that gods and heroes combined to wreak their displeasure on the devoted head of Cleomenes, who had tampered with the Delphic oracle, ravaged the sacred Eleusinian land, and burned the grove of the hero Argus. The Delphic Apollo was quick and powerful, according to Pausanias, to defend his honour and to visit with vengeance the sacrilegious persons who dared to assail his sanctuary or rifle his treasures. King Archidamus, who had fingered the sacred moneys, fell in battle in a foreign land and his corpse weltered unburied; the Phlegyans, who made a raid on Delphi, perished by thunderbolts and earthquakes; and it was in all the majesty of thunder, lightning, and earthquake that at a later time the god stood forth to repel the Gauls. Amongst the punishments with which the gods were thought to visit unwarranted intrusions into their sanctuaries, blindness and madness had a special place. King Aepytus, on forcing his way into the shrine of Poseidon at Mantinea, which none might enter, was instantly struck blind and died soon afterwards; some Persian 80soldiers who ventured into the sanctuary of the Cabiri near Thebes became crazed and in that state put an end to themselves; and it was believed that if any defiled or impious person entered the sanctuary of the Eumenides at Cerynea he would go mad on the spot.

His belief in oracles.

Believing in the gods, Pausanias naturally believed in their official utterances, the oracles. The Delphic oracle, he thinks, foretold the battle of Leuctra and various episodes in the Messenian wars; and he appeals to one of its answers as conclusive evidence that the mother of Aesculapius was Coronis. He relates how the accidental exposure of the bones of Orpheus was followed by the destruction of the city of Libethra in accordance with a prediction of Dionysus in Thrace, and he narrates the fatal disasters which Epaminondas, Hannibal, and the Athenians incurred by misunderstanding oracular answers sent them from Delphi, Ammon, and Dodona. The history of Macedonia, its rise and its fall, had been predicted by the Sibyl, if we may believe Pausanias, who quotes her prophecy; and he assures us that the inroad of the Gauls into Asia had been foretold by Phaennis a generation before the event took place. He had himself consulted the oracle of Trophonius, and has left us a curious account of the ceremonies observed by enquirers at the shrine. In his day, he informs us, the most 81infallible oracle was that of Amphilochus at Mallus in Cilicia.

His criticism of myths.

Yet while Pausanias accepted on the whole the religion of his country, he was by no means blind to the discrepancies and improbabilities of many Greek myths and legends, and he speaks somewhat disdainfully of the unquestioning faith of the multitude in the stories they had heard from childhood. “Falsehood in general,” he says, “passes current among the multitude because they are ignorant of history and believe all that they have heard from childhood in choirs and tragedies.” And again he observes that “it is not easy to persuade the vulgar to change their opinions.” From the former of these passages it appears that Pausanias was little disposed to place implicit faith in the utterances of the poets on matters of tradition. Elsewhere he intimates his doubts still more plainly. Speaking of the hydra, which he maintains had not more than one head, he says that the poet Pisander multiplied the creature’s heads “to make the monster more terrific, and to add to the dignity of his own verses.” Again, he mentions that the poets have declared certain objects of art to be works of Hephaestus, and that obsequious public opinion has chimed in with them, but he for his part rejects all such relics as spurious save one. The only poet to whose authority 82he inclined to bow was Homer, whose testimony he often appeals to with respect. He held that many old stories were true enough in their origin, but had fallen into discredit by reason of the distortions and exaggerations to which they had been subjected by the narrators. The particular story which suggests this remark is the legend that Lycaon had been turned into a wolf on sacrificing a babe to Lycaean Zeus. Pausanias believes the legend, but he rejects as incredible the assertion that at every subsequent sacrifice to Zeus on Mount Lycaeus a man had been turned into a wolf, and he does not stick to brand as humbugs the persons who gave out that the Arcadian boxer Damarchus had been so transformed. “Lovers of the marvellous,” he observes, “are too prone to heighten the marvels they hear tell of by adding touches of their own; and thus they debase truth by alloying it with fiction.”

His disbelief of certain myths.

The attitude of incredulity which Pausanias maintained towards many of the current legends is declared by him in the most unequivocal manner. He speaks of “the many falsehoods believed by the Greeks,” and reminds us that though he is bound to record Greek stories he is not bound to believe them, and that as a matter of fact he does not believe them all. The myths of the transformations of gods and 83men into animals and plants seem especially to have stuck in his throat. He does not believe that Zeus changed himself into a cuckoo to win the love of Hera, and as to the story of the transformation of Cycnus into a swan, he says roundly: “That a man should be turned into a bird is to me incredible.” Nor will he hear of Narcissus’s love for his own reflexion in the glassy pool and his wondrous change into the flower that bore his name. “It is sheer folly,” he remarks, “to suppose that a person who has reached the age of falling in love should be unable to distinguish between a man and his reflexion,” and as for the flower in question he has chapter and verse for it to prove that it grew before Narcissus was born. The companion story of the transformation of Hyacinth into the flower he does not treat quite so cavalierly. “It may not be literally true,” he tells us, “but let it pass.” Further, he cannot believe that the beasts followed Orpheus as he sang, and that the minstrel journeyed down to hell to win back his lost Eurydice. Again, while he believes in giants, he rejects as a silly story the notion that they had serpents instead of feet, and he supports his scepticism by referring to the corpse of one of these monstrous beings which had been found in the bed of the river Orontes enclosed in a coffin eleven ells long. Often, 84without formally refusing his assent to some tale of wonder, he quietly hints his incredulity by indicating that he leaves his readers to believe it or not as they feel inclined. Thus after telling how pigs thrown into the halls of Demeter at Potniae were supposed to re-appear next year at Dodona, he adds, almost sarcastically: “The tale may possibly find credence with some people.” Other marvels which he dismisses with a sneer are the sowing of the dragon’s teeth by Cadmus and the springing up of armed men; the sprouting of Hercules’s club into a tree when he set it on the ground; the wonderful vision of Lynceus who could see through the trunk of an oak-tree; and the story that at a certain rock in Megara the sad Demeter stood and called back her daughter from the darkling road down which she had vanished.

His rationalistic interpretation of some myths.

It is not always, however, that Pausanias meets seemingly miraculous stories with a blank negation. He had too much good sense to do that. He knew that our experience does not exhaust the possibilities of nature, and he endeavoured accordingly to trim the balance of his judgment between hasty credulity on the one side and rash disbelief on the other. Thus after pointing out that, if the descriptions of the strange creatures of distant lands are false in some particulars, they are true or at least 85not improbable in others, he concludes: “So careful should we be to avoid hasty judgments on the one hand, and incredulity in matters of rare occurrence on the other.” In his endeavour to winnow the true from the false, to disentangle the ravelled skein of tradition, he has often recourse to that convenient and flexible instrument—rationalistic or allegorical interpretation. We have seen with what ease he thus disencumbered himself of Cerberus’s superfluous heads and reduced that animal from a very extraordinary dog to a very ordinary serpent. The miraculous story of the death of Actaeon, rent in pieces by his hounds at the instigation of Artemis, gives him no trouble: it was a simple case of hydrophobia. Medusa was a beautiful African queen who met Perseus at the head of her troops. Titan was an early astronomer who resided near Sicyon and passed for a brother of the sun for no other reason than that he made observations on that luminary. The fable that Procne and Philomela were turned into a nightingale and a swallow arose merely from a comparison of their mournful cries to the plaintive notes of these birds. In one passage, indeed, under the fierce light of criticism the gods themselves seem on the point of melting away like mist before the sun, leaving behind them nothing but the clear hard face of nature, over which 86for a while the gorgeous pageantry of their shifting iridescent shapes had floated in a golden haze. The passage occurs in the description of Aegium, where our author fell in with a Phoenician of Sidon with whom he discussed the philosophic basis of the belief in Aesculapius, coming to the conclusion that the god was nothing but the air and his father Apollo nothing but the sun. Had Pausanias followed up this line of thought he might, like Schiller, have seen as in a vision the bright procession of the gods winding up the long slope of Olympus, sometimes pausing to look back sadly at a world where they were needed no more. But the whole tenour of his work goes to show that, if here he had a glimpse of a higher truth, it was only a flash-light that went out leaving him in darkness.

