CONTENTS

PAGE

1. Pausanias and his Description of Greece 1

2. Oropus 160

3. Rhamnus 163

4. Marathon 165

5. Prasiae 174

6. Mount Hymettus 178

7. Mount Pentelicus 182

8. Phyle 187

9. The Port of Athens 191

10. The Sacred Way 209

11. The Hall of Initiation at Eleusis 214

12. Eleutherae 216

13. Megara 219

14. The Scironian Road 220

15. The Isthmus of Corinth 223

16. The Bath of Aphrodite 226

17. The Prospect from Acro-Corinth 227

18. The Capture of Corinth by Aratus 228

19. Sicyon 232

20. Phliasia 233

21. Nemea 237

22. The Pass of the Tretus 238

viii23. Mycenae 242

24. The End of the Mycenaean Age 245

25. Mount Arachnaeus 248

26. Epidaurus 249

27. The Temple in Aegina 251

28. The Sanctuary of Poseidon in Calauria 252

29. Troezen 253

30. From Troezen to Epidaurus 255

31. Methana 260

32. Nauplia 261

33. The Springs of the Erasinus 263

34. The Lernean Marsh 266

35. The Anigraean Road 269

36. The Battlefield of Sellasia 270

37. Sparta 271

38. Mistra 274

39. On the Road from Sparta to Arcadia 278

40. Cape Malea 279

41. Monemvasia 281

42. Maina 282

43. Pharae and the Messenian Plain 284

44. Messene 285

45. On the Road to Olympia 287

46. Olympia 290

47. Phidias’s Image of Olympian Zeus 292

48. The Hermes of Praxiteles 293

49. Lasion 296

50. The Erymanthus 299

51. The Monastery of Megaspeleum 300

52. The Gulf of Corinth 301

53. On the Coast of Achaia 303

54. Pellene 304

55. The Road from Argos to Arcadia 306

ix56. Mantinea 308

57. The Road to Stymphalus 310

58. The Lake and Valley of Stymphalus 312

59. The Lake of Pheneus 315

60. From Pheneus to Nonacris 320

61. The Fall of the Styx 324

62. The Valley of the Aroanius 330

63. The Springs of the Ladon 331

64. The Gorge of the Ladon 333

65. Aliphera 336

66. Dimitsana 337

67. Gortys 338

68. The Plain of Megalopolis 342

69. The Cave of the Black Demeter 343

70. The Temple of Apollo at Bassae 345

71. The Temple of Artemis at Aulis 346

72. Glaucus’s Leap 347

73. Evening on the Euripus 349

74. The Copaic Lake 349

75. The Great Katavothra 355

76. The Vale of the Muses 357

77. Hippocrene 358

78. Lebadea 359

79. The Boeotian Orchomenus 361

80. The Plain of Chaeronea 364

81. Panopeus 364

82. Near Hyampolis 365

83. Tithorea 366

84. From Amphissa to Gravia 369

85. Daulis 371

86. The Cleft Way 373

87. Delphi 374

88. Aeschines at Delphi 378

x89. The Pythian Tune 379

90. The Lacedaemonian Trophy at Delphi 380

91. The Gods in Battle 382

92. The Sibyl’s Wish 384

93. Orpheus in Hell 386

94. The Acheron 387

95. A Ride across Parnassus 389

96. Pericles 392

1PAUSANIAS | AND OTHER GREEK SKETCHES

Greece in the second century A.D.

I. Pausanias and his Description of Greece.—It may be reckoned a peculiar piece of good fortune that among the wreckage of classical literature the Description of Greece by Pausanias should have come down to us entire. In this work we possess a plain, unvarnished account by an eye-witness of the state of Greece in the second century of our era. Of no other part of the ancient world has a description at once so minute and so trustworthy survived, and if we had been free to single out one country in one age of which we should wish a record to be preserved, our choice might well have fallen on Greece in the age of the Antonines. No other people has exerted so deep and abiding an influence on the course of modern civilisation as the Greeks, and never could all the monuments of their chequered but glorious history have been studied so fully as 2in the second century of our era. The great age of the nation, indeed, had long been over, but in the sunshine of peace and imperial favour Greek art and literature had blossomed again. New temples had sprung up; new images had been carved; new theatres and baths and aqueducts ministered to the amusement and luxury of the people. Among the new writers whose works the world will not willingly let die, it is enough to mention the great names of Plutarch and Lucian.

It was in this mellow autumn—perhaps rather the Indian summer—of the ancient world, when the last gleanings of the Greek genius were being gathered in, that Pausanias, a contemporary of Hadrian, of the Antonines, and of Lucian, wrote his description of Greece. He came in time, but just in time. He was able to describe the stately buildings with which in his own lifetime Hadrian had embellished Greece, and the hardly less splendid edifices which, even while he wrote, another munificent patron of art, Herodes Atticus, was rearing at some of the great centres of Greek life and religion. Yet under all this brave show the decline had set in. About a century earlier the emperor Nero, in the speech in which he announced at Corinth the liberation of Greece, lamented that it had not been given him to confer the boon in other 3and happier days when there would have been more people to profit by it. Some years after this imperial utterance Plutarch declared that the world in general and Greece especially was depopulated by the civil brawls and wars; the whole country, he said, could now hardly put three thousand infantry in the field, the number that formerly Megara alone had sent to face the Persians at Plataea; and in the daytime a solitary shepherd feeding his flock was the only human being to be met with on what had been the site of one of the most renowned oracles in Boeotia. Dio Chrysostom tells us that in his time the greater part of the city of Thebes lay deserted, and that only a single statue stood erect among the ruins of the ancient market-place. The same picturesque writer has sketched for us a provincial town of Euboea, where most of the space within the walls was in pasture or rig and furrow, where the gymnasium was a fruitful field in which the images of Hercules and the rest rose here and there above the waving corn, and where sheep grazed peacefully about the public offices in the grass-grown market-place. In one of his Dialogues of the Dead, Lucian represents the soul of a rich man bitterly reproaching himself for his rashness in having dared to cross Cithaeron with only a couple of men-servants, for he had been set upon and murdered 4by robbers on the highway at the point where the grey ruins of Eleutherae still look down on the pass; in the time of Lucian the district, laid waste, he tells us, by the old wars, seems to have been even more lonely and deserted than it is now. Of this state of things Pausanias himself is our best witness. Again and again he notices shrunken or ruined cities, deserted villages, roofless temples, shrines without images and pedestals without statues, faint vestiges of places that once had a name and played a part in history. To the site of one famous city he came and found it a vineyard. In one neglected fane he saw a great ivy-tree clinging to the ruined walls and rending the stones asunder. In others nothing but the tall columns standing up against the sky marked the site of a temple. Nor were more sudden and violent forces of destruction wanting to hasten the slow decay wrought by time, by neglect, by political servitude, by all the subtle indefinable agencies that sap a nation’s strength. In Pausanias’s lifetime a horde of northern barbarians, the ominous precursor of many more, carried fire and sword into the heart of Greece, and the Roman world was wasted by that great pestilence which thinned its population, enfeebled its energies, and precipitated the decline of art.

The little we know of the life of Pausanias 5is gathered entirely from his writings. Antiquity, which barely mentions the writer, is silent as to the man.

Date of Pausanias.

Fortunately his date is certain. At the beginning of his description of Elis he tells us that two hundred and seventeen years had elapsed since the restoration of Corinth. As Corinth was restored in 44 B.C., we see that Pausanias was writing his fifth book in 174 A.D. during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. With this date all the other chronological indications in his book harmonise. Thus he speaks of images which were set up in 125 A.D. as specimens of the art of his day. Again, he gives us to understand that he was a contemporary of Hadrian’s, and he tells us that he never saw Hadrian’s favourite, Antinous, in life. Now Hadrian died in 138 A.D., and the mysterious death of Antinous in Egypt appears to have fallen in 130 A.D. It is natural to infer from Pausanias’s words that though he never saw Antinous in life, he was old enough to have seen him; from which we conclude that our author was born a good many years before 130 A.D., the date of Antinous’s death. The latest historical event mentioned by him is the incursion of the Costobocs into Greece, which seems to have taken place some time between 166 A.D. and 180 A.D., perhaps in 176 A.D.

Dates of the various books.

