"Cape Sounion is part of the territory of Attica projecting from the mainland of Greece and facing the Aegean and the Cyclades. Sail round the cape and you come to a harbor; on the point of the cape is the Temple of Athene of Sounion. Sailing further on you will arrive at… "
So begins, in media res, the Periegesis Hellados of Pausanias- to use the title of its original Greek or, as his Roman contemporaries would have called it in Latin, Descriptio Graecae, and as we know it today, the Description of Greece.
Pausanias's book has been called the world's oldest surviving travel guide, yet its practical information and logical organization are still striking to modern tourists offering a full description of the classical Greek monuments and sites which were, in his words, worth a visit (a phrase often used in the Michelin guide). "My account," he wrote, "has preferred to pick out those things that are most noteworthy from the multitude of things not worth relating."
Pausanias also offered details on how to get there, which any reader of the Lonely Planet will surely recognize as sometimes the most important part of their guidebook. Indeed, recent scholars have made check lists of the monuments the Periegesis mentions as "worth seeing", charted its routes on modern road maps for the benefit of motorists, and cut out the wordy digressions in order to make for easier stand up reading - all sure proof that the book still deserves being taken. along on sightseeing trips to Greece.
Pausanias sequenced his descriptions from east to west, the same way his Greek readers would have put the most important part of their country- Attica and Athens- first, and the way most foreign tourists first arrive by air. This differs from the approach of Strabo, writing from Rome, who described Greece from west to east, for the benefit of his readers arriving by ship from Italy from across the Ionian Sea.
Pausanias' method was to travel in a star pattern outward from cities along radiating roads, taking first one and then the next. Arriving from the frontier of the district described in the previous chapter, he made his way straight to the biggest city's market place and, using it as his hub, would work his way outward as along the spokes of a wheel.
Whenever he reached the end of one road, he would retrace his steps back to the hub and go out again along the next radiating road until the circle was complete. He did the same from a district's secondary cities until finally covering the entire district, at which point he would cross into the adjacent district and start over. In a land with poor or nonexistent secondary roads, this was the most logical way to cover the entire landscape without having to travel cross country.
It is not surprising that Pausanias' accounts of coast lines, anchorages, and sailing distances were less accurate than his descriptions of interior landmarks. After all, he was a sightseer, not a sailor. The geographer Strabo on the other hand called the sea his "counsellor", and the literary genre closest to Pausanias' groundbreaking book were the periploi, or "coastal voyages", a kind of annotated navigational chart.
The Periegesis is divided into ten chapters, which would have been written each on a single scroll covering a separate region, from Boiotia in the north to Lakonia in the south, and including the sites Pausanias describes in painstaking detail: Eleia- home of Olympia and its famous games, Phokis- home of the oracle at Delphi, and Attica- home of Athens and the Akropolis.
At each of these sites, Pausanias described marvelous things that no longer exist- statues carted off by the Romans, temples since fallen into absolute ruin, and altars destroyed in subsequent barbarian invasions. It is as if a visitor to Spain in the year, let us say, 3700 AD- the same number of years after the present that a tourist in Greece today reads the Periegesis after the year of its composition- could only rely on the Guide Bleu's description of the Alhambra, or the Escorial, or the entire city of Toledo, to imagine what the ravages of time had erased.
A traveler in Pausanias' day could have unrolled and read a scroll at each stop along the itinerary- just as today a modem tourist reads his book in translation by thumbing through a paperback edition chapter by chapter. Indeed, some of these modem translations rearrange the chapters from the original because the sequence of a modem tourist's itinerary through Greece is so different- given the existence today of superhighways and airports- than that of an ancient traveler relying on ships and mules.
The Periegesis digresses often from pure site description far and wide into their histories and associated biographies, hero legends, myths and religious cults. The astounding amount and level of detail about pilgrimage procedure, sacred ritual, and devotional practice in ancient Greece endeared Pausanias to James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, the classic study of comparative religions, who translated the Periegesis into English in 1898 and wrote a monumental 4 volume commentary on it.
In Pausanias' own words, he tried to find the balance between a place's logoi (stories) and its theoremata (sights), all the while acting as an autoptes (eyewitness). Much like Herodotus, considered the father of history, and unlike the less accurate but better known Strabo, considered the father of geography, Pausanias believed first and foremost in autopsia- a Greek word literally meaning "seeing for oneself '.
Contrary to the other classical writers whose books of personal travel have survived only in fragments or in the citations of others, Pausanias was willing and able to travel long and hard to reach risky places. More than once he wrote such lines as "the route is easier for a man on foot with a well-belted tunic than it is for horses and mules" or "the voyage is stormy and tortuous".
Climbing with the legs of a mountain goat, he once visited the Temple of Apollo at Bassai (designed by Iktinos, architect also of the Parthenon) atop a steep and dangerous 4,000 foot high summit in Arkadia, a site so remote that it was only rediscovered by accident in 1760 by a French traveler, killed there by bandits for his coat's brass buttons.
His book has been called by one scholar "a happy survival, a marvelous cornucopia, an ancient Baedeker , and a sturdy resource to mine for names and places, fragments of history, and versions of myth." In fact, the book barely survived the Classical Age at all. Its title was first mentioned by name only three hundred years later in a document found in Constantinople, and its sole surviving manuscript from the Dark Ages, of nearly 900 pages, came to light in Florence in the 15th Century.
We know little about Pausanias himself other than what can be inferred from the book. He was born early in the 2nd C AD, probably in the Lydian city Magnesia ad Sipylum, modem day Manisa, near the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. In his life he traveled far beyond Greece- and knew firsthand Upper Egypt, Rome, Palestine, Syria, Macedonia and much of Asia Minor. We think that he wrote the book over a thirty year period after repeated trips through the Greek mainland.