His change of view as to myths.

In a later passage he makes a confession of his faith in matters of mythology. After telling the barbarous tale how the cannibal Cronus, intending to devour his infant son Poseidon, had been cozened by Rhea into swallowing a foal, he goes on: “When I began this work I used to look on these Greek stories as little better than foolishness; but now that I have got as far as Arcadia my opinion about them is this: I believe that the Greeks who were accounted wise spoke of old in riddles, and not straight 87out; and, accordingly, I conjecture that this story about Cronus is a bit of Greek philosophy. In matters of religion I will follow tradition.” This seems to be practically a recantation of earlier, perhaps youthful scepticism. The tales which he had once ridiculed as absurd he now finds to be full of deep, if hidden, wisdom. Meditation and perhaps still more the creeping paralysis of age, which brings so many men to a dull acquiescence in beliefs and practices which they had spurned in youth, appear to have wrought a mental revolution in Pausanias. The scoffer had become devout.

His treatment of discrepant traditions.

Yet to a pious believer the discrepancy between Greek traditions must have been a sore stumbling-block. Pausanias tripped over it again and again. “Greek traditions,” says he, “are generally discrepant.” “The legends of the Greeks differ from each other on most points, especially in the genealogies.” “The old legends, being unencumbered by genealogies, left free scope for fiction, especially in the pedigrees of heroes.” “Most things in Greece are subjects of dispute.” In face of such differences Pausanias, when he does not content himself with simply enumerating the various traditions, chooses to follow either the most generally received version or the one which on any ground appears to him the most probable. With his sober unimaginative 88temperament and bias to rationalism, it was natural that between conflicting versions of the same tradition he should choose the one which clashed least with experience. Thus he relates the two stories told of the way in which the people of Tanagra acquired the Triton whose stuffed carcase was the glory of the town. One story ran that the creature had been slain by Dionysus himself in single combat; according to the other, a common mortal had found the Triton lying drunk on the beach and had chopped off his head with an axe. The latter version of the tale is described by Pausanias as “less dignified but more probable.” Tritons, it is true, whether drunk or sober, are not common objects of the sea-shore; but there was no need to heighten the marvel by lugging in Dionysus. Again, the death of Aristodemus, the ancestor of the two royal houses of Sparta, was variously narrated. “Those who wish to invest him with a halo of glory,” writes Pausanias, “say that he was shot by Apollo”; but the truer story was that he had been knocked on the head by the children of Pylades. Again, he regards with suspicion the claims of men and women to be the husbands and wives, the sons and daughters of gods and goddesses. “The Moon, they say, loved Endymion, and he had fifty daughters by the goddess. Others, with more probability, say that Endymion 89married a wife.” “Cadmus made a distinguished marriage if he really married, as the Greeks say he did, a daughter of Aphrodite and Ares.” Then as to reputed sons of gods. “That Corinthus was a son of Zeus has never yet, so far as I know, been seriously asserted by anybody except by a majority of the Corinthians themselves.” Oenomaus was a son of Alexion, “though the poets have given out that he was a son of Ares.” The father of Augeas was Eleus, “though those who magnify his history give the name of Eleus a twist, and affirm that Augeas was a son of the sun.” The crafty Autolycus “was reputed to be a son of Hermes, though in truth his father was Daedalion.” The story that Orpheus had the Muse Calliope for his mother is stigmatised by our author as a falsehood. Rivers that appeared in the character of fathers were also viewed by Pausanias with distrust. He held that the father of Eteocles was Andreus, not the river Cephisus; and he believed that the father of Plataea was not the river Asopus but a king of the same name. Other instances of his hesitation to accept legends of divine parentage might be cited.

His application of historical methods to Greek traditions.

But in his criticism of Greek legends Pausanias did not confine himself to the simple test of experience. He did not merely ask whether a story agreed more or less with the 90laws of nature, and accept or reject it accordingly. In historical enquiries the application of such a criterion obviously cannot carry the enquirer beyond the first step. Pausanias went much further. He introduced considerations drawn from general probability, from chronology, from the monuments, from a comparison with other traditions, from the relative weight to be attached to the authorities by which each version of a legend was supported. In fact, far from being hide-bound in the trammels of tradition, he moved freely among the materials at his disposal, accepting this and rejecting that in obedience to the dictates of a reasonable and fairly enlightened criticism. Thus, he rejects the Sophoclean version of the death of Oedipus because it conflicts with the Homeric. He will not allow that a bronze image of Athena at Amphissa can have formed part of the Trojan spoils, and that a bronze image of Poseidon at Pheneus can have been dedicated by Ulysses, because at the time of the Trojan war and in the lifetime of Ulysses the art of casting in bronze had not yet been invented. He refuses to believe that the grave of Dejanira was at Argos, because she was known to have died at Trachis and her grave to be not far from Heraclea. Among the several places in Greece that set up claims to be the Oechalia of Homer, our author decides in favour of Carnasium in 91Messenia, because the bones of Eurytus were there. The tradition that the mysteries at Celeae had been founded by a man of Eleusis named Dysaules, who had been driven into exile after a battle between the Eleusinians and Athenians, is rejected by Pausanias on the grounds that no such battle took place and that no such person is mentioned by Homer. The legend that Daedalus joined Aristaeus in colonising Sardinia is set aside by him for the reason that Daedalus lived several generations after Aristaeus, and therefore could not possibly have shared with him in a colony or in anything else. Similarly he argues on chronological grounds against the traditions that Achilles had been a suitor of Helen; that Timalcus went to Aphidna with the Dioscuri; and that the Telamon and Chalcodon who marched with Hercules against Elis were the well-known Telamon of Aegina and Chalcodon of Euboea. The Spartan tradition as to the image of Brauronian Artemis is preferred by Pausanias to the Athenian, and that for a variety of reasons which he sets forth in detail.

Thus Pausanias criticised Greek myths and legends according to his lights, and if his lights did not shine very brilliantly the fault was not his.

His taste in art.

Of his taste in painting and sculpture we are scarcely able to judge, partly because he is 92chary of his praise, generally confining himself to a simple mention or description of the work before him, partly because so few of the works described by him have survived to our time. |His taste in painting.| The paintings are all gone. A little blue pigment on a ruined wall at Delphi is all that remains of those frescoes of Polygnotus which excited the admiration of antiquity. That Pausanias himself admired them is clear, both from the length of his description and from the words with which he brings it to a close: “So varied and beautiful is the painting of the Thasian artist.” Elsewhere he seems to have lost no opportunity of describing extant pictures of Polygnotus, though he does not always mention his name. A painting of Drunkenness by Pausias apparently struck Pausanias especially, for he tells us that “in the picture you can see the crystal goblet and the woman’s face through it.” But the only pictures, besides those of Polygnotus at Delphi, on which he deigns to bestow a dry word of commendation are a couple of paintings on tombstones, one of them by Nicias, as to whom Pausanias tells us elsewhere that he had been the greatest painter of animals of his time.

His taste in sculpture.

