Pausanias was a Greek who lived in the second century AD. The one work of his that we know survives whole: the Description of Greece, a tour of the Greek mainland in ten books, region by region.1,2 Nothing is known about him except what can be pieced together from that book.1,3,4
A man known only from his book
He dates himself in passing. Opening his account of Elis, he remarks that the Corinthians had held their land from the Roman emperor for «εἴκοσιν ἔτη καὶ διακόσια τριῶν δέοντα» (literally “twenty years and two hundred, less three”, our translation): “two hundred and seventeen years” up to his own time.5 Corinth was refounded in 44 BC, so he was writing his fifth book in AD 174.3,4
In the book on Achaea he explains why the great Music Hall at Athens, which Herodes built in memory of his dead wife, is missing from his Attica: “my account of the Athenians was finished before Herodes began the building”.6 Since Herodes Atticus' wife Regilla seems to have died in 160 or 161, Frazer concluded that the first book was finished by then at the latest.4
Of Antinous, the emperor Hadrian's favourite, who seems to have died in AD 130, he writes «ἐγὼ δὲ μετʼ ἀνθρώπων μὲν ἔτι αὐτὸν ὄντα οὐκ εἶδον»: “I never saw him in the flesh, but I have seen images and pictures of him.”4,7 Frazer read this to mean that he was old enough to have seen him, and so was born a good many years before 130.4 At the other end, he mentions an army of raiders, the Costoboci, «τὸ κατʼ ἐμὲ τὴν Ἑλλάδα ἐπιδραμὸν», “who overran Greece in my day”;8 historians date their invasion to 170 or 171.9 He knows of Marcus Aurelius' war on the Germans and the Sarmatians,4,10 but says nothing of the emperor's death in 180.3
Debated among scholars So the book took years to write: at least fourteen, and probably many more, on Frazer's reckoning.4 Domenico Musti, who led the great Italian edition, saw two phases of work, one about 135–150 and the other in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, 161–180.11
Debated among scholars Where he came from is less certain. He speaks of «Πέλοπος δὲ καὶ Ταντάλου τῆς παρʼ ἡμῖν ἐνοικήσεως», “That Pelops and Tantalus once dwelt in my country”, and goes on to the throne of Pelops on Mount Sipylus.12 Sipylus is in Lydia, in Asia Minor, so he was very probably a Lydian.1,3,4 Some have placed his birth at Magnesia, the city at the foot of the mountain, and Christian Habicht argued for it; Frazer would not decide, and a study of 2007 by Juan Pablo Sánchez Hernández links him rather with Smyrna, which it calls the main cultural and administrative centre of the Second Sophistic, the Greek literary revival of his age.4,13
Greece in ten books
The Greek title is Ἑλλάδος περιήγησις.2 Its second word belongs to a guide's trade: the Liddell–Scott–Jones dictionary explains περιήγησις as “leading round and explaining, as is done by guides and cicerones”, and also as “geographical description”.14 The tour starts at Cape Sunium and Athens and goes on through Corinth and the Argolid, Laconia, Messenia, Elis with Olympia (two books), Achaea, Arcadia, Boeotia, and last Phocis with western Locris.2,3,15 It leaves out large parts of the Greek world, the islands among them.2
His Loeb translator, W. H. S. Jones, describes the method. Pausanias follows a road to a central point such as the market-place, lists what is to be seen there, then takes each road out in turn, coming back each time to start again.3 His real interest is in sanctuaries, statues and tombs, and the stories attached to them.3 Scenery, farming and trade hardly appear, and, as Jones notes, “he does not even inform his readers where a night's lodging could be obtained”.3 The historian Christian Habicht summed him up: “He definitely prefers the sacred to the profane and the old to the new”.2
