Chapter IV: Part 4

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

[Sidenote: Literary
style of
Pausanias.]

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

[Sidenote: He perhaps
modelled
his style on
that of
Hegesias.]

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

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

[Sidenote: Pausanias’s
use of
previous
writers.]

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

[Sidenote: Distinction
between
the historical
and
descriptive
parts of
Pausanias’s
work.]

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

[Sidenote: Poets
used by
Pausanias.]

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

[Sidenote: Historians
used by
Pausanias.]

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

[Sidenote: The Elean
register.]

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

[Sidenote: Inscriptions.]

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

[Sidenote: Writers
on art.]

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

[Sidenote: The local
guides.]

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

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

[Sidenote: Did
Pausanias
describe
Greece
from books
or from
personal
observation?]

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

[Sidenote: Descriptions
which
he may
have taken
from
books.]

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

[Sidenote: Measurements
of
monuments
and of
distances.]

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

[Sidenote: Description
of the
coast of
Hermionis.]

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

[Sidenote: Roads from
Lepreus.]

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

[Sidenote: The Enneacrunus
episode.]

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

[Sidenote: Law-courts
at Athens
and altars
at Olympia.]

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

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

[Sidenote: Predecessors
of
Pausanias.]

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

First, then, let us take the things mentioned by both Polemo and Pausanias.

[Sidenote: Polemo
and
Pausanias
compared.]

Fragment ii. In his description of the Acropolis at Athens, Polemo mentioned a sculptor Lycius, son of Myron. So does Pausanias in his description of the Acropolis.

Fragment iii. In his description of the Acropolis, Polemo mentioned a decree forbidding women of loose character to take the names of any of the great quadriennial festivals. Pausanias mentions no such decree, but among the paintings which he describes in the Propylaea is one of Alcibiades “containing emblems of the victory won by his team at Nemea.” Now we know from other writers that in this picture Alcibiades was portrayed reclining in the lap of Nemea. The model who sat for the personification of Nemea was probably a woman of the sort who were forbidden by the decree to take the name of a quadriennial festival, and the sight of the picture may have led Polemo to mention the decree. If this was so—and the reasoning though a little circuitous is plausible—it becomes probable that Polemo saw and described the picture of Alcibiades to which Pausanias refers. The probability is strengthened, almost to the point of certainty, by our knowledge that Polemo did describe the paintings in the Propylaea, though no details of his description have survived.

Fragment iv. In his description of the Acropolis, Polemo mentioned that Thucydides was buried at the Melitian gate. So does Pausanias in his description of the Acropolis.

Fragment vi. In his description of the pictures in the Propylaea, which probably formed part of his treatise in four books on the Acropolis, Polemo mentioned three Athenian festivals at which torch-races were held, namely the Panathenian festival, the festival of Hephaestus, and the festival of Prometheus. Pausanias in his description of the Academy mentions that torch-races were run from an altar of Prometheus in the Academy to the city.

Fragment x. Polemo told the story of the capture of Aphidna in Attica by the Dioscuri, and mentioned that in the affair Castor was wounded by king Aphidnus in the right thigh. Pausanias repeatedly refers to the capture of Aphidna by the Dioscuri, but he expresses a belief that the place was taken without fighting, and he gives reasons for thinking so.

Fragment xi. In one of his works which is cited as _The Greek History_ Polemo mentioned that Poseidon contended with Hera for the possession of Argos and was worsted, and that the two deities did not exhibit tokens in support of their claims as they did at Athens. Pausanias in his description of Argolis twice mentions the defeat of Poseidon in his dispute with Hera for the possession of the land, but he says nothing about the absence of tokens.

Fragment xii. According to Polemo, the Argives related how the first corn sown in Argolis had been fetched by Argus from Libya. According to Pausanias, they asserted that they had received the first corn from Demeter.

Fragment xviii. In his work on the votive offerings at Lacedaemon, Polemo mentioned “a chapel of Cottina, close to Colone, where is the sanctuary of Dionysus, a splendid edifice known to many in the city.” Pausanias in his description of Sparta mentions “the place named Colona, and a temple of Dionysus Colonatas.”

Fragment xxii. Polemo mentioned at Olympia the old temple of Hera, the temple of the Metapontines, and the temple of the Byzantines. Pausanias describes all three buildings, but he designates the two latter correctly as treasuries, not temples.

Fragment xxiii. Polemo related that for a time a race had been run at Olympia between carts drawn by mules, but that after thirteen victories had been won the race was abolished in Ol. 84. He further said that the name for a mule-cart (_apene_) was a Tegean word. Pausanias mentions that the race between mule-carts at Olympia was instituted in Ol. 70 and abolished in Ol. 84. He says nothing about the name for a mule-cart being Tegean.

Fragment xxiv. Polemo said that Athena was wounded by Ornytus. Pausanias says that she was wounded by Teuthis, but that some people called her assailant Ornytus.