In sculpture the taste of Pausanias was apparently austere. He decidedly preferred the earlier to the later art. Of the archaic works attributed to Daedalus he says that they “are 93somewhat uncouth to the eye, but there is a touch of the divine in them for all that.” He praises Bupalus, an artist of the sixth century B.C., as “a clever architect and sculptor.” But on the whole it was for the sculptors of the fifth century B.C. that he chiefly reserved his scanty praise, and amongst them he seemingly preferred the masters of the older manner who immediately preceded Phidias. |Predecessors of Phidias.| Thus, with regard to Pythagoras of Rhegium, who flourished about 480 B.C., he says that he was “a good sculptor, if ever there was one,” and in speaking of the boxer Euthymus he remarks that “his statue is by Pythagoras, and most well worth seeing it is.” Of Onatas, who was at work about 467 B.C., he expresses a high opinion: “I am inclined to regard Onatas, though he belongs to the Aeginetan school of sculpture, as second to none of the successors of Daedalus and the Attic school.” This criticism indicates that Pausanias preferred in general the Attic school of sculpture to the Aeginetan, though he considered one master of the latter school as the peer of the greatest Attic sculptors. At Pergamus there was a bronze image of Apollo by this same Onatas which Pausanias describes as “one of the greatest marvels both for size and workmanship.” It is a proof of the independence of Pausanias’s judgment in art that this early sculptor, whom he ranked with 94|Phidias| Phidias and Praxiteles, is not even mentioned by any other ancient writer except in a single epigram of the Anthology. Another old master of the fifth century whose statues Pausanias often notices is Calamis; on one of them he bestows a word of commendation. A statue by this artist was much admired by Lucian. The great sculptor Myron, a contemporary of Phidias, seems also to have found favour in the eyes of Pausanias, for he mentions that the image of Dionysus on Mount Helicon was the finest of all the artist’s works, next to the statue of Erechtheus at Athens. That Pausanias appreciated the greatness of Phidias is clear from the way in which he speaks of him and from the detail in which he describes the sculptor’s two most famous works, the image of the Virgin Athena at Athens and the image of Zeus at Olympia. Of the latter he observes that the mere measurements of the image could convey no idea of the impression which the image itself made on the beholder. Yet he did not consider it the sculptor’s masterpiece, for as to the image of the Lemnian Athena at Athens he remarks that it is “the best worth seeing of all the works of Phidias.” The preference thus given to this comparatively obscure statue over the image of Zeus which the ancient world agreed in extolling as little less than divine is another proof of the independence of Pausanias’s 95judgment in artistic matters; and that his taste here was good is attested by the very high place which his contemporary Lucian, one of the best critics of antiquity, assigns to the same statue. Of Alcamenes our author observes that as a sculptor he was second only to his contemporary Phidias, and with regard to the statue of Aphrodite in the Gardens by this artist he says that “few things at Athens are so well worth seeing as this.” Here, again, our author’s judgment is confirmed by that of Lucian, who describes this image as the most beautiful work of Alcamenes, and draws from it not a few traits for his imaginary statue of ideal beauty which was to combine all the most perfect features of the most celebrated statues. Another sculptor whose style seems to have pleased Pausanias was Naucydes, a brother of the famous Polyclitus, who worked at the end of the fifth or at the beginning of the fourth century B.C. A bronze image of Athena by Hypatodorus at Aliphera is declared by Pausanias to be worth seeing both for its size and its workmanship; but the date of this sculptor is somewhat uncertain. Strongylion, whom Pausanias describes as unrivalled in his representations of oxen and horses, seems to have flourished toward the end of the fifth century B.C. Among the sculptors of the following century Pausanias praises Cephisodotus 96|Sculptors of the fourth century B.C.| for the conception of his statue representing the infant Wealth in the arms of Peace, and the sculptors Xenophon and Callistratus for a similar allegorical work representing Wealth in the arms of Fortune. Further, he commends some of the sculptures of Damophon at Messene, ^[3] and he has a few words of approbation for several works of Praxiteles, but not one for any work of the other two great masters of the fourth century, Scopas ^[4] and Lysippus, though he mentions many statues by them. A critic of a taste so severe that he could pass by the works of Scopas and the Hermes of Praxiteles without uttering a syllable of admiration was not likely to take much pleasure in the productions of the decadence. Pausanias notices few and praises none of the successors of Praxiteles. Of the colossal image of Olympian Zeus at Athens, which must have been executed in his own lifetime, he says condescendingly that it was good for its size.

It may be noted as significant of Pausanias’s interest in the older sculpture that the only 97artists with whose styles he shows himself so familiar as to recognise them at sight are Calamis, Canachus, Endoeus, and Laphaes, of whom Calamis and Canachus flourished in the early part of the fifth century B.C., and Endoeus in the last part of the sixth century B.C. The date of Laphaes is unknown, but as the two images by this artist were both made of wood and are expressly declared by Pausanias to be ancient, we can hardly suppose that the sculptor flourished later than the sixth century B.C.

His taste in architecture.

Of Pausanias’s taste in architecture we are much better able to judge, for many of the buildings described by him exist, and by a most fortunate coincidence amongst them are some of which he expressed his admiration in unusually strong language. |Walls of Tiryns.| To begin with the relics of the prehistoric age, the walls of Tiryns and the beehive tomb of Orchomenus, which he calls the Treasury of Minyas, raised his wonder to such a pitch that he compares them to the Egyptian pyramids and animadverts on the perversity of the Greeks, who admired and described only the marvels they saw abroad, while they entirely neglected the marvels no less great which they had at home. The walls of Tiryns he describes with amazement as “made of unwrought stones, each stone so large that a pair of mules could not even stir the smallest of them.” No modern reader who has 98|Beehive tomb at Orchomenus.| seen the walls of Tiryns as they still stand, built of enormous stones and resembling a work of giants rather than of men, will be likely to regard Pausanias’s admiration of them as misplaced, whatever may be thought of the comparison of them to the pyramids. Amongst the prehistoric remains of Greece they are certainly unmatched. The walls of Mycenae and of the great prehistoric fortress of Gla or Goulas in Boeotia surpass them, indeed, in extent, but fall far short of them in the size of the blocks of which they are composed. As to the beehive tomb at Orchomenus, of which Pausanias says that there was no greater marvel either in Greece or elsewhere, it is now sadly ruinous, but we can judge of its original effect by the great beehive tomb at Mycenae known as the Treasury of Atreus, which agrees with the tomb at Orchomenus very closely in dimensions and exists almost intact. To stand within the great circular chamber and look up at the domed roof, with its rings of regularly hewn stones diminishing one above the other till they are lost in the darkness overhead, is an impressive experience. Those who have enjoyed it will be disposed to think that Pausanias was right in regarding the similar edifice at Orchomenus as a very wonderful structure.

The Propylaea.

To come down to buildings of the historical age, Pausanias admired the Propylaea or grand 99|Theatre at Epidaurus.| portal of the Acropolis at Athens, which “for the beauty and size of the blocks,” he says, “has never yet been matched.” It is probably not too much to say that even in its ruins this magnificent portal is still the highest triumph of the mason’s craft. The exquisite fitting of the massive cleanly-cut blocks of white marble is a pleasure to behold. Again, the sight of the theatre in the sanctuary of Aesculapius at Epidaurus moves the sober Pausanias to an extraordinary, almost unparalleled burst of admiration. “In the Epidaurian sanctuary,” he says, “there is a theatre which in my opinion is most especially worth seeing. It is true that in size the theatre at Megalopolis in Arcadia surpasses it, and that in splendour the Roman theatres far transcend all the theatres in the world; but for symmetry and beauty what architect could vie with Polyclitus? For it was Polyclitus who made this theatre.” Here again modern taste confirms the judgment of Pausanias. Neither the Dionysiac theatre at Athens, nor the great theatre at Megalopolis, nor the well-preserved theatre at Delphi, nor any other existing Greek theatre, so far at least as my experience goes, can vie for a moment in beauty and symmetry with the exquisite theatre at Epidaurus.

