Pausanias the Traveler

Greek travel writer

• Born: c. 100-115
• Birthplace: Lydia, Magnesia, Asia Minor (now in Turkey)
• Died: c. 180
• Place of death: Greece

Pausanias the Traveler spent many years traveling and wrote a travel guide to Greece, covering all cities and sanctuaries, with historical, artistic, and religious information on each.

Early Life

Nearly all the information about the life of Pausanias (paws-AYN-ee-ahs) comes from his only surviving work, the Periegesis Hellados (between 143 and 161 c.e.; Description of Greece, 1794). In fact, the author’s name is only known as Pausanias, thanks to a late Byzantine lexicographer called Stephanus. The ten-book travel guide to Greece that survives under Pausanias’s name is the only work of its kind to have survived from antiquity, and it has been translated into many languages. Pausanias appears to have traveled widely in the territories of the Roman Empire and probably spent ten to twenty years in Greece, gathering material for his guide.

Pausanias does not supply a preface or an epilogue and generally keeps a low profile in his writing. He hardly ever says anything about himself or the circumstances of his travels, but some details of his life can be pieced together from the few references he does make. He was born around 110 or 115 c.e., most probably in a town in Lydia, in the province of Asia Minor, now Turkey, called Magnesia. This was located near Mount Sipylus, not far from Pergamum, one of the major cities of the eastern part of the Roman Empire, renowned for its cultural activity. Pausanias mentions the area around Mount Sipylus so frequently in his work that it is widely believed that he came from there. Although not born in Greece proper, he would have identified himself as Greek in every sense of the word: socially, culturally, and even politically. He was the rough contemporary of such famous writers as the astronomer Ptolemy, the satirist Lucian, and the physician Galen, as well as of many Greek Sophists, who traded on their rhetorical, rather than their intellectual, skills.

In view of the education he received and his ability to travel so widely—which in his day involved considerable expense—one can assume that Pausanias came from a wealthy family. He would have received a traditional Greek education in rhetoric and literature. He quotes from a long list of classical writers, ranging from historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides to poets such as Homer and Apollonius of Rhodes and clearly possessed an excellent memory. His family were probably members of the provincial aristocracy and were most likely Greeks who held Roman citizenship. Some have suggested that Pausanias was a medical doctor, but the evidence for this is highly questionable. It is more likely that he was a wealthy, well-educated man who undertook extensive travels and decided to write a guide for others who wished to follow in his footsteps.

At what age he began these travels, it is impossible to say, but one may conjecture that he started while quite young: His journeys included tours of western and central Asia Minor, Ionia, Caria, Galatia, Syria, and Palestine. He says he never visited Babylon but did go to Egypt, where he saw, among other sites, the pyramids. He visited several islands in the Aegean, including Rhodes and Delos, and may also have gone to Sardinia and Sicily. In Italy, he traveled to Rome and through the Greek towns of the south, including Capua and Metapontum. In all these places, he undertook a careful survey of sites and objects of historical, artistic, and religious interest. While staying in the large metropolitan centers of Pergamum, Athens, Alexandria, and Rome, he would have encountered Imperial administrators, local dignitaries, famous scholars, writers, artists, and athletes. He mentions several senators in his book.

Pausanias appears to have written his Description of Greece between 143 and 161 c.e. This means that he wrote it when he had reached mature adulthood. While he may have produced other works before this, it is clear that the Description of Greece was his life’s work.

Life’s Work

The genre of travel literature in which Pausanias is to be placed began in the Hellenistic era, in the third century b.c.e., when the Greek world expanded dramatically beyond the boundaries of mainland Greece. The ultimate origin lies in the early books of Herodotus’s Historiai Herodotou (c. 424 b.c.e.; The History, 1709) with their descriptions of Persia, Egypt, and Scythia—all regions largely unfamiliar to Greeks—and in the tradition of the periploi (circumnavigations), descriptions of seas and coastlines written to guide sailors. Most of the travel-writers before Pausanias restricted themselves to describing a single city or a particular monument within a city. What makes Pausanias’s Description of Greece unique and uniquely impressive is that he took as his subject virtually the whole of mainland Greece.

Pausanias seems to have placed the activity of travel writing on a completely new intellectual and scientific level. His method was not to rely on what previous writers had said and simply patch together a group of sources but to travel to places, so that he could see them for himself and write from personal observation. He wrote book 1, on Athens and Attica, first, for it shows signs of experimentation and the search for a cohesive methodology. Book 2 dealt with Corinth and Argos and books 3 through 8 the rest of the Peloponnese, including Sparta and Messenia. There are two books (5 and 6) devoted to Elis because that is where the Olympic festival was held, and Pausanias treats the site of Olympia, which was filled with cultural and artistic significance, at great length. In book 9, he moves out of the Peloponnese into central Greece and describes Boeotia, continuing in book 10 with an account of Phocis, paying particular attention to the renowned sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. The guide is most likely complete or very nearly complete. Some scholars have thought that Pausanias wrote one or more books beyond the ten that survive, citing the absence of an epilogue, but the evidence is inconclusive. There may have been an eleventh book devoted to Euboea, but more than that cannot be said.

