Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,' — Context and Discussion

edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. I desire to thank Messrs. A. and C. Black for their courteous permission to republish it. The other sketches are reprinted, with some small changes and adjustments of detail, from my commentary on Pausanias. References to authorities have been omitted as needless in a book which is not specially addressed to the learned. Any one who wishes to pursue the subject further will find my authorities amply cited in the original volumes. Among works from which I have borrowed both outlines and colours for some of my sketches of Greek landscape I will here mention only two—the _Erinnerungen und Eindrücke aus Griechenland_ of the Swiss scholar W. Vischer, and the _Peloponnes_ of the German geologist Mr. A. Philippson. Slight and fragmentary as these sketches are, I am not without hope that they may convey to readers who have never seen Greece something of the eternal charm of its scenery. To such as already know and love the country they will yet be welcome, if here and there they revive some beautiful or historic scene on those tablets of the mind from which even the brightest hues so quickly fade.

CAMBRIDGE, _March 30, 1900_.

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 23. 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 56. 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 89. 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

PAUSANIAS | AND OTHER GREEK SKETCHES

[Sidenote: 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 in 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 and 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 by 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 is gathered entirely from his writings. Antiquity, which barely mentions the writer, is silent as to the man.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Dates of the various books.]

From 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 in 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., the 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. [Sidenote: The first book written and published before the rest.] Amongst 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 that 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 professors 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.

[Sidenote: 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 weeping 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.

[Sidenote: Other writers of the same name.]