6From these and a few more hints we may draw some conclusions as to the dates when the various books that make up the Description of Greece were written. In the seventh book Pausanias tells us that his description of Athens was finished before Herodes Atticus built the Music Hall in memory of his wife Regilla. As Regilla appears to have died in 160 or 161 A.D. and the Music Hall was probably built soon afterwards, we may suppose that Pausanias had finished his first book by 160 or 161 A.D. at latest. There is, indeed, some ground for holding that both the first and the second book were composed much earlier. For in the second book Pausanias mentions a number of buildings which had been erected in his own lifetime by a Roman senator Antoninus in the sanctuary of Aesculapius at Epidaurus. If, as seems not improbable, the Roman senator was no other than the Antoninus who afterwards reigned as Antoninus Pius, we should naturally infer that the second book was published in the reign of Hadrian, that is, not later than 138 A.D., the year when Hadrian died and Antoninus succeeded him on the throne. With this it would agree that no emperor later than Hadrian is mentioned in the first or second book, or indeed in any book before the eighth. Little weight, however, can be attached to this circumstance, for 7in the fifth book Hadrian is the last emperor mentioned although that book was written, as we have seen, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, thirty-six years after Hadrian’s death. A much later date has been assigned to the second book by Mr. W. Gurlitt in his valuable monograph on Pausanias. He points out that when Pausanias wrote it the sanctuary of Aesculapius at Smyrna had already been founded, and that if Masson’s chronology of the life of the rhetorician Aristides is right the sanctuary was still unfinished in 165 A.D. Hence Mr. Gurlitt concludes that the second book of Pausanias was written after 165 A.D. Even the first book, according to him, must be dated not earlier than 143 A.D. His reason is that when Pausanias wrote this book the stadium at Athens had already been rebuilt of white marble by Herodes Atticus, and that the reconstruction cannot, if Professor C. Wachsmuth is right, have been begun before 143 A.D. or a little earlier. With regard to the other books, the evidence, scanty as it is, is less conflicting. The fifth book, as we have seen, was composed in the year 174 A.D. The eighth book, in which mention is made of the victory of Marcus Antoninus over the Germans, must have been written after 166 A.D., the year when the German war broke out, and may have been written in or after 176 A.D., 8the year in which the emperor celebrated a triumph for his success. In the tenth book occurs the reference to the inroad of the Costobocs; hence the book was written between 166 and 180 A.D. Further, the references which Pausanias makes both forwards and backwards to the several parts of his work show that the books were written in the order in which they now stand. Hence books six to ten cannot have been composed earlier, and may have been composed a good deal later, than 174 A.D., the year in which our author was engaged on his fifth book. Thus the composition of the work extended over a period of at least fourteen years and probably of many more. That Pausanias spent a long time over it might be inferred from a passage in which he explains a change in his religious views. When he began his work, so he tells us, he looked on some Greek myths as little better than foolishness, but when he had got as far as his description of Arcadia he had altered his opinion and had come to believe that they contained a kernel of deep wisdom under a husk of extravagance. Such a total change of attitude towards the religious traditions of his country was more probably an affair of years than of weeks and months.

That the first book was not only written but published before the others seems clear. |The first book written and published before the rest.| 9Amongst the proofs of this the strongest is the writer’s statement in the seventh book, that when he wrote his description of Athens the Music Hall of Herodes Atticus had not yet been built. This implies that when he wrote the seventh book the first was already published; otherwise he could easily have incorporated a notice of the Music Hall in its proper place in the manuscript. Again, in the eighth book he expressly corrects a view which he had adopted in the first; this also he might have done in the manuscript of the first book if he still had it by him. In other places he tacitly adds to statements and descriptions contained in the first book. Further, the narrative of the Gallic invasion in the first book is superseded by the much fuller narrative given in the tenth book, and would hardly have been allowed to stand if it had been in the author’s power to cut it out. More interesting are the passages in which we seem to discover references to criticisms which had been passed on his first book. Thus in the third book he repeats emphatically the plan of work which he had laid down for himself in the first, adding that the plan had been adopted after mature deliberation, and that he would not depart from it. This sounds like a trumpet-blast of defiance to the critics who had picked holes in the scheme of his first book. Elsewhere he seems conscious 10that some of their strictures were not wholly undeserved. In speaking of the descendants of Aristomenes he is sorely tempted to go into the family history of the Diagorids, but pulls himself up sharply with the remark that he passes over this interesting topic “lest it should appear an impertinent digression.” Clearly the arrows of the reviewers had gone home. The tedious historical dissertations with which he had sought to spice the plain fare of Athenian topography were now felt by the poor author himself to savour strongly of impertinent digressions. Again, old habit getting the better of him, the sight of a ruined camp of King Philip in a secluded Arcadian valley sets him off rambling on the divine retribution that overtook that wicked monarch and his descendants and the murderers of his descendants and their descendants after them, till, his conscience smiting him, he suddenly returns to business with the half apology, “But this has been a digression.” That Pausanias had the fear of the critics before his eyes is stated by himself in the plainest language. He had made, he tells us, careful researches into the vexed subject of the dates of Homer and Hesiod, but refrained from stating the result of his labours, because he knew very well the carping disposition of the professors of poetry of his own day. Little did he foresee the disposition of certain other 11professors who were to sit in judgment on him some seventeen hundred years later. Had he done so he might well have been tempted to suppress the Description of Greece altogether, and we might have had to lament the loss of one of the most curious and valuable records bequeathed to us by antiquity.

Birthplace of Pausanias.

The birthplace of Pausanias is less certain than his date, but there are good grounds for believing that he was a Lydian. For after saying that in his country traces were still to be seen of the abode of Pelops and Tantalus, he mentions some monuments and natural features associated with the names of these ancient princes on and near Mount Sipylus. This is nearly a direct affirmation that the region about Mount Sipylus in Lydia was his native land. The same thing appears, though less directly, from the minute acquaintance he displays with the district and from the evident fondness with which he recurs again and again to its scenery and legends. He had seen the white eagles wheeling above the lonely tarn of Tantalus in the heart of the hills; he had beheld the stately tomb of the same hero on Mount Sipylus, the ruined city at the bottom of the clear lake, the rock-hewn throne of Pelops crowning the dizzy peak that overhangs the cañon, and the dripping rock which popular fancy took for the bereaved Niobe 12weeping for her children. He speaks of the clouds of locusts which he had thrice seen vanish from Mount Sipylus, of the wild dance of the peasantry, and of the shrine of Mother Plastene, whose rude image, carved out of the native rock, may still be seen in its niche at the foot of the mountain. From all this it is fair to surmise that Pausanias was born and bred not far from the mountains which he seems to have known and loved so well. Their inmost recesses he may have explored on foot in boyhood and have drunk in their old romantic legends from the lips of woodmen and hunters. Whether, as some conjecture, he was born at Magnesia, the city at the northern foot of Mount Sipylus, we cannot say, but the vicinity of the city to the mountain speaks in favour of the conjecture. It is less probable, perhaps, that his birthplace was the more distant Pergamus, although there is no lack of passages to prove that he knew and interested himself in that city. As a native of Lydia it was natural that Pausanias should be familiar with the western coast of Asia Minor. There is indeed no part of the world outside of Greece to which he refers so often. He seizes an opportunity to give us the history of the colonisation of Ionia, and dwells with patriotic pride on the glorious climate, the matchless temples, and the natural wonders of that beautiful land.

Other writers of the same name.

13Some scholars have identified our author with a sophist of the same name who was born at Caesarea in Cappadocia, studied under Herodes Atticus, and died an old man at Rome, leaving behind him many declamations composed in a style which displayed a certain vigour and some acquaintance with classical models. But, quite apart from the evidence that our author was a Lydian, there are strong reasons for not identifying him with his Cappadocian namesake. Neither Suidas nor Philostratus, who has left us a short life of the Cappadocian Pausanias, mentions the Description of Greece among his works; and on the other hand our Pausanias, though he often mentions Herodes Atticus, nowhere speaks of him as his master or of any personal relations that he had with him. Further, the author of the Description of Greece is probably to be distinguished from a writer of the same name who composed a work on Syria to which Stephanus of Byzantium repeatedly refers. It is true that our Pausanias evidently knew and had travelled in Syria, but this in itself is no reason for supposing that he was the author of a work to which in his extant writings he makes no allusion. The name Pausanias was far too common to justify us in identifying all the authors who bore it, even when we have grounds for believing them to have been contemporaries.

14That Pausanias had travelled widely beyond the limits of Greece and Ionia is clear from the many allusions he lets fall to places and objects of interest in foreign lands. Some of them he expressly says that he saw; as to others we may infer that he saw them from the particularity of his description. In Syria he had seen the Jordan flowing through the Lake of Tiberias and falling into the Dead Sea, and had gazed at the red pool near Joppa in which Perseus was said to have washed his bloody sword after slaying the sea-monster. He describes a tomb at Jerusalem, the door of which by an ingenious mechanical contrivance opened of itself once a year at a certain hour, and he often alludes to Antioch which for its vast size and wealth he ranked with Alexandria. In Egypt he had seen the Pyramids, had beheld with wonder the colossal statue of Memnon at Thebes, and had heard the musical note, like the breaking of a lute-string, which the statue emitted at sunrise. The statue still stands, and many inscriptions in Greek and Latin carved by ancient visitors on its huge legs and base confirm the testimony of Pausanias as to the mysterious sound. From Egypt our author seems to have journeyed across the desert to the oasis of Ammon, for he tells us that in his time the hymn which Pindar sent to Ammon was still to be seen there carved on a triangular slab beside the altar. Nearer 15home he admired the splendid fortifications of Rhodes and Byzantium. Though he does not describe northern Greece, he had visited Thessaly, and had seen the blue steaming rivulet rushing along at the foot of the rugged forest-tufted mountains that hem in like a wall the pass of Thermopylae on the south. He appears to have visited Macedonia, and perhaps, too, Epirus; at least he speaks repeatedly of Dodona and its oracular oak, and he mentions the sluggish melancholy rivers that wind through the dreary Thesprotian plain and that gave their names to the rivers in hell. He had crossed to Italy and seen something of the cities of Campania and the wonders of Rome. The great forum of Trajan with its bronze roof, the Circus Maximus—then probably the most magnificent building in the world—and the strange beasts gathered from far foreign lands, seem to have been the sights which most impressed him in the capital of the world. In the Imperial Gardens he observed with curiosity a tusk which the custodian assured him had belonged to the Calydonian boar; and he noticed, doubtless with less pleasure, the great ivory image of Athena Alea which Augustus had carried off from the stately temple of the goddess at Tegea. In the neighbourhood of Rome the bubbling milk-white water of Albula or Solfatara, as it is now called, on the road to 16Tibur, attracted his attention, and beside the sylvan lake of Aricia he appears to have seen the grim priest pacing sword in hand, the warder of the Golden Bough. The absurd description he gives of the beautiful and much-maligned Strait of Messina would suffice to prove that he never sailed through it. Probably like most travellers coming from the East he reached Italy by way of Brundisium. Of Sardinia he has given a somewhat full description, but without implying that he had visited it. Sicily, if we may judge by a grave blunder he makes in speaking of it, he never saw.