Pausanias arranged his guide geographically, treating first one region, then moving on to the next. From Athens, he does a circle of the Peloponnese, ending up in central Greece. Each book is arranged topographically, with the exception of the first, in which the method is more haphazard. The pattern in the remaining nine books is clear: When Pausanias crosses the border into a region, he makes his way directly to the capital, from which he provides an account of the significant sites and objects to be seen there. Then he follows another road out to the border, describing everything that he finds worth mentioning. He returns to the capital and takes another road out to the border, doing the same thing until all the major locations in the region have been visited, at which point he crosses the frontier into the next region.

Most books open with a general introduction in which the history and myths relating to the region are summarized. Pausanias clearly considered this an important element of his work, and elsewhere on occasion he interrupts his descriptions of sites to provide the reader with some historical or cultural background. This suggests that he saw his guide as more than a catalog of interesting sights and perhaps rather as a grand work of cultural transmission. The guide is a literary work as well as a practical handbook: He wanted to make it both useful for travelers and entertaining for readers. The selection of what to describe, from what was certainly an overwhelming mass of available material, and the careful arrangement of these selections into a coherent structure, are indicative of a highly systematic and sophisticated mind. Judicious selectivity was especially vital with regard to the “big” sites of Olympia and Delphi, and the city of Athens, whose cultural richness was unique in Greece.

Pausanias had his preferences in matters of architecture and art, and they come through quite clearly. He prefers religious buildings like temples and shrines to public or administrative constructions, and he elevates artwork from the archaic and classical periods above all subsequent forms. One can see these preferences at work most often by omission: He simply chooses not to comment on what he does not admire. His tone is more emotional when he describes sacred images or old statues.

It is reasonable to wonder, then, for what kind of audience Pausanias saw himself composing his Description of Greece. Without any doubt, the guide is intended for Greek speakers, but that would have included not just Greeks living in the homeland, but also Greeks spread more widely afield across the empire, like his own family. The guide would also have been accessible to Greek-speaking Romans and might have appealed particularly to philhellene circles in the aristocratic and Imperial elite. It is striking that Pausanias avoids almost all mention of matters Roman: Like many educated Greeks of his day, he probably felt a degree of cultural hostility, a hostility that perforce remained unexpressed. Some have viewed his Description of Greece as a document of cultural warfare, a work glorifying the treasures and traditions of Greece through its sheer weight of detail.

The date of Pausanias’s death is not known, but is assumed to have occurred around the year 180 c.e. By this time, the “golden age” of the second century was coming to a close and it would not be long before travel of the kind undertaken by Pausanias became more difficult. The fate of the Description of Greece is unknown: it slips into obscurity and we do not know whether it was widely read or not, whether it made Pausanias’s name or not. It is only in recent times that its value for tourists has been realized.

Significance

Pausanias’s Description of Greece provides detailed information on what a traveler could expect to find of cultural, religious, and artistic significance in just about every town in mainland Greece. It continues to be an important source for archaeologists and historians, as well as the basis of many modern travel guides. It stands out from the ancient tradition of such travel-writing by virtue of its scope, organization, and reliance on personal observation. Scholarly investigation has tended to confirm Pausanias’s accuracy in reporting what he saw during his extensive travels throughout Greece. The guide is revealing on several levels about the intellectual position of Greeks living under Roman rule, for it turns the landscape of Greece into a discourse, in which places and objects come to embody what it means to be Greek. Although the author remains something of a mystery, in the sense that little is known about him, his work continues to be read with fascination by travelers and nontravelers alike.

Bibliography

Alcock, Susan. Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Volume of essays discussing Pausanias and his work, including the sources he used, his guides, his artistic interpretations, and the impact of Pausanias’s work on later travel writers and on the genre. Includes bibliography and index.

Arafat, K. W. Pausanias’s Greece: Ancient Artists and Roman Rulers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Covers what Pausanias has to say about the Greek past, the Roman rulers of Greece, and philhellenic benefactors like Herodes Atticus. Includes bibliography and index.

Frazer, James G., and A. Van Buren. Graecia Antiqua: Maps and Plans to Illustrate Pausanias’s “Description of Greece.” London: Macmillan, 1930. A volume of maps and other topographical information produced to supplement Frazer’s 6-volume translation of the guide.

Habicht, Christian. Pausanias’s Guide to Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Groundbreaking reevaluation that argues for Pausanias’s essential accuracy and reliability and seeks to place his guide in its historical and social context.

Pausanias. Pausanias’s “Description of Greece.” 6 vols. Translated by J. G. Frazer. 1898. Reprint. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1965. Includes substantial commentary on Pausanias’s work, with detailed investigation of what he has to say about the artistic, historical, and religious material at each site visited. A comprehensive edition. Includes index.