Temples at Bassae and Tegea.

Again, in regard to the temple of Apollo at Bassae our author says that “of all the temples 100in Peloponnese, next to the one at Tegea, this may be placed first for the beauty of the stone and the symmetry of its proportions,” and as to the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, to which he here refers, he says elsewhere, “The present temple far surpasses all other temples in Peloponnese both in size and style.” So far as the size of the temple at Tegea goes, Pausanias is wrong. The temple of Zeus at Olympia was nearly twice as large. But in regard to style modern taste merely echoes the opinion of Pausanias. The scanty remains of the temple at Tegea are now mostly buried underground, but the admirable design and workmanship of the architectural fragments, and the beauty of the shattered sculptures, justify the praise which Pausanias bestows on it as the finest temple in Peloponnese in respect of artistic style. No person of taste but will set the pathetic force and beauty of the two battered heads from this temple above all the coarse vigour of the Phigalian frieze and the ungraceful, almost repulsive hardness of the groups from the gables of the Olympian temple. And that in architectural style the temple at Bassae came next to the one at Tegea is an opinion that will hardly be disputed by any one who has seen the beautiful temple at Bassae with its long rows of grey columns standing solitary among the barren mountains. That 101Pausanias was right in preferring it to the temple of Zeus at Olympia both for the beauty of the stone and the symmetry of its proportions is hardly open to question. The temple of Zeus must have been imposing from its size, but its proportions, so far as we can judge from the ruins, do not strike an observer as especially harmonious; and as to the materials, the rough conglomerate of Olympia cannot be compared for beauty with the fine hard limestone of Bassae.

Walls of Messene.

Further, Pausanias describes the walls of Messene with their towers and battlements, and declares them to be stronger than the finest fortifications he had seen elsewhere. The remains of these superb fortifications bear him out. For the scale on which they are planned and for the solidity and perfection of the masonry they are without a rival in Greece. In other places, as at Asea in Arcadia, at Aegosthena in Megaris, and at Lilaea and Drymaea in Phocis, circuits of walls with their flanking towers exist in better preservation, but none of them can vie in style and splendour with the fortifications of Messene. Here again we must pronounce unhesitatingly that so far as our knowledge goes Pausanias was in the right.

Music Halls at Athens and Patrae.

To come down to buildings of a later age, Pausanias tells us that the Music Hall at Patrae was the grandest in Greece except the one 102built by Herodes Atticus at Athens, which excelled it both in size and style. Here we are in the fortunate position of being able to compare for ourselves the two buildings which Pausanias ranks together as the finest of their kind in Greece, for both of them exist in comparatively good preservation to the present day. That the Music Hall of Herodes Atticus excels in size the one at Patrae, as Pausanias says it did, is obvious at a glance. The former is in fact a spacious theatre, the latter is a tiny one. But both, as appears from the remains, were originally cased with marble and probably presented a splendid appearance. The lions’ paws of white marble which adorn the seats in the Music Hall at Patrae, together with the mosaic pavement of black and white in the adjoining chamber, enable us to form some slight idea of the elegance of those appointments which excited the admiration of Pausanias.

Stadium at Athens.

Lastly, our author observes that the stadium at Athens, built of white marble by Herodes Atticus, was “wonderful to see, though not so impressive to hear of,” and that the greater part of the Pentelic quarries had been exhausted in its construction. The latter statement is, of course, an exaggeration. Mount Pentelicus is made of white marble, and there is a good deal of it left to this day, though the great white blotches on its sides, visible even from the coast 103of Epidaurus, tell plainly where the quarrymen have been at work. But we may easily believe Pausanias that the stadium was a wonderful sight when tiers of white marble benches, glistening in the strong sunshine, rose steeply above each other all along both sides of the valley. For a valley it is still, and a valley lined with white marble it must have been in the days of Pausanias. Those who have seen the stadium since it was partially refitted with white marble benches for the games of 1896 can better picture to themselves what its aspect must have been when the benches were complete. Before the time of Herodes Atticus the spectators may have sat either on the earthen slopes, as at Olympia, or on benches of common stone, as at Epidaurus and Delphi.

On the whole, then, so far as we can judge from the existing monuments and the testimony of ancient writers, especially of Lucian, the artistic taste of Pausanias was sound and good, if somewhat austere.

Intrinsic evidence of Pausanias’s truthfulness.

The manner in which he has described the monuments is plain and appropriate, entirely free from those vague rhetorical flourishes, literary graces, and affected prettinesses with which, for example, Philostratus tricks out his descriptions of pictures, and which have consequently left it a matter of dispute to this day whether the pictures he describes existed anywhere but in 104his own imagination. No one is ever likely seriously to enquire whether the temples and theatres, the statues and paintings described by Pausanias ever existed or not. His descriptions carry the imprint of reality on them to every mind that is capable of distinguishing between the true and the false; and even if they did not, their truthfulness would still be vouched for by their conformity with the remains of the monuments themselves. Proof of this confirmity might be adduced in great abundance. Here, however, we are concerned with that internal evidence of the author’s honesty and candour which the writings themselves supply. Evidence of this sort can never, indeed, amount to demonstration. Candour and honesty are not qualities that can be brought to the test of the senses; they cannot be weighed in a balance or seen under a microscope. A man who is neither candid nor honest himself will probably never sincerely believe in the existence of these qualities in others, and there is no means of convincing him. It is always open to him to find a sinister motive for the simplest act, a covert meaning under the plainest words. In the case of Pausanias the internal evidence of good faith seems amply sufficient to convince a fair-minded enquirer. It consists in the whole cast and tenour of his writings; in the naturalness and credibility of all that he affirms 105of his own knowledge, with the exception of two or three cases in which he seems to have been duped by mercenary or priestly trickery; it consists in the plainness and directness of the descriptions; in their freedom from any tinge of rhetoric or sophistry; in the modesty with which the author generally keeps himself in the background; and finally in occasional confessions of ignorance which only malignity could interpret as artifices resorted to for the purpose of supporting an assumed air of ingenuous simplicity. This last feature of the work it is desirable to illustrate by instances. The others, pervading as they do the whole book, hardly admit of exemplification.

His confessions of ignorance.