Aim of Pausanias’s work.

The aim that Pausanias had in writing his Description of Greece is nowhere very fully or clearly stated by him. His book has neither head nor tail, neither preface nor epilogue. At the beginning he plunges into the description of Attica without a word of introduction, and at the end he breaks off his account of Ozolian Locris with equal abruptness. There is reason to believe that the work is unfinished, for he seems to have intended to describe Opuntian Locris, but this intention was never fulfilled. However, from occasional utterances as well as from the general scope and plan of the book, we can gather a fairly accurate notion of the writer’s purpose. Thus in the midst of his description of the Acropolis of Athens he suddenly interposes the remark, “But I must 17proceed, for I have to describe the whole of Greece,” as if the thought of the wide field he had to traverse jogged him, as well it might, and bade him hasten. Again, after bringing his description of Athens and Attica to an end, he adds: “Such are, in my opinion, the most famous of the Athenian traditions and sights: from the mass of materials I have aimed from the outset at selecting the really notable.” Later on, before addressing himself to the description of Sparta he explains his purpose still more definitely and emphatically: “To prevent misconceptions, I stated in my Attica that I had not described everything, but only a selection of the most memorable objects. This principle I will now repeat before I proceed to describe Sparta. From the outset I aimed at sifting the most valuable traditions from out of the mass of insignificant stories which are current among every people. My plan was adopted after mature deliberation, and I will not depart from it.” Again, after briefly narrating the history of Phlius, he says: “I shall now add a notice of the most remarkable sights,” and he concludes his description of Delphi with the words: “Such were the notable objects left at Delphi in my time.” In introducing his notice of the honorary statues at Olympia he is careful to explain that he does not intend to furnish a complete catalogue of 18them, but only to mention such as were of special interest either for their artistic merit or for the fame of the persons they portrayed.

Method of the work.

From these and a few more passages of the same sort it seems clear that Pausanias intended to describe all the most notable objects and to narrate all the most memorable traditions which he found existing or current in the Greece of his own time. It was a vast undertaking, and we need not wonder that at the outset he should have felt himself oppressed by the magnitude of it, and that consequently in the first book, dealing with Attica, his selection of notable objects should be scantier and his description of them slighter than in the later books. It was not only that he was bewildered by the multitude of things he had to say, but that he had not quite made up his mind how to say them. He was groping and fumbling after a method. As the work proceeded, he seems to have felt himself more at ease; the arrangement of the matter becomes more systematic, the range of his interests wider, the descriptions more detailed, his touch surer. Even the second book shows in all these respects a great advance on the first. To mention two conspicuous improvements, he has now definitely adopted the topographical order of description, and he prefaces his account of each considerable city with a sketch of its history. In the first 19book, on the other hand, an historical introduction is wholly wanting, and though Athens itself is on the whole described in topographical order, the rest of Attica is not. Only with the description of the Sacred Way which led from Athens to Eleusis does Pausanias once for all grasp firmly the topographical thread as the best clue to guide him and his readers through the labyrinth. Throughout the rest of his work the general principle on which he arranges his matter is this. After narrating in outline the history of the district he is about to describe, he proceeds from the frontier to the capital by the nearest road, noting anything of interest that strikes him by the way. Arrived at the capital he goes straight to the centre of it, generally to the market-place, describes the chief buildings and monuments there, and then follows the streets, one after the other, that radiate from the centre in all directions, recording the most remarkable objects in each of them. Having finished his account of the capital he describes the surrounding district on the same principle. He follows the chief roads that lead from the capital to all parts of the territory, noting methodically the chief natural features and the most important towns, villages, and monuments that he meets with on the way. Having followed the road up till it brings him to the frontier, he retraces his steps to the 20capital, and sets off along another which he treats in the same way, until in this manner he has exhausted all the principal thoroughfares that branch from the city. On reaching the end of the last of them he does not return on his footsteps, but crosses the boundary into the next district, which he then proceeds to describe after the same fashion. This, roughly speaking, is the way in which he describes the cities and territories of Corinth, Argos, Sparta, Mantinea, Megalopolis, Tegea, and Thebes.

The work is a guide-book.

A better and clearer method of arranging matter so complex and varied it might be hard to devise. It possesses at least one obvious advantage—the routes do not cross each other, and thus a fruitful source of confusion is avoided. The reader, however, will easily perceive that the order of description can hardly have been the one in which Pausanias travelled or expected his readers to travel. The most patient and systematic of topographers and sightseers would hardly submit to the irksome drudgery of pursuing almost every road twice over, first in one direction and then in the other. Manifestly the order has been adopted only for the sake of lucidity, only because in no other way could the writer convey to his reader so clear a notion of the relative positions of the places and things described. Why was Pausanias at such pains to present everything to his 21readers in its exact position? The only probable answer is that he wished to help them to find their way from one object of interest to another; in other words that he intended his Description of Greece to serve as a guide-book to travellers. If his aim had been merely to amuse and entertain his readers at home, he could hardly have lighted on a worse method of doing so; for the persons who find topographical directions amusing and can extract entertainment from reading that “This place is so many furlongs from that, and this other so many more from that other,” must be few in number and of an unusually cheerful disposition. The ordinary reader is more likely to yawn over such statements and shut up the book. We may take it, then, that in Pausanias’s work we possess the ancient equivalent of our modern Murrays and Baedekers. The need for such a guide-book would be felt by the many travellers who visited Greece, and for whom the garrulous but ignorant ciceroni did not, as we know, always provide the desired information. Yet with the innocent ambition of an author Pausanias may very well have hoped that his book might prove not wholly uninteresting to others than travellers. The digressions on historical subjects, on natural curiosities, on the strange creatures of different countries, with which he so often breaks the thread of his 22description, may be regarded as so many lures held out to the reader to beguile him on his weary way. Indeed in one passage he plainly intimates his wish not to be tedious to his readers.

Antiquarian and religious bias of Pausanias.

When we come to examine the substance of his book we quickly perceive that his interests were mainly antiquarian and religious, and that though he professes to describe the whole of Greece or, more literally, all things Greek, what he does describe is little more than the antiquities of the country and the religious traditions and ritual of the people. He interested himself neither in the natural beauties of Greece nor in the ordinary life of his contemporaries. For all the notice he takes of the one or the other, Greece might almost have been a wilderness and its cities uninhabited or peopled only at rare intervals by a motley throng who suddenly appeared as by magic, moved singing through the streets in gay procession with flaring torches and waving censers, dyed the marble pavements of the temples with the blood of victims, filled the air with the smoke and savour of their burning flesh, and then melted away as mysteriously as they had come, leaving the deserted streets and temples to echo only to the footstep of some solitary traveller who explored with awe and wonder the monuments of a vanished race. Yet as his work proceeded Pausanias seems 23to have wakened up now and then to a dim consciousness that men and women were still living and toiling around him, that fields were still ploughed and harvests reaped, that the vine and the olive still yielded their fruit, though Theseus and Agamemnon, Cimon and Pericles, Philip and Alexander were no more. To this awakening consciousness or, to speak more correctly, to this gradual widening of his interests, we owe the few peeps which in his later books Pausanias affords us at his contemporaries in their daily life. Thus he lets us see the tall and stalwart highlanders of Daulis; the handsome and industrious women of Patrae weaving with deft fingers the fine flax of their native fields into head-dresses and other feminine finery; the fishermen of Bulis putting out to fish the purple shell in the Gulf of Corinth; the potters of Aulis turning their wheels in the little seaside town from which Agamemnon sailed for Troy; and the apothecaries of Chaeronea distilling a fragrant and healing balm from roses and lilies, from irises and narcissuses culled in peaceful gardens on the battlefield where Athens and Thebes, side by side, had made the last stand for the freedom of Greece.

His descriptions of religious rites.

Contrast with these sketches, few and far between, the gallery of pictures he has painted of the religious life of his contemporaries. To 24mention only a few of them, we see sick people asleep and dreaming on the reeking skins of slaughtered rams or dropping gold and silver coins as a thank-offering for recovered health into a sacred spring; lepers praying to the nymphs in a cave, then swimming the river and leaving, like Naaman, their uncleanness behind them in the water; holy men staggering along narrow paths under the burden of uprooted trees; processions of priests and magistrates, of white-robed boys with garlands of hyacinths in their hair, of children wreathed with corn and ivy, of men holding aloft blazing torches and chanting as they march their native hymns; women wailing for Achilles while the sun sinks low in the west; Persians in tall caps droning their strange litany in an unknown tongue; husbandmen sticking gold leaf on a bronze goat in a market-place to protect their vines from blight, or running with the bleeding pieces of a white cock round the vineyards while the black squall comes crawling up across the bay. We see the priest making rain by dipping an oak-branch in a spring on the holy mountain, or mumbling his weird spells by night over four pits to soothe the fury of the winds that blow from the four quarters of the world. We see men slaughtering beasts at a grave and pouring the warm blood down a hole into the tomb for the dead 25man to drink; others casting cakes of meal and honey into the cleft down which the water of the Great Flood all ran away; others trying their fortune by throwing dice in a cave, or flinging barley-cakes into a pool and watching them sink or swim, or letting down a mirror into a spring to know whether a sick friend will recover or die. We see the bronze lamps lit at evening in front of the oracular image, the smoke of incense curling up from the hearth, the enquirer laying a copper coin on the altar, whispering his question into the ear of the image, then stealing out with his hands on his ears, ready to take as the divine answer the first words he may hear on quitting the sanctuary. We see the nightly sky reddened by the fitful glow of the great bonfire on the top of Mount Cithaeron where the many images of oak-wood, arrayed as brides, are being consumed in the flames, after having been dragged in lumbering creaking waggons to the top of the mountain, each image with a bridesmaid standing by its side. These and many more such scenes rise up before us in turning the pages of Pausanias.