Fragment xxvii. In his work on the treasuries at Delphi, Polemo mentioned the Sicyonian treasury. So does Pausanias in his description of Delphi.

Fragment xxix. Polemo told how the Delphians honoured the wolf because a wolf had discovered a sacred jewel of gold that had been stolen from Delphi and buried on Mount Parnassus. Pausanias says that the Delphians dedicated a bronze figure of a wolf in the sanctuary of Apollo, because a man who had stolen some sacred treasures and hidden them in the forest on Parnassus was killed by a wolf, which then went daily to the city and howled, till people followed it and so found the stolen treasure.

Fragment xxxii. Polemo told how Palamedes invented dice to amuse the Greek army before Troy when they were distressed by famine. Pausanias says simply that dice were an invention of Palamedes.

Fragment xli. Polemo said that at Athens there were three images of the Furies, two made by Scopas out of the stone called _luchneus_ (probably Parian marble), and the middle one made by Calamis. Pausanias notices the images of the Furies without mentioning their number, their material, or the artists who made them.

Fragment xlii. In speaking of wineless libations Polemo remarked on the scrupulousness of the Athenians in matters of ritual. Pausanias observes, in different connexions, that the Athenians were more pious and more zealous in religious matters than other people.

Fragment xliv. Polemo said that Lais was born at Hyccara in Sicily and was murdered in Thessaly, whither she had gone for love of a Thessalian named Pausanias; and he described her grave beside the Peneus with the epitaph and the urn on the tombstone. Pausanias says that Lais was a native of Hycara (_sic_) in Sicily and that her grave was at Corinth, where it was surmounted by the figure of a lion holding a ram in its paws. He adds that in Thessaly, whither she had gone for the love of a certain Hippostratus, there was another tomb which claimed to be hers.

Fragment xlviii. Polemo said that copies of the laws of Solon were kept in the Prytaneum engraved on square wooden tablets which revolved on pivots in such a way that when the tablets were turned at an angle they seemed to be triangular. Pausanias says briefly that the laws of Solon were inscribed in the Prytaneum.

Fragment lv. Polemo said that wrestling was invented by Phorbas. Pausanias says that it was invented by Theseus.

Fragment lxxviii. Polemo mentioned the sanctuary of Hercules at Cynosarges. So does Pausanias.

Fragment lxxxiii. Polemo described two pools in Sicily, beside which the Sicilians took their most solemn oaths, perjury being followed by death. Pausanias describes how people threw offerings into the craters of Etna and watched whether the offerings sank or were ejected by the volcanic fires. Some modern writers have supposed that Pausanias meant to describe the place and the oath described by Polemo, but that he mistook the water for fire and the offering for an oath. The supposition is very unlikely.

Fragment lxxxvi. Polemo mentioned the Tiasa, a river near Sparta. So does Pausanias.

[Sidenote: No evidence
that
Pausanias
copied
Polemo.]

These are, I believe, all the existing fragments of Polemo in which he mentions the same things as Pausanias. Not one of them supports the theory that Pausanias copied from Polemo. In some of them the writer mentions the same places, buildings, and works of art that are mentioned by Pausanias. But this was almost inevitable. When two men describe the same places correctly they can hardly help mentioning some of the same things. In no case does the coincidence go beyond a bare mention. Again, Polemo sometimes referred to the same myth or legend as Pausanias; but this is no proof that Pausanias copied from Polemo. A multitude of myths and legends were the commonplaces of every educated Greek, whether he had read Polemo or not. The passage of Polemo as to the race between mule-carts at Olympia agrees in substance, not in language, with the corresponding passage of Pausanias. Both writers, it may be assumed, derived their information from the best source, the Olympic register, which, as we have seen, was published and accessible to all. The Delphian story of the wolf that disclosed the stolen treasure may have been narrated by both writers in the same way, though from the abridged form in which Polemo’s version is reported by Aelian we cannot be sure of this. No doubt the story was told in much the same way by the Delphian guides to all visitors, who may have been surprised to find a statue of a wolf dedicated to Apollo, the old mythical relationship of the god with wolves having long fallen into the background. Again, Polemo, like Pausanias, remarked on the scrupulous piety of the Athenians. So, too, for that matter did St. Paul, but nobody suspects him of having borrowed the remark from Polemo. The mention of the sculptor Lycius, of the grave of Thucydides, and of the torch-race by the two writers proves nothing as to the dependence of the one on the other. Some of the fragments of Polemo show that he described in minute detail things which Pausanias has merely mentioned. Finally, in a number of the fragments Polemo makes statements which are explicitly or implicitly contradicted by Pausanias. This proves that if Pausanias was acquainted with the works of Polemo, he at least exercised complete freedom of judgment in accepting or rejecting the opinions of his predecessor. Another proof of his independence is furnished by his speaking of the treasuries at Olympia as treasuries, whereas Polemo had designated the same buildings less correctly as temples.

[Sidenote: Things
mentioned
by Polemo
but not by
Pausanias.]