Repeatedly, then, Pausanias owns that he had not been present at certain festivals, and consequently had not seen certain images which were only exhibited on these occasions. Thus with regard to the very curious image of Eurynome, which would have especially interested him as an antiquary, he tells us that the sanctuary in which it stood was opened only on one day in the year, and that as he did not happen to arrive on that day he had not seen the image, and therefore could only describe it from hearsay. Similarly he says that he cannot describe the image of Artemis at Hyampolis because it was the custom to open the sanctuary only twice a year. He tells at second hand of 106a festival of Dionysus at Elis, in which empty kettles were said to be found miraculously filled with wine; but he informs us that he was not himself at Elis at the time of the festival, and from expressions which he uses in regard to the marvel we may infer that he had his doubts about it. No one presumably will dispute these statements of Pausanias and maintain that he arrived in time for those festivals and saw those images although he assures us that he did not. We are bound, therefore, in fairness to believe him when he tells us with regard to the sanctuary of Mother Dindymene at Thebes that “it is the custom to open the sanctuary on a single day each year, not more. I was fortunate enough to arrive on that very day, and I saw the image.” As other instances of his candour may be cited his acknowledgment that he had not witnessed the ceremonies performed at the tombs of Eteocles and Polynices at Thebes, nor beheld the secret object revered in the worship of Demeter at Hermion; that he could describe the sanctuary of Poseidon at Mantinea only from hearsay; that he had neither seen the walls of Babylon and Susa nor conversed with any one who had; that he never saw Antinous in life, though he had seen statues and paintings of him; and that he had not heard the trout sing like thrushes in the river Aroanius, though he tarried by the 107river until sunset, when they were said to sing loudest. These are the confessions of an honest man, inclined perhaps to credulity, but yet who will not deceive others by professing to have seen sights, whether marvellous or otherwise, which he has not seen. Again, when he quotes a book at second hand he is careful to tell us so. Thus, after citing some lines from the Atthis of Hegesinus, he goes on: “This poem of Hegesinus I have not read: it was lost before my time; but the verses are quoted as evidence by Callippus of Corinth in his history of Orchomenus, and I have profited by his information to do the same.” Again, after quoting a couple of verses of an Orchomenian poet Chersias, he adds. “The poetry of Chersias is now lost, but these verses also are quoted by Callippus in the same work of his on Orchomenus.” These statements, like the foregoing, will hardly be disputed even by the most sceptical. No one will be likely to insist that Pausanias read books which he tells us he did not. Therefore in fairness we are bound to believe him when he says that he did read certain other works, such as the memoirs of some obscure historians, a treatise on rhetoric purporting to be by Pittheus, the epics Eoeae and Naupactia, a poem attributed to Linus, verses of Erato, a poem on soothsaying which passed under the name of Hesiod, and the 108oracles of Euclus, Musaeus, and Bacis. If we take the word of Pausanias for what he tells us he did not see and did not read, we must take it also for what he tells us he did see and did read. At least if we are to accept as true all those statements of an author which tell against himself and to reject as false all those which tell in his favour, there is an end of even the pretence of fair and rational criticism.

Literary style of Pausanias.

The literary style of Pausanias is no exception to the rule that the style of a writer reflects the character of the man. Pausanias was neither a great man nor a great writer. He was an honest, laborious, plodding man of plain good sense, without either genius or imagination, and his style is a faithful mirror of his character. It is plain and unadorned, yet heavy and laboured, as if the writer had had to cast about for the proper words and then fit them painfully together like the pieces in a Chinese puzzle. There is a sense of strain and effort about it. The sentences are devoid of rhythm and harmony. They do not march, but hobble and shamble and shuffle along. At the end of one of them the reader is not let down easily by a graceful cadence, a dying fall; he is tripped up suddenly and left sprawling, till he can pull himself together, take breath, and grapple with the next. It is a loose, clumsy, ill-jointed, ill-compacted, rickety, ramshackle 109style, without ease or grace or elegance of any sort. Yet Pausanias had studied good models. He knew Thucydides and his writings abound with echoes of Herodotus. But a style that has less of the unruffled flow, the limpid clearness, the exquisite grace, the sweet simplicity of the Herodotean prose it might be hard to discover. The sound of the one is like the chiming of a silver bell; that of the other like the creaking of a corn-crake. With all its defects, however, the style of Pausanias is not careless and slovenly. The author bestrides his high horse; he bobs up and down and clumps about on it with great solemnity; it is not his fault if his Pegasus is a wooden hobby-horse instead of a winged charger.

He perhaps modelled his style on that of Hegesias.

This union of seemingly opposite faults, this plainness without simplicity, this elaboration without richness, may perhaps be best explained by Boeckh’s hypothesis, that he modelled his style on that of his countryman Hegesias of Magnesia, a leader of the Asiatic school of rhetoric, who, aping the unadorned simplicity of Lysias’s manner, fell into an abrupt and jerky, yet affected and mincing style, laboriously chopping and dislocating his sentences so that they never ran smooth, never by any chance slid into a rounded period with an easy cadence. Dionysius of Halicarnassus declares peevishly that in all the voluminous works of Hegesias 110there was not a single well-written page, and that the man must have gone wrong not from stupidity but of set purpose and malice prepense, otherwise he could not have helped writing a good sentence now and then by accident. Frigid conceits and a puerile play upon words were mistaken by this perverse writer for literary beauties, and in the effort to stud his pages with these false jewels he sacrificed both pathos and truth. In this respect, indeed, Pausanias happily did not follow the bad example of his predecessor. His writings are entirely free from paltry conceits and verbal quibbles. The thought is always manly and direct, however tortuous may be the sentence in which he seeks to express it. If he imitated Hegesias, it was apparently in the arrangement of the words and sentences alone.

Whatever may be thought of this theory, the attention which Pausanias obviously bestowed on literary style is in itself wholly laudable. Such attention is a simple duty which every author owes to his readers. Pausanias cannot be blamed for trying to write well; the pity is that with all his pains he did not write better. He was anxious not to be needlessly tedious, not to inflict on the reader mere bald lists of monuments strung together on a topographical thread. He aimed at varying the phraseology, at shunning the eternal repetition 111of the same words in the same order. Yet he steered clear of one shoal only to run aground on another. If to some extent he avoided monotony and attained variety of expression, it was too often at the cost of simplicity and clearness. The natural order of the words was sacrificed and a crabbed contorted one substituted for it merely in order to vary the run of the sentences. For the same reason a direct statement was often discarded in favour of an indirect one, with the result that a reader who happens to be unfamiliar with the author’s manner is sometimes at a loss as to his meaning. For example, it has been questioned whether he means that there was a statue of Aeschylus in the theatre at Athens and one of Oenobius on the Acropolis. Yet any person conversant with his style must feel sure that in both these cases Pausanias intends to intimate the existence of the statue, and that if he does not affirm it in so many words this is due to no other cause than a wish to turn the sentence in another way. Similar instances could easily be multiplied. The ambiguity which so often arises from this indirect mode of statement is one of the many blots on the style of Pausanias. Such as it is, his style is seen at its best in some of the longer historical passages, notably in the spirited narratives of the Messenian wars and the Gallic invasion. Here he occasionally 112rises to a fair level of literary merit, as for example in describing the evil omens that preceded and hastened the death of the patriot king Aristodemus, and again in relating the impious attack of the Gauls on Delphi and their overwhelming repulse. Through the latter narrative there runs, like a strain of solemn music, an undertone of religious faith and fervour which greatly heightens the effect.

Pausanias’s use of previous writers.

In these and similar historical episodes we must allow something for the influence on Pausanias’s style of the literary authorities whom he followed. The warmer tinge of the descriptions, the easier flow of the sentences may not be wholly due to the ardour of the writer’s piety, to the swell of his patriotic feelings. Something of the movement, the glow, the solemn strain, the martial fire may have been caught by him from better models. This brings us to the enquiry, What books did Pausanias use in writing his own? and how did he use them? Unfortunately we are not and probably never shall be in a position to answer these questions fully. Like most ancient writers Pausanias is sparing in the citation of his authorities, and it is clear that he must have consulted books of which he makes no mention. And when to this we add that the works of most of the writers whom he does cite have perished or survive only in a few disjointed 113fragments, it becomes clear that any hope of acquiring a complete knowledge of his literary sources and mode of using them must be abandoned. Many attempts have been made of late years to identify the lost books consulted by Pausanias; but from the nature of the case it is plain that such attempts must be fruitless. One of them will be noticed presently. Meantime all that I propose to do is to indicate some of the chief literary and documentary sources which Pausanias expressly cites, and to illustrate by examples his method of dealing with them.

Distinction between the historical and descriptive parts of Pausanias’s work.