His account of superstitious customs and beliefs.

Akin to his taste for religious ritual is his love of chronicling quaint customs, observances, and superstitions of all sorts. Thus he tells us how Troezenian maidens used to dedicate locks of their hair in the temple of the bachelor Hippolytus before marriage; how on a like 26occasion Megarian girls laid their shorn tresses on the grave of the virgin Iphinoe; how lads at Phigalia cropped their hair in honour of the river that flows in the deep glen below the town; how the boy priests of Cranaean Athena bathed in tubs after the ancient fashion; and how the priest and priestess of Artemis Hymnia must remain all their lives unmarried, must wash and live differently from common folk, and must never enter the house of a private person. Amongst the curious observances which he notices at the various shrines are the rules that no birth or death might take place within the sacred grove of Aesculapius at Epidaurus, and that all sacrifices had to be consumed within the bounds; that no broken bough might be removed from the grove of Hyrnetho near Epidaurus, and no pomegranate brought into the precinct of the Mistress at Lycosura; that at Pergamus the name of Eurypylus might not be pronounced in the sanctuary of Aesculapius, and no one who had sacrificed to Telephus might enter that sanctuary till he had bathed; that at Olympia no man who had eaten of the victim offered to Pelops might go into the temple of Zeus, that women might not ascend above the first stage of the great altar, that the paste of ashes which was smeared on the altar must be kneaded with the water of the Alpheus and no other, and that the sacrifices 27offered to Zeus must be burnt with no wood but that of the white poplar. Again, he loves to note, though he does not always believe, the local superstitions he met with or had read of, such as the belief that at the sacrifice to Zeus on Mount Lycaeus a man was always turned into a wolf, but could regain his human shape if as a wolf he abstained for nine years from preying on human flesh; that within the precinct of the god on the same mountain neither men nor animals cast shadows, and that whoever entered it would die within the year; that the trout in the river Aroanius sang like thrushes; that whoever caught a fish in a certain lake would be turned into a fish himself; that Tegea could never be taken because it possessed a lock of Medusa’s hair; that Hera recovered her virginity every year by bathing in a spring at Nauplia; that the water of one spring was a cure for hydrophobia, while the water of another drove mares mad; that no snakes or wolves could live in Sardinia; that when the sun was in a certain sign of the zodiac earth taken from the tomb of Amphion and Zethus at Thebes and carried to Tithorea in Phocis would draw away the fertility from the Theban land and transfer it to the Tithorean, whence at that season the Thebans kept watch and ward over the tomb, lest the Tithoreans should come and filch the precious earth; 28that at Marathon every night the dead warriors rose from their graves and fought the great battle over again, while belated wayfarers, hurrying by, heard with a shudder the hoarse cries of the combatants, the trampling of charging horses, and the clash of arms.

In carrying out his design of recording Greek traditions, Pausanias has interwoven many narratives into his description of Greece. These are of various sorts, and were doubtless derived from various sources. Some are historical, and were taken avowedly or tacitly from books. Some are legends with perhaps a foundation in fact; others are myths pure and simple; others again are popular tales to which parallels may be found in the folk-lore of many lands. Narratives of these sorts Pausanias need not have learned from books. Some of them were doubtless commonplaces with which he had been familiar from childhood. Others he may have picked up on his travels. The spring of mythical fancy has not run dry among the mountains and islands of Greece at the present day; it flowed, we may be sure, still more copiously in the days of Pausanias. Amongst the popular tales which he tells or alludes to may be mentioned the story of the sleeper in the cave; of the cunning masons who robbed the royal treasury they had built; of the youth who slew the lion and 29|Myths.| married the princess; of the kind serpent that saved a child from a wolf and was killed by the child’s father by mistake; of the king whose life was in a purple lock on his head; of the witch who offered to make an old man young again by cutting him up and boiling him in a hellbroth, and who did in this way change a tough old tup into a tender young lamb. It is characteristic of Greek popular tradition that these stories are not left floating vaguely in the cloudy region of fairyland; they are brought down to solid earth and given a local habitation and a name. The sleeper was Epimenides the Cretan; the masons were Trophonius and Agamedes, and the king for whom they built the treasury was Hyrieus of Orchomenus; the youth who won the hand of the princess was Alcathous of Megara; the king with the purple lock was Nisus, also of Megara; the witch was Medea, and the old man whom she mangled was Pelias; the place where the serpent saved the child from the wolf was Amphiclea in Phocis. Amongst the myths which crowd the pages of Pausanias we may note the strangely savage tale of Attis and Agdistis, the hardly less barbarous story of the loves of Poseidon and Demeter as horse and mare, and the picturesque narratives of the finding of the forsaken babe Aesculapius by the goatherd, and the coming of Castor 30|Legends.| and Pollux to Sparta in the guise of strangers from Cyrene. Of the legends which he tells of the heroic age—that border-land between fable and history—some are his own in the sense that we do not find them recorded by any other ancient writer. Such are the stories how Theseus even as a child evinced undaunted courage by attacking the lion’s skin of Hercules which he mistook for a living lion; how the same hero in his youth proved his superhuman strength to the masons who had jeered at his girlish appearance; how the crazed Orestes, dogged by the Furies of his murdered mother, bit off one of his fingers, and how on his doing so the aspect of the Furies at once changed from black to white, as if in token that they accepted the sacrifice as an atonement. Such, too, is the graceful story of the parting of Penelope from her father, and the tragic tale of the death of Hyrnetho; in the latter we seem almost to catch the ring of a romantic ballad. Among the traditions told of historical personages by Pausanias but not peculiar to him are the legends of Pindar’s dream, of the escape of Aristomenes from the pit, and of the wondrous cure of Leonymus, the Crotonian general, who, attacking the Locrian army at the point where the soul of the dead hero Ajax hovered in the van, received a hurt from a ghostly spear, but was afterwards healed by 31the same hand in the White Isle, where Ajax dwelt with other spirits of the famous dead. To the same class belong a couple of anecdotes with which Pausanias has sought to enliven the dull catalogue of athletes in the sixth book. One tells how the boxer Euthymus thrashed the ghost of a tipsy sailor and won the hand of a fair maiden, who was on the point of being delivered over to the tender mercies of the deceased mariner. The other relates how another noted boxer, by name Theagenes, departed this vale of tears after accumulating a prodigious number of prizes; how when he was no more a spiteful foe came and wreaked his spleen by whipping the bronze statue of the illustrious dead, till the statue, losing patience, checked his insolence by falling on him and crushing him to death; how the sons of this amiable man prosecuted the statue for murder; how the court, sitting in judgment, found the statue guilty and solemnly condemned it to be sunk in the sea; how, the sentence being rigorously executed, the land bore no fruit till the statue had been fished up again and set in its place; and how the people sacrificed to the boxer as to a god ever after.

His description of the country.

The same antiquarian and religious tincture which appears in Pausanias’s account of the Greek people colours his description of the country. The mountains which he climbs, the 32plains which he traverses, the rivers which he fords, the lakes and seas that he beholds shining in the distance, the very flowers that spring beside his path hardly exist for him but as they are sacred to some god or tenanted by some spirit of the elements, or because they call up some memory of the past, some old romantic story of unhappy love or death. Of one flower, white and tinged with red, he tells us that it first grew in Salamis when Ajax died; of another, that chaplets of it are worn in their hair by white-robed boys when they walk in procession in honour of Demeter. He notes the mournful letters on the hyacinth and tells the tale of the fair youth slain unwittingly by Apollo. He points out the old plane-tree which Menelaus planted before he went away to the wars; the great cedar with an image of Artemis hanging among its boughs; the sacred cypresses called the Maidens, tall and dark and stately, in the bleak upland valley of Psophis; the myrtle-tree whose pierced leaves still bore the print of hapless Phaedra’s bodkin on that fair islanded coast of Troezen, where now the orange and the lemon bloom in winter; the pomegranate with its blood-red fruit growing on the grave of the patriot Menoeceus who shed his blood for his country. If he looks up at the mountains, it is not to mark the snowy peaks glistering in the sunlight against the 33blue, or the sombre pine-forests that fringe their crests and are mirrored in the dark lake below; it is to tell you that Zeus or Apollo or the Sun-god is worshipped on their tops, that the Thyiad women rave on them above the clouds, or that Pan has been heard piping in their lonely coombs. The gloomy caverns, where the sunbeams hardly penetrate, with their fantastic stalactites and dripping roofs, are to him the haunts of Pan and the nymphs. The awful precipices of the Aroanian mountains, in the sunless crevices of which the snow-drifts never melt, would have been passed by him in silence were it not that the water that trickles down their dark glistening face is the water of Styx. If he describes the smooth glassy pool which, bordered by reeds and tall grasses, still sleeps under the shadow of the shivering poplars in the Lernean swamp, it is because the way to hell goes down through its black unfathomed water. If he stops by murmuring stream or brimming river, it is to relate how from the banks of the Ilissus, where she was at play, the North Wind carried off Orithyia to be his bride; how the Selemnus had been of old a shepherd who loved a sea-nymph and died forlorn; how the amorous Alpheus still flows across the wide and stormy Adriatic to join his love at Syracuse. If in summer he crosses a parched river-bed, where not a driblet of water 34is oozing, where the stones burn under foot and dazzle the eye by their white glare, he will tell you that this is the punishment the river suffers for having offended the sea-god. Distant prospects, again, are hardly remarked by him except for the sake of some historical or legendary association. The high knoll which juts out from the rugged side of Mount Maenalus into the dead flat of the Mantinean plain was called the Look, he tells us, because here the dying Epaminondas, with his hand pressed hard on the wound from which his life was ebbing fast, took his long last look at the fight. The view of the sea from the Acropolis at Athens is noticed by him, not for its gleam of molten sapphire, but because from this height the aged Aegeus scanned the blue expanse for the white sails of his returning son, then cast himself headlong from the rock when he descried the bark with sable sails steering for the port of Athens.

