Work
Description of Greece
Ἑλλάδος Περιηγήσεως
By Pausanias.
- Kind of writing
- Geography
- Dialect
- Koine
- Written
- 2nd c. AD
- Length
- 242,433 words analysed
- Vocabulary
- 68% common words
- In the library
- 1 Greek text, 1 English translation
The texts
Each is the collection's own file, read unchanged from the Perseus Digital Library or Open Greek and Latin. The description is theirs too.
- Greek textPausanias. Pausaniae Graeciae descriptio, Volumes 1-3. Spiro, Friedrich, editor. Leipzig: Teubner, 1903.
- English translationPausanias. Pausanias Description of Greece, Volumes 1-4. Jones, W.H.S. (William Henry Samuel), translator; Ormerod, Henry Arderne, translator. London, New York: W. Heinemann, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1918-1935.
In The Painted Stoa
Entries that quote or point to this work's Greek.
The people who fed Sparta, and how Sparta kept them downThe helots and the krypteiaSparta's citizens could spend their lives training for war because someone else grew their food.The potters' quarter and cemetery of Athens, dug for over 150 yearsThe KerameikosJust outside the city wall of Athens, where the Sacred Way left for Eleusis and the road ran out to Plato's Academy, lay the Kerameikos: the quarter of the potters, and for more than a thousand years the city's great cemetery.A crown of wild olive, a truce, and statues paid for by cheatsThe Olympic GamesEvery four years for more than a thousand years, Greeks from all over the Mediterranean travelled to the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia to watch naked men run, wrestle, box and race chariots.The secret kept by thousands for a thousand yearsThe Eleusinian MysteriesEvery autumn for about a thousand years, crowds walked the fourteen miles from Athens to Eleusis to be initiated into the Mysteries of Demeter and her daughter Persephone.Where Greeks went when doctors failed: a night in the god's hallAsclepius and the healing sleepA sick Greek who could afford the journey might go to a sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of healing, wash, make an offering, and lie down for the night in a special hall, hoping the god would come in a dream and cure him.Homer's city of Agamemnon, and the graves Schliemann opened in 1876Mycenae, rich in goldHomer called Mycenae "rich in gold".Carved for Athena, shattered in 1687, divided between Athens and London: the history, and both sides of the argumentThe Parthenon MarblesThe sculptures carved for the Parthenon in the fifth century BC now live in two museums.