He says himself that he chose. At the end of Attica he writes «ἀπέκρινε δὲ ἀπὸ τῶν πολλῶν ἐξ ἀρχῆς ὁ λόγος μοι τὰ ἐς συγγραφὴν ἀνήκοντα», “from the beginning my narrative has picked out of much material the things that deserve to be recorded.”16 Arriving at Sparta, he states the rule again: he will pick out “the things most worthy of mention—an excellent rule which I will never violate.”17 Frazer heard in this an answer to critics of his first book.4 His aim, as he puts it at Athens, is to go through «πάντα ὁμοίως ἐπεξιόντα τὰ Ἑλληνικά», “all things Greek alike” (our translation).18
He records decline plainly. Of Panopeus in Phocis he wonders whether it is a city at all, «εἴγε ὀνομάσαι τις πόλιν καὶ τούτους οἷς γε οὐκ ἀρχεῖα οὐ γυμνάσιόν ἐστιν, οὐ θέατρον οὐκ ἀγορὰν ἔχουσιν»: “if one can give the name of city to those who possess no government offices, no gymnasium, no theater, no market-place, no water descending to a fountain”.19
What reading him is like
Jones found his Greek plain on the whole, but given to roundabout phrases and to moving words out of their usual order, “sometimes so violent as to throw doubt upon the sense”.3 He had read Herodotus closely: Frazer's notes point out small words borrowed from him,4 and Musti counted Herodotus and Thucydides as his models.11
He is no simple believer. «ἀρχόμενος μὲν τῆς συγγραφῆς εὐηθίας ἔνεμον πλέον», he admits: “When I began to write my history I was inclined to count these legends as foolishness, but on getting as far as Arcadia I grew to hold a more thoughtful view of them”; the wise men of old, he decided, had spoken in riddles.20 He is honest about what he has only been told,1 and Jones counts some nineteen mentions of the local guides who showed visitors round and told them the stories.3
Tested with the spade
Debated among scholars In the nineteenth century many scholars distrusted him. In 1877 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff revived the idea that he had borrowed largely from Polemo of Ilium, a writer of some three hundred years before; in 1886 A. Kalkmann went further, arguing that he had copied his Athens, Olympia and Delphi from Polemo and had seen little of Greece himself. Kalkmann later largely took this back.4 Frazer answered them in 1898, and twentieth-century archaeology has on the whole borne Pausanias out.1,4
Mycenae is the classic case. Writing about a century and a half before him, the geographer Strabo said that the Argives had razed the city «ὥστε νῦν μηδʼ ἴχνος εὑρίσκεσθαι τῆς Μυκηναίων πόλεως», “so that today not even a trace of the city of the Mycenaeans is to be found”.4,21 Pausanias saw more: parts of the wall, and the gate «λέοντες δὲ ἐφεστήκασιν αὐτῇ», “upon which stand lions”.22 He reports that Agamemnon and those murdered with him lay inside the wall, while Clytemnestra and Aegisthus were buried some way outside it.22 In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann, digging with the Greek archaeologist Panagiotis Stamatakis, followed Homer and Pausanias, found shaft graves inside the citadel with gold death masks in them, and took them for the graves Pausanias meant.23 The burials have turned out to be some three centuries older than the time when Agamemnon is supposed to have lived.23
At Olympia, among the later offerings in the temple of Hera, Pausanias lists «Ἑρμῆν λίθου, Διόνυσον δὲ φέρει νήπιον, τέχνη δέ ἐστι Πραξιτέλους», “a marble Hermes carrying the baby Dionysus, a work of Praxiteles”.24 On 8 May 1877 the German excavators found a statue of a young man, the Hermes with the infant Dionysus, in the ruins of that very temple.25
Debated among scholars Whether it is really by Praxiteles is fiercely argued: the attribution rests on Pausanias' passing mention.25
Why he matters
Frazer thought it a piece of good fortune that the book came down entire, an eyewitness's account of Greece in the second century, and called it “one of the most curious and valuable records bequeathed to us by antiquity”.4 For many statues, paintings and buildings his few words are the only literary source to survive from antiquity, and historians and archaeologists still depend on them.2