The disinterested glimpses, as we may call them, of Greek scenery which we catch in the pages of Pausanias are brief and few. He tells us that there is no fairer river than the Ladon either in Greece or in foreign land, and probably no one who has traversed the magnificent gorge through which the river bursts its way from the highlands of northern Arcadia to the lowlands on the borders of Elis will be inclined 35to dispute his opinion. Widely different scenes he puts in for us with a few touches—the Boeotian Asopus oozing sluggishly through its deep beds of reeds; the sodden plain of Nestane with the rain-water pouring down into it from the misty mountains; the road running through vineyards with mountains rising on either hand; the spring gushing from the hollow trunk of a venerable plane; the summer lounge in the shady walks of the grove beside the sea; the sand and pine-trees of the low coast of Elis; the oak-woods of Phelloe with stony soil where the deer ranged free and wild boars had their lair; and the Boeotian forest with its giant oaks in whose branches the crows built their nests.

His notices of the natural products of Greece.

It is one of the marks of a widening intellectual horizon that as his work goes on Pausanias takes more and more notice of the aspect and natural products of the country which he describes. Such notices are least frequent in the first book and commonest in the last three. Thus he remarks the bareness of the Cirrhaean plain, the fertility of the valley of the Phocian Cephisus, the vineyards of Ambrosus, the palms and dates of Aulis, the olive-oil of Tithorea that was sent to the emperor, the dykes that dammed off the water from the fields in the marshy flats of Caphyae and Thisbe. He mentions the various kinds 36of oaks that grew in the Arcadian woods, the wild-strawberry bushes of Mount Helicon on which the goats browsed, the hellebore, both black and white, of Anticyra, and the berry of Ambrosus which yielded the crimson dye. He observed the flocks of bustards that haunted the banks of the Phocian Cephisus, the huge tortoises that crawled in the forests of Arcadia, the white blackbirds of Mount Cyllene, the two sorts of poultry at Tanagra, the purple shell fished in the sea at Bulis, the trout of the Aroanius river, and the eels of the Copaic Lake. All these instances are taken from the last three books. In the earlier part of his work he condescended to mention the honey of Hymettus, the old silver mines of Laurium, the olives of Cynuria, the fine flax of Elis, the purple shell of the Laconian coast, the marble of Pentelicus, the mussel-stone of Megara, and the green porphyry of Croceae. But of the rich Messenian plain, known in antiquity as the Happy Land, where nowadays the traveller passes, almost as in a tropical region, between orange-groves and vineyards fenced by hedges of huge fantastic cactuses and sword-like aloes, Pausanias has nothing more to say than that “the Pamisus flows through tilled land.”

His account of the state of the roads.

On the state of the roads he is still more reticent than on that of the country. The dreadful Scironian road—the Via Mala of 37Greece—which ran along a perilous ledge of the Megarian sea-cliffs at a giddy height above the breakers, had lately been widened by Hadrian. An excellent carriage road, much frequented, led from Tegea to Argos. Another road, traversable by vehicles, went over the pass of the Tretus, where the railway from Corinth to Argos now runs; and we have the word of Pausanias for it that a driving-road crossed Parnassus from Delphi to Tithorea. On the other hand the road from Sicyon to Titane was impassable for carriages; a rough hill-track led from Chaeronea to Stiris; the path along the rugged mountainous coast between Lerna and Thyrea was then, as it is now, narrow and difficult; and the pass of the Ladder over Mount Artemisius from Argos to Mantinea was so steep that in some places steps had to be cut in the rock to facilitate the descent. Of the path up to the Corycian cave on Mount Parnassus our author truly observes that it is easier for a man on foot than for mules and horses. Greek mules and horses can, indeed, do wonders in the way of scrambling up and down the most execrable mountain paths on slopes that resemble the roof of a house; but it would sorely tax even their energies to ascend to the Corycian cave.

The real interest of Pausanias, however, lay neither in the country nor in the people of his 38|His descriptions of the monuments.| own age, but in those monuments of the past, which, though too often injured by time or defaced by violence, he still found scattered in profusion over Greece. It is to a description of them that the greater part of his work is devoted. He did not profess to catalogue, still less to describe, them all. To do so might well have exceeded the powers of any man, however great his patience and industry. All that a writer could reasonably hope to accomplish was to make a choice of the most interesting monuments, to describe them clearly, and to furnish such comments as were needful to understanding them properly. This is what Pausanias attempted to do and what, after every deduction has been made for omissions and mistakes, he may fairly be said to have done well. The choice of the monuments to be described necessarily rested with himself, and if his choice was sometimes different from what ours might have been, it would be unreasonable to blame him for it. He did not write for us. No man in his sober senses ever did write for readers who were to be born some seventeen hundred years after he was in his grave. In his wildest dreams of fame Pausanias can hardly have hoped, perhaps under all the circumstances we ought rather to say feared, that his book would be read, long after the Roman empire had passed away, by the people 39whom he calls the most numerous and warlike barbarians in Europe, ^[1] by the Britons in their distant isle, and by the inhabitants of a new world across the Atlantic.

His preference for the older over the later art.

When we examine Pausanias’s choice of monuments we find that, like his account of the country and people, it was mainly determined by two leading principles, his antiquarian tastes and his religious curiosity. In the first place, the monuments described are generally ancient, not modern; in the second place, they are for the most part religious, not profane. His preference for old over modern art, for works of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. over those of the later period, was well founded and has been shared by the best judges both in ancient and modern times. Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Quintilian, and our author’s own contemporary, Lucian, perhaps the most refined critic of art in antiquity, mention no artist of later date than the fourth century B.C. The truth is, the subjugation of Greece by Macedonia struck a fatal blow at Greek art. No sculptor or painter of the first rank was born after the conquest. It seemed as if art were a flower that could only bloom in freedom; in the air of slavery it drooped and faded. 40Thus if Pausanias chose to chronicle the masterpieces of the great age of art rather than the feebler productions of the decadence, we can only applaud his taste. Yet we may surmise that his taste was here reinforced by his patriotism. For he was more than a mere antiquary and connoisseur. He was a patriot who warmly sympathised with the ancient glories of his country and deeply mourned its decline. He recognised Athens as the representative of all that was best in Greek life, and he can hardly find words strong enough to express his detestation of the men who by weakening her in the Peloponnesian war directly prepared for the conquest of Greece by Macedonia. The battle of Chaeronea he describes repeatedly as a disaster for the whole of Greece, and of the conqueror Philip himself he speaks in terms of the strongest reprobation. The men who had repelled the Persians, put down the military despotism of Sparta, fought against the Macedonians, and delayed, if they could not avert, the final subjugation of Greece by Rome were for him the benefactors of their country. He gives a list of them, beginning with Miltiades and ending with Philopoemen, after whom, he says, Greece ceased to be the mother of the brave. And as he mentions with pride and gratitude the men who had served the cause of freedom, so he expresses 41himself with disgust and abhorrence of the men who had worked for the enslavement of Greece to Persia, to Macedonia, and to Rome. His style, generally cold and colourless, grows warm and animated when he tells of a struggle for freedom, whether waged by the Messenians against the Spartans, or by the Greeks against the Gauls, or by the Achaeans against the Romans. And when he has recorded the final catastrophe, the conquest of Greece by Rome, he remarks as with a sigh that the nation had now reached its lowest depth of weakness, and that when Nero afterwards liberated it the boon came too late—the Greeks had forgotten what it was to be free.

His preference for religious over profane art.

The preference which Pausanias exhibits for the art of the best period is not more marked than his preference for sacred over profane or merely decorative art, for buildings consecrated to religion over buildings devoted to the purposes of civic or private life. Rarely does he offer any general remarks on the aspect and architectural style of the cities he describes. At Tanagra he praises the complete separation of the houses of the people from the sanctuaries of the gods. Amphissa, he tells us, was handsomely built, and Lebadea could compare with the most flourishing cities of Greece in style and splendour. On the other hand he viewed with unconcealed disdain the squalor and decay 42of the Phocian city of Panopeus, “if city it can be called that has no government offices, no gymnasium, no theatre, no market-place, no water conducted to a fountain, and where the people live in hovels, just like highland shanties, perched on the edge of a ravine.” In the cities he visited he does indeed notice market-places, colonnades, courts of justice, government offices, fountains, baths, and the houses and statues of famous men, but the number of such buildings and monuments in his pages is small compared to the number of temples and precincts, images and votive offerings that he describes, and such notice as he takes of them seldom amounts to more than a bare mention. The civic buildings that he deigns to describe in any detail are very few. Amongst them we may note the Painted Colonnade at Athens with its famous pictures, the spacious and splendid Persian Colonnade at Sparta with its columns of white marble carved in the shape of Persian captives, the market-place at Elis, and the Phocian parliament-house with its double row of columns running down the whole length of the hall and its seats rising in tiers from the columns up to the walls behind.