Before doing so it is desirable to point out explicitly a distinction which, though obvious in itself, has apparently been overlooked or slurred over by some of Pausanias’s critics. The matter of his work is of two sorts, historical and descriptive: the one deals with events in the past, the other with things existing in the present. For his knowledge of past events, except in so far as they fell within his own lifetime and observation, Pausanias was necessarily dependent either on written documents or on oral testimony, in short on the evidence of others; no other source of information was open to him. For his knowledge of things existing in the present, on the other hand, he need not have been indebted to the evidence of others, he may have seen them for himself. It does not, of course, follow that what he may 114have seen he did actually see. His descriptions of places and things, like his narratives of events that happened before his time, may all have been taken from books or from the mouths of other people; only it is not, as in the case of the historical narratives, absolutely necessary that they should be so derived. This distinction is so elementary and obvious that to call attention to it may be deemed superfluous. Yet some of the critics appear to labour under an impression that, if they can show the historical parts of Pausanias’s work to have been taken from books, they have raised a presumption that the descriptive or topographical parts were also so taken. They do not, indeed, put so crass a misapprehension into words, but they seem to be influenced by it. To brush away these mental cobwebs it is only needful to realise clearly that, though Pausanias certainly could not have witnessed events which happened before he was born, he was not therefore necessarily debarred from seeing things which existed in his own lifetime. In investigating the sources of his information it is desirable to keep the historical and the descriptive parts of his work quite distinct from each other and to enquire into each of them separately.

Poets used by Pausanias.

To begin with the historical, in the widest sense of the word, we find that Pausanias drew his accounts of the mythical and heroic ages 115in large measure from the poets. Homer is his chief poetical authority, but he also makes use of the later epics such as the Cypria, the Eoeae, the Little Iliad, the Minyad, the Naupactia, the Oedipodia, the Returns (Nostoi), the Sack of Ilium by Lesches, the Thebaid, and the Thesprotis. Of these the Thebaid was esteemed by him next to the Iliad and Odyssey. On questions of genealogy he often cites the early poets Asius and Cinaethon. Among the works attributed to Hesiod he frequently refers to the Theogony and the Catalogue of Women, and he once quotes the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. That he knew the Alexandrian poet Euphorion of Chalcis is shown by two references to his writings. The most ancient Greek hymns in his opinion were those of Olen; he cites several of them. Again, the testimony of Pamphos, author of the oldest Athenian hymns, is often appealed to by Pausanias. Among the lyric poets whose works he knew, such as Alcaeus, Alcman, Archilochus, Pindar, Sappho, and Stesichorus, he appears to have ranked Pindar first; at least he refers to his poems far oftener than to those of the others. Among the elegiac poets he quotes Tyrtaeus and Simonides. With the great tragic and comic poets he shows but little acquaintance; Aeschylus is the only one whose authority he appeals to repeatedly. He refers 116once to the testimony of Sophocles, but only to reject it; once to that of Aristophanes; never to that of Euripides. On the other hand, he seems to have devoted a good deal of attention to the critical study of the older poets. He had investigated the dates of Homer and Hesiod and the question of Homer’s native country. Nor did he neglect to enquire into the genuineness of many poems that passed under famous names. He tells admiringly how a contemporary of his own, Arrhiphon of Triconium, detected the spuriousness of certain verses attributed to an old Argive poet Philammon, by pointing out that the verses were in the Doric dialect which had not yet been introduced into Argolis in Philammon’s time. Among the works ascribed to Musaeus he held that nothing was genuine except the hymn to Demeter composed for the Lycomids; some of the verses which passed under the name of Musaeus he set down as forgeries of Onomacritus. The hymns of Orpheus were ranked by him next to those of Homer for poetical beauty, but he saw that some of the verses attributed to Orpheus were spurious. He had grave doubts as to the Theogony being a genuine work of Hesiod; and he informs us that the reading of a poem fathered on Linus sufficed to convince him of its spuriousness. Of the works which circulated 117under the name of the early Corinthian poet Eumelus one only, he tells us, was held to be genuine. He could not believe that Anaximenes had written a certain epic on Alexander the Great. As to the epic called the Thebaid, which he admired, he reports the view of Callinus that the author was Homer, adding that “many respectable persons have shared his opinion.”

Historians used by Pausanias.

The historian whom Pausanias seems to have studied most carefully and whom he cites most frequently is Herodotus. Though he only once refers to the history of Thucydides and once to that of Xenophon, it is probable that he used both authors in several passages where he does not mention their names. Other historians whom he refers to are Anaximenes, Antiochus of Syracuse, Charon of Lampsacus, Ctesias, Hecataeus, Hellanicus, Hieronymus of Cardia, Myron of Priene, Philistus, Polybius, and Theopompus. Besides these he cites several local histories, such as the histories of Attica by Androtion and Clitodemus, a history of Corinth attributed to Eumelus, a history of Orchomenus by Callippus, and what seems to have been a versified history of Argos by Lyceas. Further, he had read the memoirs of certain obscure historians whose names he does not mention. In his use of the historical materials at his disposal Pausanias appears to have done his best to follow the same critical 118principles which he applied to the mythical and legendary lore of Greece. When the accounts conflicted he weighed them one against the other and accepted that which on the whole seemed to him to be the more probable or the better authenticated. Thus before proceeding to narrate the history of the Messenian wars he mentions his two chief authorities, namely a prose history of the first war by Myron of Priene and a versified history of the second war by Rhianus of Bene; then he points out a glaring discrepancy between the two in regard to the date of Aristomenes—the William Tell or Sir William Wallace of Messenia—and gives his reasons for accepting the testimony of Rhianus and rejecting that of Myron, whose writings, according to him, revealed an indifference to truth and probability of which he gives a striking instance. Again, Pausanias was able to allow for the bias of prejudice in an historian. Thus he points out that the history of Hieronymus the Cardian was coloured by a partiality for Antigonus and a dislike of Lysimachus, of whom the latter had destroyed the historian’s native city; that the historian Philistus concealed the worst excesses of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, because he hoped to be allowed by the tyrant to return to that city; and that Androtion, the historian of Attica, had apparently introduced a certain 119narrative for the sole purpose of casting reproach on the Lacedaemonians.

The Elean register.

An historical document of which Pausanias made much use was the Elean register of Olympic victors. He often refers to it. We need not suppose that he consulted the original documents in the archives at Elis. The register had been published many centuries before by Hippias of Elis, and copies may have been in common circulation. Wherever he may have seen it, Pausanias appears to have studied it carefully, and sometimes he turns the information thus acquired to good account. Thus he points out that a statement of the Elean guides was at variance with an entry in the register, and that the runner Oebotas could not possibly have fought at the battle of Plataea in 479 B.C. since his Olympic victory was won in Ol. 6 (756 B.C.).

Inscriptions.

Another trustworthy source from which Pausanias derived many of his historical facts was inscriptions. What copious use he made of them may be gathered from a slight inspection of his work, particularly his description of Olympia, and that on the whole he read them correctly is proved by inscriptions still extant of which he has given us either the text or the general purport. Yet he did not accept their testimony blindfold. In some of his references to them we can perceive the same discrimination, the same desire to sift and 120weigh the evidence which we have found to characterise his procedure in other enquiries. Thus in an old gymnasium at Anticyra he saw the bronze statue of a native athlete Xenodamus with an inscription setting forth that the man had won the prize in the pancratium at Olympia. Pausanias accordingly consulted the Olympic register and finding no such victor mentioned in it came to the conclusion that, if the inscription were not lying, the victory of Xenodamus must have fallen in Ol. 211 (65 A.D.), the only Olympiad which had been struck out of the register. Again, at Olympia he saw a tablet inscribed with the victories of Chionis, a Lacedaemonian runner, who lived in the first half of the seventh century B.C. In the inscription it was mentioned that the race in armour had not yet been instituted in the time of Chionis; indeed we know from Pausanias that more than a century elapsed after the time of Chionis before the race in armour was introduced. Hence Pausanias concludes very sensibly that the inscription could not, as some people supposed, have been set up by the runner himself, for how could he have foreseen that the race in armour ever would be instituted long after he was dead and buried? Again, he infers that the Gelo who dedicated a chariot at Olympia cannot have been, as was commonly assumed, the tyrant Gelo, because in 121the inscription on the pedestal Gelo described himself as a citizen of Gela, whereas, according to Pausanias, at the time when the chariot was dedicated Gelo had already made himself master of Syracuse and would therefore have described himself as a Syracusan, not as a native of Gela. The argument falls to the ground because Pausanias mistook the date of Gelo’s subjugation of Syracuse by several years; none the less his criticism of the current view testifies to the attention he bestowed on inscriptions.