His descriptions of religious monuments.

It is when he comes to religious art and architecture that Pausanias seems to have felt himself most at home. If in his notice of civic buildings and monuments he is chary of details, 43he is lavish of them in describing the temples and sanctuaries with their store of images, altars, and offerings. The most elaborate of his descriptions are those which he has given of the temple of Zeus at Olympia with the great image of the god by Phidias, the scenes on the Chest of Cypselus in the Heraeum at Olympia, the reliefs on the throne of Apollo at Amyclae, and the paintings by Polygnotus in the Cnidian Lesche at Delphi. But, apart from these conspicuous examples; almost every page of his work bears witness to his interest in the monuments of religion, especially when they were more than usually old and quaint. Among the queer images he describes are the thirty square stones revered as gods at Pharae; the rough stones worshipped as images of Love and Hercules and the Graces at Thespiae, Hyettus, and Orchomenus; the pyramidal stone which represented Apollo at Megara; the ancient wooden image of Zeus with three eyes on the acropolis of Argos; the old idol of Demeter as a woman with a horse’s head holding a dove in one hand and a dolphin in the other; the figure of a mermaid bound fast with golden chains in a wild wood at the meeting of two glens; the image of the War God at Sparta in fetters to hinder him from running away; the bronze likeness of an unquiet ghost clamped with iron to a rock to keep him still; 44an image of Athena with a purple bandage on her wounded thigh; a pair of wooden idols of Dionysus with shining gilt bodies and red faces; and tiny bronze images of Castor and Pollux, a foot high, on a rocky islet over which the sea broke foaming in winter, but could not wash them away. Some of the images he describes as tricked out with offerings of devout worshippers. Such were an image of Pasiphae covered with garlands; a figure of Hermes swathed in myrtle boughs; a crimson-painted idol of Dionysus emerging from a heap of laurel leaves and ivy; and a statue of Health almost hidden under tresses of women’s hair and strips of Babylonish raiment in the shade of ancient cypresses at Titane. Among the appointments of the sanctuaries he mentions, for example, altars made of the ashes or blood of the victims, perpetual fires, a golden lamp that burned day and night in the Erechtheum, a gilt head of the Gorgon on the wall of the Acropolis, a purple curtain in the temple of Zeus, a golden and jewelled peacock dedicated by Hadrian to Hera, the iron stand of Alyattes’s bowl, chains of liberated prisoners, hanging from the cypresses in the grove of Hebe, and bronze railings round the shaft down which the enquirer, clad in a peculiar costume, descended by a ladder to consult the oracle of Trophonius.

His interest in relics.

45Again, Pausanias loves to notice the things, whether worshipped or not, which were treasured as relics of a mythical or legendary past. Such were the remains of the clay out of which Prometheus had moulded the first man and woman; the stone that Cronus had swallowed instead of his infant son; the remains of the wild-strawberry tree under which Hermes had been nourished; the egg which the lovely Leda had laid and out of which Castor and Pollux had been hatched; the ruins of the bridal chamber where Zeus had dallied with Semele; the mouldering hide of the Calydonian boar; and the old wooden pillar, held together by bands and protected from the weather by a shed, which had stood in the house of Oenomaus. In the temple of Artemis at Aulis, now represented by a ruined Byzantine chapel in a bare stony field, the traveller was shown the remains of the plane-tree under which the Greeks had sacrificed before setting sail for Troy, and on a neighbouring hill the guides pointed out the bronze threshold of Agamemnon’s hut. But the most revered of all the relics described by Pausanias seems to have been the sceptre which Hephaestus was said to have made and Agamemnon to have wielded. It was kept and worshipped at Chaeronea. A priest who held office for a year guarded the precious relic in his house and offered sacrifices to it daily, 46while a table covered with flesh and cakes stood constantly beside it. A ruder conception of religion than is revealed by this practice of adoring and feeding a staff it might be hard to discover amongst the lowest fetish-worshippers of Western Africa. And this practice was carried on in the native city and in the lifetime of the enlightened Plutarch! Truly the extremes of human nature sometimes jostle each other in the street.

His notices of historic monuments.

But his religious bias by no means so warped the mind of Pausanias as to render him indifferent to the historic ground which he trod, and to those monuments of great men and memorable events on which his eye must have fallen at almost every turn. As a scholar he was versed in, and as a patriot he was proud of, the memories which these monuments were destined to perpetuate, and which in the genius of the Greek people have found a monument more lasting than any of bronze or marble. He visited the battlefields of Marathon and Plataea and beheld the trophies of victory and the graves of the victors. At Salamis he saw the trophy of the great sea-fight, but he mentions no graves. Doubtless the bones of many victors and vanquished lay together fathoms deep in the bay. At Chaeronea he saw a sadder monument, the colossal stone lion on the grave of the Thebans who had fallen in 47the cause of freedom. On the battlefield of Mantinea he found the grave of Epaminondas, at Sparta the grave of Leonidas, and among the pine-woods of the sacred isle that looks across the blue Saronic gulf to Attica the grave of the banished Demosthenes. At Thebes he saw the ruins of Pindar’s house, the shields of the Lacedaemonian officers who fell at Leuctra, and the figures of white marble which Thrasybulus and his comrades in exile and in arms had dedicated out of gratitude for Theban hospitality. In the Grove of the Muses on Helicon he beheld the statues of renowned poets and musicians—Hesiod with his lute, Arion on his dolphin, blind Thamyris, Orpheus holding the beasts spellbound as he sang. At Tanagra he observed the portrait and the tomb of the poetess Corinna, the rival of Pindar; and in several cities of Arcadia he remarked portraits of the Arcadian historian Polybius.

Nowhere, however, did he find historical monuments crowded so closely together as at Athens, Olympia, and Delphi. The great sanctuaries of Olympia and Delphi served in a manner as the national museums and record-offices of Greece. In them the various Greek cities not only of the mother-country but of Italy, Sicily, Gaul, and the East set up the trophies of their victories and deposited copies of treaties and other important documents. 48|Historic monuments at Olympia.| They offered a neutral ground where natives of jealous or hostile states could meet in peace, and where they could survey, with hearts that swelled with various emotions, the records of their country’s triumphs and defeats. At Olympia our author mentions a tablet inscribed with a treaty of alliance for a hundred years between Elis, Athens, Argos, and Mantinea; another tablet recording a treaty of peace for thirty years between Athens and Sparta; and the quoit of Iphitus inscribed with the terms of the truce of God which was proclaimed at the Olympic festival. Amongst the many trophies of war which he enumerates the most memorable was the image of Zeus dedicated in common by the Greeks who had fought at Plataea, and the most conspicuous, unless we except the figure of Victory on the pillar dedicated by the Messenians of Naupactus, must have been the colossal bronze statue of Zeus, no less than twenty-seven feet high, which the Eleans set up for a victory over the Arcadians. A golden shield, hung high on the eastern gable of the temple of Zeus, proclaimed the triumph of the Lacedaemonian arms at Tanagra. The sight of one-and-twenty gilded shields that glittered on the eastern and southern sides of the temple must have cost Pausanias a pang, for they had been dedicated by the Roman general Mummius to commemorate the 49conquest of Greece. Another monument that doubtless vexed the patriotic heart of Pausanias was an elegant rotunda with slim Ionic columns resting on marble steps and supporting a marble roof; for the statues which it enclosed, resplendent in gold and ivory, were those of Philip and Alexander, and the building stood as a memorial of the battle of Chaeronea.

Historic monuments at Delphi.

At Delphi the road which wound up the steep slope to the temple of Apollo was lined on both sides with an unbroken succession of monuments which illustrated some of the brightest triumphs and darkest tragedies in Greek history.history. Here the proud trophy of the Lacedaemonian victory at Aegospotami, with its rows of statues rising in tiers, confronted the more modest trophy erected by the Athenians for the victory of Marathon. Here were statues set up by the Argives for the share they had taken with the Thebans in founding Messene. Here was a treasury dedicated by the Athenians out of the spoils of Marathon, and another dedicated by the Thebans out of the spoils of Leuctra. Here another treasury, built by the Syracusans, commemorated the disastrous defeat of the Athenians in Sicily. A bronze palm-tree and a gilded image of Athena stood here as memorials of Athenian valour by sea and land at the Eurymedon. Here, above all, were monuments of the victories achieved by the 50united Greeks over the Persians at Artemisium, Salamis, and Plataea. The golden tripod, indeed, which formed the trophy of Plataea, had disappeared long before Pausanias passed up the Sacred Way, its empty place testifying silently to the rapacity of the Phocian leaders; but the bronze serpent which had supported it still stood erect, with the names of the states that had taken part in the battle inscribed on its coils. A prodigious image of Apollo, five-and-thirty ells high, towering above the other monuments, proclaimed at once the enormity of the crime which the Phocians had committed and the magnitude of the fine by which they had expiated it. High and conspicuous too, on the architrave of the temple, hung the shields which told of one of the latest triumphs of the Greek arms, the repulse and defeat of the Gauls. All these and many more historical monuments Pausanias saw and described at Delphi.