Writers on art.

The image of Zeus which the united Greeks dedicated at Olympia as a trophy of the battle of Plataea was made, Pausanias tells us, by a sculptor of Aegina named Anaxagoras, as to whom he remarks that “the name of this sculptor is omitted by the historians of sculpture.” This passage proves that Pausanias consulted, as might have been anticipated, some of the many ancient works on the history of art, but what they were he has not told us and it would be vain to guess. He alludes to them elsewhere.

The local guides.

Yet another source which furnished Pausanias with information, more or less trustworthy, on matters of history and tradition was the discourse of the local guides whom he encountered at many or all of the chief places of interest. We know from other ancient writers that in antiquity, as at the present day, towns of any 122note were infested by persons of this class who lay in wait for and pounced on the stranger as their natural prey, wrangled over his body, and having secured their victim led him about from place to place, pointing out the chief sights to him and pouring into his ear a stream of anecdotes and explanations, indifferent to his anguish and deaf to his entreaties to stop, until having exhausted their learning and his patience they pocketed their fee and took their leave. An educated traveller could often have dispensed with their explanations, but if he were good-natured he would sometimes let them run on, while he listened with seeming deference to the rigmarole by which the poor men earned their daily bread. A question interposed in the torrent of their glib discourse was too apt to bring them to a dead stand. Outside the beaten round of their narrow circle they were helpless. That Pausanias should have fallen into their clutches was inevitable. He seems to have submitted to his fate with a good grace, was led about by them to see the usual sights, heard the usual stories, argued with them about some, and posed them with questions which they could not answer about others. Often no doubt their services were useful and the information they gave both true and interesting. Among the many traditions which Pausanias has embodied in his work there may be not a 123few which he picked up from the guides. We may conjecture, too, that the measurements of buildings and images which he occasionally records were, at least in some cases, derived by him from the same source.

So much for the sources of historical and traditionary lore on which Pausanias drew. That he always used them correctly cannot be maintained. We can show that he sometimes mistook the purport of inscriptions and blundered as to historical events and personages, but these mistakes are not more numerous than can be reasonably allowed for in a work embracing so great and multifarious a collection of facts.

Did Pausanias describe Greece from books or from personal observation?

Coming now to the descriptive or topographical part, which forms the staple of Pausanias’s work, we have to ask, Whence did he derive his knowledge of the places and and monuments he describes? from observation? or from books? or from both? To these questions Pausanias himself gives no full and direct answer. He neither professes to have seen everything that he describes nor does he acknowledge to have borrowed any of his descriptions from previous writers, whom he barely alludes to and never mentions by name. On the other hand he sometimes affirms in the most unambiguous language that he saw the things which he describes, and as there is no 124|He affirms that he saw many things which he describes.| reason to doubt his word we may accept these affirmations unconditionally, and believe that he describes some things at least as an eye-witness. But such assertions of personal knowledge are only incidental, and the total number of them is exceedingly small in comparison with the number of places and things which he describes without saying whether he saw them or not. Thus in regard to the vast majority of Pausanias’s descriptions we have still to ask, Are they based on personal observation or taken from books? In endeavouring to answer this question we must first of all bear in mind that if Pausanias saw all that he professes to have seen it is inevitable that he should have seen a great deal more. For example, he could not have seen, as he professes to have done, certain statues on the Acropolis of Athens without also seeing the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, and the Propylaea, which he does not expressly say that he saw. He could not have seen, as he says he did, the statue of Anaximenes and the Sicyonian treasury at Olympia without also seeing the temples of Zeus and Hera and a multitude of buildings and statues besides. In short, in all the places which he appears on his own showing to have visited, we may and must assume that he saw much more than he claims in so many words to have seen. Further, since he was not transported from one 125place to another by magic, he must have travelled over the roads which joined the various places that he visited. Thus by plotting out on the map the places which he saw and joining them by the routes he describes, we can form some general notion of the extent of Pausanias’s travels in Greece. Yet the notion thus formed must necessarily be very rough and imperfect. For, in the first place, we cannot always be sure of the route which he took from one town or village to another. Thus, for example, he describes two roads from Argos over Mount Artemisius to Mantinea; but there is nothing to show which he took or even that he took either. He may, like most travellers, have reached Mantinea from Argos by neither of the direct passes over the mountains, but by the circuitous route that goes by Lerna and Tegea. In the second place, it would be very rash to assume that he visited only those places where he is proved by some incidental assertion of personal knowledge to have been. Possibly or rather probably he visited many more. If he did not think it worth while to assure us that he saw the Parthenon and the Erechtheum at Athens, and the temples of Zeus and Hera at Olympia, he need not have thought it worth while to depose to having seen every insignificant shrine and image that he describes in the petty towns 126and obscure villages through which he passed. Thus the indications which he has given us are far too meagre to permit us to make out his itinerary in Greece with any approach to certainty.

Descriptions which he may have taken from books.

But if we cannot be sure that many of his descriptions are based on personal knowledge, have we any grounds for supposing that they are borrowed, without acknowledgment, from books? Such a supposition would be, on the face of it, neither unreasonable nor improbable. In the historical parts of his work Pausanias must have used many books which he does not mention, and he may have done the same thing in the topographical or descriptive parts. The grounds on which it could be proved or made probable that he borrowed his descriptions from books are various. The most obvious and certain would be the existence in an older writer of a description agreeing in form as well as in substance so closely with a description in Pausanias that no alternative would be left us but to suppose, either that Pausanias copied from this older writer, or that both of them copied from some common original. Or again it might be that the descriptions of Pausanias contained information which he could hardly have ascertained for himself, or mistakes into which he could scarcely have fallen if he had seen the things for himself. In regard to the 127first of these grounds it may be said at once that in the extant literature of antiquity, so far as the present writer is aware, there is no description of any place or monument agreeing in form and substance so closely with a description in Pausanias as to make it probable that he copied it. The slight and superficial resemblances which have been traced between passages of Strabo and passages of Pausanias are no more than such as may easily or necessarily arise when two writers are describing independently the same places.

Measurements of monuments and of distances.

When we ask whether the descriptions of Pausanias contain matter which he could not easily have ascertained for himself, we are reminded first of his measurements of temples and images, and second of his estimates of the exact distances in furlongs between one place and another. The measurements of temples and images were probably derived either from the local guides or from books. Some of them he may perhaps have taken for himself; but that he should, for example, have measured for himself the height of the temple of Zeus at Olympia is highly improbable. The distances by land, estimated in furlongs, may have been drawn by Pausanias from Roman milestones or from books or from a map like the Tabula Peutingeriana. Distances by sea he can hardly have measured for himself; if he did not borrow 128them from a book or a map, he may have had them from the sailors with whom he voyaged. In all these cases it is possible, perhaps probable, that Pausanias drew his information from literary sources; but what particular books or maps he used, if he used any, we do not know, and it would be vain to guess.

Description of the coast of Hermionis.