Historic monuments at Athens.

At Athens among the portraits of famous men that attracted his attention were statues of the statesmen Solon, Pericles, and Lycurgus, the generals Conon, Timotheus, and Iphicrates, the orators Demosthenes and Isocrates, the philosopher Chrysippus, and the poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Menander. In the Prytaneum were preserved copies of the laws of Solon. The colonnades that flanked the 51market-place were adorned with pictures of the battles of Marathon, Oenoe, and Mantinea, and in one of them—the celebrated Painted Colonnade—our author observed bronze shields, smeared with pitch to preserve them from rust, which had been taken from the Spartans at Sphacteria. On the Acropolis stood, as a trophy of the Persian wars, the immense bronze statue of Athena, of which the blade of the spear and the crest of the helmet could be seen far off at sea. Close at hand in the Erechtheum the traveller was shown the sword of Mardonius and the corselet of Masistius, who had fallen while leading the Persian cavalry to the charge at Plataea. In Piraeus he saw the sanctuary of Aphrodite which Conon had built after vanquishing the Lacedaemonian fleet off Cnidus, and at the entrance to the great harbour, in view of the ships sailing out and in, the grave of Themistocles who had won for Athens the empire of the sea. But no place in Greece was richer in monuments of the historic past, none seems to have stirred Pausanias more deeply than that memorable spot outside the walls of Athens where, within the narrow compass of a single graveyard, were gathered the mortal remains of so much valour and genius. Here lay not a few of the illustrious men who by their counsels, their swords, or their pens had made Athens great and famous, and hither 52the ashes of humbler citizens, who had died for their country, were brought from distant battlefields to rest in Attic earth. His description of this the national burying-ground of Athens has not, indeed, the pensive grace of Addison’s essay on the tombs in the Abbey. It is little more than a bare list of the names he read on the monuments, but there almost every name was a history as full of proud or mournful memories as the names carved on the tombs in Westminster and St. Paul’s or stitched on the tattered and blackened banners that droop from the walls of our churches. The annals of Athens were written on these stones—the story of her restless and aspiring activity, her triumphs in art, in eloquence, in arms, her brief noon of glory, and her long twilight of decrepitude and decay. No wonder that our traveller paused amid monuments which seemed, in the gathering night of barbarism, to catch and reflect some beams of the bright day that was over, like the purple light that lingers on the slopes of Hymettus when the sun has set on Athens.

His digressions on natural curiosities.

To relieve the tedium of the topographical part of his work, Pausanias has introduced digressions on the wonders of nature and of foreign lands. Thus, for example, having mentioned the destruction of Helice by an earthquake, he describes the ominous signs which 53herald the approach of a great earthquake—the heavy rains or long droughts, in winter the sultry weather, in summer the haze through which the sun’s disc looms red and lurid, the sudden gusts, the springs of water drying up, the rumbling noises underground. Further, he analyses the different kinds of shocks, determines the nature of the one which destroyed Helice, and describes the immense wave which simultaneously advanced on the doomed city from the sea. He refers to the ebb and flow of the ocean, to the ice-bound sea and frozen deserts of the north, to the southern land where the sun casts no shadow at midsummer. He tells how the Chinese rear the silkworm, and describes both silk and the silkworm more correctly than any writer who preceded and than some who followed him. It has been suggested that he derived his information, directly or indirectly, from a member of the Roman embassy which appears from the evidence of Chinese historians to have been sent by the emperor Marcus Antoninus to the far East and to have reached the court of China in October 166 A.D. Again, he describes the Sarmatians of northern Europe leading a nomadic life in the depths of their virgin forests, subsisting by their mares, ignorant of iron, clad in corselets made of horse-hoofs, shooting arrows barbed with bone from bows 54of the cornel-tree, and entangling their foes in the coils of their lassoes.

Among the curiosities which seem to have especially interested him were the huge bones he met with in various places. Generally he took them to be bones of giants, but one of them he described more happily as that of a sea-monster. Probably they were all bones of mammoths or other large extinct animals, such as have been found plentifully in modern times in various parts of Greece, for example near Megalopolis, where he saw some of them. Again, he is particularly fond of describing or alluding to strange birds and beasts, whether native to Greece or imported from distant countries. Thus he mentions a reported variety of white blackbirds on Mount Cyllene which had attracted the attention of Aristotle, and he describes almost with the exactitude of a naturalist a small venomous viper of northern Arcadia which is still dreaded by the inhabitants. He refers to the parrots and camels and huge serpents of India, and he describes briefly but correctly the ostrich and the rhinoceros. He gives a full and sober account of the method of capturing the bison, and another of the mode of catching the elk which contrasts very favourably with the absurd account of it given by Caesar. At Tanagra he saw the stuffed or pickled Triton, or what 55passed for such, of which the Tanagraeans were so proud that they put a figure of a Triton on the coins which they minted in the lifetime of Pausanias. In the island of Poroselene he enjoyed, he assures us, the spectacle of a tame dolphin that came at a boy’s call and allowed him to ride on its back.

His report of this last spectacle, though it is confirmed by another witness, may raise a doubt as to his credibility. Professor Alfred Newton, whom I have consulted on the subject, kindly informs me that he knows of no modern evidence to bear Pausanias out, but that considering the widespread belief of the ancients in the familiarity of dolphins he does not think it inconceivable that in those days the creatures lived in little fear of mankind. We cannot judge, he says, by the behaviour of animals at the present day of what they might or did do before persecution began. “When the Russians,” he continues, “discovered Bering’s Island in 1741, they found its shores thronged by a big sea-beast (the Rhytina gigas of naturalists), which, never having seen men before, had no fear of them, and the Russians (shipwrecked as they were) used to wade in the water and milk the ‘cows.’ The confidence was misplaced, and within thirty years or so every one of the animals had been destroyed, and the species extirpated.” Thus it seems 56not impossible that dolphins may have been tamer in antiquity than they are now, and that Pausanias may really have seen what he tells us he saw. But perhaps the exhibition at Poroselene was a hoax.

Description of Greece by the pseudo-Dicaearchus.

So much for the contents of Pausanias’s book. Before we enquire into the character of the writer and the sources from which he drew his materials it may be instructive to compare his work with the fragments of another ancient description of Greece which have come down to us. The comparison will help us to understand better both what we have gained and what we have lost by the idiosyncrasies of Pausanias. The fragments commonly pass under the name of the eminent Messenian writer Dicaearchus, a pupil of Aristotle; but from internal evidence we may conclude that the work of which they formed part was written by a later author at some time between 164 B.C. and 86 B.C. The nature of the work may be gathered from the following free translation or paraphrase, which is also slightly abridged.

“ The road to Athens is a pleasant one, running between cultivated fields the whole way. The city itself is dry and ill supplied with water. The streets are nothing but miserable old lanes, the houses mean, with a few better ones among them. On his first 57arrival a stranger could hardly believe that this is the Athens of which he has heard so much. Yet he will soon come to believe that it is Athens indeed. A Music Hall, the most beautiful in the world, a large and stately theatre, a costly, remarkable, and far-seen temple of Athena called the Parthenon rising above the theatre, strike the beholder with admiration. A temple of Olympian Zeus, unfinished but planned on an astonishing scale; three gymnasiums, the Academy, Lyceum, and Cynosarges, shaded with trees that spring from greensward; verdant gardens of philosophers; amusements and recreations; many holidays and a constant succession of spectacles;—all these the visitor will find in Athens.

“ The products of the country are priceless in quality but not too plentiful. However, the frequency of the spectacles and holidays makes up for the scarcity to the poorer sort, who forget the pangs of hunger in gazing at the shows and pageants. Every artist is sure of being welcomed with applause and of making a name; hence the city is crowded with statues.

“ Of the inhabitants some are Attic and some are Athenian. The former are gossiping, slanderous, given to prying into the business of strangers, fair and false. The Athenians are high-minded, straightforward, and staunch in 58friendship. The city is infested by a set of scribblers who worry visitors and rich strangers. When the people catches the rascals, it makes an example of them. The true-born Athenians are keen and critical auditors, constant in their attendance at plays and spectacles. In short, Athens as far surpasses all other cities in the pleasures and conveniences of life as they surpass the country. But a man must beware of the courtesans, lest they lure him to ruin. The verses of Lysippus run thus:

‘If you have not seen Athens, you’re a stock;

If you have seen it and are not taken with it, you’re an ass;

If you are glad to leave it, you’re a pack-ass.’

“ Thence to Oropus by Psaphides and the sanctuary of Zeus Amphiaraus is a day’s journey for a good walker. It is all up-hill, ^[2] but the abundance and good cheer of the inns prevent the traveller from feeling the fatigue. Oropus is a nest of hucksters. The greed of the custom-house officers here is unsurpassed, their roguery inveterate and bred in the bone. Most of the people are coarse and truculent in their manners, for they have knocked the 59decent members of the community on the head. They deny they are Boeotians, standing out for it that they are Athenians living in Boeotia. To quote the poet Xeno:

‘All are custom-house officers, all are robbers.

A plague on the Oropians!’

“ Thence to Tanagra is a hundred and thirty furlongs. The road runs through olive-groves and woodlands: fear of highwaymen there is none at all. The city stands on high and rugged ground. Its aspect is white and chalky; but the houses with their porches and encaustic paintings give it a very pretty appearance. The corn of the district is not very plentiful, but the wine is the best in Boeotia. The people are well-to-do, but simple in their way of life. All are farmers, not artisans. They practise justice, good faith, and hospitality. To needy fellow-townsmen and to vagabonds they give freely of their substance, for meanness and covetousness are unknown to them. It is the safest city in all Boeotia for strangers to stay in; for the independent and industrious habits of the people have bred a sturdy downright hatred of knavery. In this city I observed as little as might be of those unbridled impulses which are commonly the source of the greatest crimes. For where people have enough to live on, they do not 60hanker after lucre, so roguery can hardly show face among them.

“ Thence to Plataea is two hundred furlongs. The road is somewhat desolate and stony, and it rises up the slopes of Cithaeron, but it is not very unsafe. In the city, to quote the poet Posidippus,

‘Two temples there are, a colonnade and old renown,

And the baths, and Sarabus’s famous inn.

A desert most of the year, it is peopled at the time of the games.’

The inhabitants have nothing to say for themselves except that they are Athenian colonists, and that the battle between the Greeks and the Persians was fought in their country.

“ Thence to Thebes is eighty furlongs. The road is through a flat the whole way. The city stands in the middle of Boeotia. Its circumference is seventy furlongs, its shape circular. The soil is dark. In spite of its antiquity the streets are new, because, as the histories tell us, the city has been thrice razed to the ground on account of the morose and overbearing character of the inhabitants. It is excellent for the breeding of horses; it is all well-watered and green, and has more gardens than any other city in Greece. For two rivers flow through it, irrigating the plain below the city; and water is brought from the Cadmea in 61underground conduits which were made of old, they say, by Cadmus. So much for the city. The inhabitants are high-spirited and wonderfully sanguine, but rash, insolent, and overbearing, ready to come to blows with any man, be he citizen or stranger. As for justice they set their face against it. Business disputes are settled not by reason but by fisticuffs, and the methods of the prize-ring are transferred to courts of justice. Hence lawsuits here last thirty years at the very least. For if a man opens his lips in public on the law’s delay and does not thereupon take hasty leave of Boeotia, he is waylaid by night and murdered by the persons who have no wish that lawsuits should come to an end. Murders are perpetrated on the most trifling pretexts. Such are the men as a whole, though some worthy, high-minded, respectable persons are also to be found among them. The women are the tallest, prettiest, and most graceful in all Greece. Their faces are so muffled up that only the eyes are seen. All of them dress in white and wear low purple shoes laced so as to show the bare feet. Their yellow hair is tied up in a knot on the top of the head. In society their manners are Sicyonian rather than Boeotian. They have pleasing voices, while the voices of the men are harsh and deep. The city is one of the best places to pass the summer in, for it has gardens and plenty of cool 62water. Besides it is breezy, its aspect is verdant, and fruit and flowers abound. But it lacks timber, and is one of the worst places to winter in by reason of the rivers and the winds; for snow falls and there is much mud. The poet Laon writes in praise of the Boeotians, but he does not speak the truth, the fact being that he was caught in adultery and let off lightly by the injured husband. He says:

‘Love the Boeotian, and fly not Boeotia;

For the man is a good fellow, and the land is delightful.’

“ Thence to Anthedon is one hundred and sixty furlongs. The road runs aslant through fields. Carriages can drive on it. The city, which is not large, stands on the shore of the Euboean sea. The market-place is all planted with trees and flanked by colonnades. Wine and fish abound, but corn is scarce, for the soil is poor. The inhabitants are almost all fishermen living by their hooks, by the purple shell, and by sponges, growing old on the beach among the seaweed and in their huts. They are all of a ruddy countenance and a spare form; the tips of their nails are worn away by reason of working constantly in the sea. Most of them are ferrymen or boat-builders. Far from tilling the ground they do not even own it, alleging that they are descendants of the marine Glaucus, who was confessedly a fisherman.

63“ So much for Boeotia. As for Thespiae, it contains ambition and fine statues, nothing else. The Boeotians have a saying about their national faults to the effect that greed lives in Oropus, envy in Tanagra, quarrelsomeness in Thespiae, insolence in Thebes, covetousness in Anthedon, curiosity in Coronea, braggery in Plataea, fever in Onchestus, and stupidity in Haliartus. These are the faults that have drained down into Boeotia as into a sink from the rest of Greece. To quote the verse of Pherecrates:

‘If you have any sense, shun Boeotia.’

So much for the land of the Boeotians.

“From Anthedon to Chalcis is seventy furlongs. As far as Salgoneus the road is level and easy, running between the sea on the one hand and a wooded and well-watered mountain of no great height on the other. The city of Chalcis measures seventy furlongs in circumference. It is all hilly and shaded with trees. Most of the springs are salt, but there is one called Arethusa of which the water, though brackish, is wholesome, cool, and so abundant that it suffices for the whole city. With public buildings such as gymnasiums, colonnades, sanctuaries, and theatres, besides paintings and statues, the city is excellently provided, and the situation of the market-place for purposes of 64commerce is unsurpassed. For the currents that meet in the Euripus flow past the very walls of the harbour, and here there is a gate which leads straight into the market-place, a spacious area enclosed by colonnades. This proximity of the market-place to the harbour, and the ease with which cargoes can be unloaded, attract many ships to the port. Indeed the Euripus itself, with its double entrance, draws merchants to the city. The whole district is planted with olives, and the fisheries are productive. The people are Greek in speech as well as by birth. Devoted to learning, with a taste for travel and books, they bear their country’s misfortunes with a noble fortitudefortitude. A long course of political servitude has not extinguished that inborn freedom of nature which has taught them to submit to the inevitable. To quote a verse of Philiscus:

'Chalcis is a city of most worthy Greeks.'”

These passages, which I have perhaps quoted at too great length, may suffice. I will spare the reader a long description of Mount Pelion, its pine-woods, its wild flowers, and its simples, which seems to be a fragment of the same work. Two points only in the description of the mountain may be mentioned. The writer tells us that the knowledge of certain simples was hereditary in a single family, who kept it a profound secret, though they refused to accept any 65money from the sick people whom they tended, deeming it would be impious to do so. These herbalists claimed to be descended from the centaur Chiron. Again, we learn from the writer how in the greatest heat of summer, when the Dog Star rose, a procession of men of good birth and in the prime of life, all chosen by the priest and all clad in sheepskins, ascended through the pine-woods to the cave of Chiron and a sanctuary of Zeus on the top of the mountain. He mentions the sheepskins as a proof of the great height of Mount Pelion, as if without them the men would have shivered on the mountain even while the plains below were sweltering and baking in the heat. But it is more probable that the sheepskins had some religious significance.

The pseudo-Dicaearchus and Pausanias compared.

This account of the procession of skin-clad men to the cave and sanctuary on the top of the high mountain reads not unlike a passage in Pausanias. But how different is almost all the rest of this writer’s description of Greece from that of Pausanias! Instead of a dull patient enumeration of monuments, arranged in topographical order and seldom enlivened even by a descriptive epithet, we have slight highly-coloured sketches of the general appearance of the towns—the white city of Tanagra on the hill with the pretty painted porches of the houses; Chalcis with its handsome buildings, 66its shady trees, its flowing springs, its spacious market beside the narrows where the tide runs fast and the porters are busy unlading the ships in the harbour; Thebes in summer with its fine new streets, its verdure, its fruit and flowers, and the balmy freshness of the perfumed air blowing over gardens; Thebes in winter, swept by bitter cutting winds, the streets deep in mud and whitened by the falling snow; Athens with its old narrow lanes and mean houses, and now and then a glimpse between them of the resplendent Parthenon, like a sun-burst, high up against the sky. Then again as to the people, what a contrast between the grave Pausanias, who hardly allows us to see them except at their devotions, and the sparkling writer who so often lifts the veil of the past and lets us catch a glimpse of the bustling motley crowd and hear the hum of their voices—the crowd that ceased to bustle and the voices that fell silent so long ago. We see the hungry populace at Athens forgetting their empty stomachs in the joys of the theatre and pageant; the frail beauties ogling; the literary pests scribbling lampoons in their garrets or wriggling in the grasp of the law. On the highways we behold the travellers walking in fear of robbers or taking their ease at their inn. At Oropus we watch the custom-house officers diving into the baggage of exasperated travellers, who mutter curses. At Tanagra we shake hands 67with the bluff well-to-do farmer, comfortable, kindly, and contented, who has a hearty welcome for the stranger and a bit and a sup for the beggar who knocks at his door. In the streets of Thebes we jostle with your ruffling swaggering blades, your bullies and swashbucklers, who will knock you down for a word and cut your throat in a dark lane if you dare to whisper a word that reflects on the course of justice, or rather of injustice, in their native city. And moving amongst these ruffians are tall graceful women, muffled up to their eyes, their yellow hair gathered in knots on the top of their heads, their purple shoes peeping from under their white dresses, their soft voices contrasting with the gruff deep bass of the men. Again the scene shifts. We are no longer among the streets and gardens of Thebes, but on the beach at Anthedon with the salt smell of the sea in our nostrils and the cool sea-breeze fanning our brow. We see the fisher-folk, with their ruddy weather-beaten faces and their finger-nails eaten away by the brine, baiting their hooks among the sea-weed on the shore, or hammering away at a new fishing-boat, or ferrying travellers across the beautiful strait to Euboea.