When we next enquire whether the descriptions of Pausanias contain errors into which he could scarcely have fallen if he had seen the places and things which he describes, a student of Pausanias is at once reminded of the author’s description of the coast of Hermionis, which it is difficult or impossible to reconcile with the actual features of the coast. That the description contains grave errors is almost certain. How these errors are to be explained is much more doubtful. It is easy to suggest, as has been done, that Pausanias did not himself sail along the coast, but borrowed his description from one of those Periploi or Coasting Voyages, which enumerated the places on a coast in topographical order and recorded the distances between them. Yet this supposition by itself would hardly explain the confusion into which Pausanias has fallen. Specimens of these Coasting Voyages have come down to us, and they are so exceedingly clear, concise, and business-like, that it is difficult to understand how any one who simply set himself 129to copy from them could have blundered so egregiously as Pausanias appears to have done. More plausible is the suggestion that, while Pausanias was obliged by the plan of his itinerary to describe the coast in one direction, the Coasting Voyage which lay before him described it in the reverse direction, and that in his effort to throw the information supplied by the Voyage into the form that suited his itinerary Pausanias made the jumble which has caused his critics so much trouble. This may be the true explanation. It would have the further advantage of helping us to understand how Pausanias obtained his knowledge of the exact distances between places on various parts of the coasts of Greece, notably on the coast of Achaia and on the wild inhospitable coast of Laconia. The Coasting Voyage which he used may, like the extant Coasting Voyage of Scylax, have comprised a description of the whole coast of Greece, and from it Pausanias may have borrowed his estimates of distances and perhaps other features of his description as well. This is Mr. Heberdey’s theory, and it is a perfectly tenable one, though in the absence of direct evidence it must remain only a more or less probable hypothesis. Yet when we remember that Pausanias’s topographical indications are nowhere more full and exact than in Arcadia, where by the nature of the case 130he cannot have used a Coasting Voyage, the hypothesis that he used one in other parts of his work seems superfluous, if not improbable. It is quite possible that he described the coast of Hermionis from notes he had made for himself in sailing along it, and that either he failed at the time to take in the natural features correctly or that afterwards in redacting his notes at home he misunderstood what he had written on the spot. Perhaps I may be allowed to say that having repeatedly sailed along the coast in question I can testify from personal experience how difficult it is to identify by sight the places from a ship, so bewildering is the moving panorama of capes, islands, bays, and mountains. It would be no great wonder if Pausanias’s head swam a little in this geographical maze.

Roads from Lepreus.

Another passage where error and confusion of some sort seem to have crept in is the mention of the three roads that led from Lepreus to Samicum, Olympia, and Elis. Here, again, Pausanias may have used and misunderstood some literary source, or he may have blundered on the spot, or his notes may have been lost, or his memory may have played him false. Any of these explanations is possible. To attempt to decide between them in the absence of any positive evidence would be fruitless.

The Enneacrunus episode.

131More famous than either of these difficulties is one which occurs in Pausanias’s account of Athens. Here in the middle of describing the market-place, which lay to the north-west of the Acropolis, he suddenly without a word of warning transports the reader to the Enneacrunus fountain, which lay in the bed of the Ilissus, not far from the Olympieum, at the opposite extremity of the city; then, having despatched the fountain and some buildings in its neighbourhood, he whirls the reader back to the market-place, and proceeds with his description of it as if nothing had happened. Of the many attempts to clear up this mystery, as by supposing either a dislocation of the text or a confusion in the author’s notes or the existence of another fountain near the market-place which may have been shown to him as the Enneacrunus, none is free from serious difficulties. That he fell into error through copying blindly and unintelligently from a book is possible but very improbable. As it is practically certain that he visited Athens and saw both the market-place and the Olympieum, the chances that he should not have seen the Enneacrunus and should therefore have been driven to borrow his description of it from a book are so small that they may be neglected.

Law-courts at Athens and altars at Olympia.

Other passages which Pausanias may perhaps 132have taken either wholly or in part from books are his account of the Athenian law-courts and his list of the altars at Olympia. Neither of these passages, it is true, is demonstrably infected by error or confusion, though there is some ground for suspecting the existence of confusion in the enumeration of the altars. But in both of them the author departs from the topographical order of description, which is so characteristic of his method, and arranges the monuments together simply on the ground of their belonging to the same class. These departures from his usual principle of order suggest that in both cases Pausanias may have borrowed from written documents in which the monuments were grouped together according to kind rather than in topographical order. Another set of monuments which Pausanias links together by a chain other than the topographical are the buildings erected by Hadrian in Athens. It is possible that he may have taken his list of them from the inscription in the Athenian Pantheon which recorded them all.

These are perhaps the most notable passages in Pausanias, which might be thought to bear traces of having been derived either wholly or in part from written documents rather than from personal observation. In none of them are the indications so clear as to amount to a 133proof of borrowing. At most they raise a probability of it, nothing more.

Predecessors of Pausanias.

It would be neither surprising nor unnatural if in writing his Description of Greece Pausanias not only consulted, as we know he did, but borrowed from the works of previous writers on the same subject. Any one who undertakes to write a guide-book to a country may legitimately borrow from his predecessors, provided he has taken the trouble to ascertain for himself that their descriptions are still applicable to the country at the time he is writing. Pausanias in his character of the Camden of ancient Greece had many predecessors whose writings he may and indeed ought to have consulted. But of their works only the titles and a few fragments have come down to us, and these contain nothing to show that Pausanias copied or had even read them. The most considerable of the fragments—those which pass under the name of Dicaearchus the Messenian—have been already examined, and we have seen how different in scope and style was the work to which they belonged from that which Pausanias has left us. No one would dream of maintaining that Pausanias copied his description of Greece from the pseudo-Dicaearchus. The most famous of the antiquaries who preceded Pausanias seem to have been Diodorus, Polemo, and Heliodorus, 134all of whom earned by their writings the title of The Periegete or Cicerone. |Diodorus.| Of these the earliest was Diodorus, who is not to be confounded with the Sicilian historian of that name. He published works on the tombs and townships of Attica, of which a few fragments survive. |Heliodorus.| They seem to have been composed before 308 B.C. Heliodorus lived in the reign of Ptolemy Epiphanes and wrote a work on the Acropolis of Athens in no less than fifteen books, of which only a few brief fragments have come down to us. There is some reason to think that Pausanias cannot have consulted it. |Polemo.| Polemo of Ilium flourished in the first part of the second century B.C., and was the author of many special treatises on the monuments of Greece. Amongst them were works on the Acropolis of Athens, on the eponymous heroes of the Attic townships and tribes, on the Sacred Way, on the Painted Colonnade at Sicyon, on the votive offerings at Lacedaemon, on the founding of the cities of Phocis, on the treasuries at Delphi, and many more. More than a hundred extracts from or references to his works have come down to us; and if we may judge from them, from the number and variety of the treatises he published, and from the praise of Plutarch we shall be inclined to pronounce Polemo the most learned of all Greek antiquaries. His acquaintance both 135with the monuments and with the literature seems to have been extensive and profound. The attention which he bestowed on inscriptions earned for him the nickname of the ‘monument-tapper.’ His works were certainly extant later than the time of Pausanias, since they are freely quoted by Athenaeus. It would, therefore, be strange if Pausanias did not study them, dealing as many of them did with the same subjects on which he touched in his Description of Greece. Yet the existing fragments of Polemo hardly justify us in supposing that Pausanias was acquainted with the writings of his learned predecessor. Certainly they lend no countenance to the view that he borrowed descriptions of places and monuments from them. This will appear from an examination of those fragments of Polemo which deal with subjects falling within the scope of Pausanias’s work. We shall look, first, at the things mentioned by both writers, and, second, at the things mentioned by Polemo alone. The fragments are numbered as in the editions of L. Preller and Ch. Müller, to which the reader is referred for the Greek text.