It is clear that he was a proud philhellene , with little respect for Roman art and culture because, writing three hundred years after the Romans had conquered Greece, he mentioned few monuments- except those constructed by Hadrian- built under their authority even when his site descriptions were otherwise complete. He loved the works of classical Greece above all, and lamented how many statues had been carted off by the Romans.
Pausanias was most careful not to criticize the Romans openly. Only once does he write of the "calamity" caused by their conquest of Greece in 146 BC. Whenever he did mention their looting of antiquities, it was nearly apologetic. Of the theft of a statue of a Winged Athena from her temple at Tegea, following the Emperor Augustus' defeat of Marc Antony and his Greek allies, he wrote, almost as if to excuse him, "Augustus does not appear to have started the looting of dedications and statues of gods from the defeated, but to have employed an ancient and established tradition."
He called the Tegea temple itself, destroyed by the Goths two centuries after his visit, the most beautiful in all the Peloponnese, so modem readers are lucky to still have his complete description of its columns and pediments. We are even luckier that Pausanias described its looted image of Athena, when he later visited Rome and found it installed in the Augustan Forum alongside other stolen treasures- "complete ivory, by the sculptor Endoios".
One wonders if Pausanias was inspired to write the Periegesis at least in part by the example set by the Emperor Hadrian, who reigned while our author was a young man. Hadrian was perhaps Rome's greatest philhellene, having been called as a child in Spain graeculus- or "grieguito"- for his love of Greek studies. The emperor visted Greece three times during his rule and saw many if not most of the hundreds of sites described by Pausanias. Would it not have been handy if Hadrian then had been able to consult this very guidebook?
Pausanias' admirer James Frazer said, "without him, the ruins of Greece would for the most part be a labyrinth without a clue, a riddle without an answer." The great German classicist Ernst Meyer wrote, "One can safely say that no other book from antiquity shows us as much of the reality of ancient Greece." Nevertheless, several influential 19th C. archaeologists had long disputed Pausanias' accuracy, some going as far as to call him a fraud, liar, and armchair traveler.
The basis for this unfair accusation, made first by great philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz, has recently come to light as being a laughable mistake. It turns out that Wilamowitz, while leading a group of important patrons on an archeological tour of the Peloponnese, had misunderstood Pausanias' s directions from Olympia to Heraea- reading them "north to south" rather than "south to north", as they were clearly written- and thereby got his travelling party utterly lost, much to his own personal embarrassment. But then, how many map readers today lose themselves because they hold maps upside down?
In fact, Pausanias' value to modem archaeology was proven just a few years later, in 1878, when the amateur treasure hunter Heinrich Schliemann located the long-sought shaft graves at Mycenae, containing the gold "Mask of Agamemnon" and other precious artifacts today displayed in Athens, simply by correctly reading a key text by Pausanias, who had written that they were to be found " inside the wall"- literally within the wall- not on its inner side, as those words had previously been understood to mean.
That Schliemann, nearly 1,700 years after the time of Pausanias, was able to use his classical text to find tombs dating an equal number of years before that text was even written, is as much a tribute to the latter' s accurate writing as it is to the former's accurate reading.
Indeed, much of the nomenclature used today for the most famous Greek sites is thanks to Pausanias first having named them- for instance, the Erechtheion temple atop the Akropolis in Athens and the seven-columned ruins of the Temple of Apollo in Corinth, which has no evidence identifying it as being dedicated to that god other than what he himself wrote.
Some of the places he noted briefly were later forgotten, only to be located by modem archaeologists with additional evidence that even Pausanias had not mentioned. Oftentimes, Pausanias identified a temple or an altar' s donor or dedicatee. Found ruined in modem times, many such sites have been reidentified only when a lost inscription came to light. Sometimes, he himself had quoted exactly that very same inscription. As one scholar has written, "the odds when there is a contradiction are not that Pausanias is wrong, but that modem scholars are."
No tourist can visit Olympia these days without being shown the remains of the workshop of the sculptor Phidias- creator of the celebrated but long-lost statue of Athena inside the Parthenon, as well as the colossal seated statue of Zeus made there whose location was confirmed just fifty years ago when a shard of a drinking cup bearing the inscription "I belong to Phidias" was unearthed. Pausanias, who stood inside the ruined workshop six hundred years -after Phidias' death, had described its exact location.
Another tantalizing hint about the lost art of Greece's Golden Age was his account of the heavily populated fresco by the painter Polygnotos, teacher of Phidias, which adorned the four inner walls of the now mostly disappeared Cnidian lesche, or meeting house, at Delphi. The two subjects of the great fresco were, to the right, the Greeks at Troy and, to the left, Odysseus's descent to Hades. Pausanias gave sufficient detail- which person was depicted, where they stood or sat, how they looked, and what they wore- that modem scholars have been able to recreate it figure for figure.
In his description, Pausanias failed to mention only the fresco's colors, except for a brief remark about the pigment used for the skin of the underworld scene's eurynomos, or flesh-eating demon spirit- "between blue and black," he said, "like the flies that settle on meat." All that is left of the fresco today is a smudge of original blue pigment. Might this have been the devil?
Pausanias often referred to the acknowledged masters of Greek literature and history who preceded him- Homer, Herodotus, and Hesiod- to claim greater authority for an argument he wanted to make. "Like every attentive reader of Homer, I am persuaded that... ," he would write about some small fact or another lost, in his time as in ours, in the fog of ancient history.
Yet he was quite honest when he did not know or could not clarify something. "I could learn nothing from the guides", he wrote about the story about Aethra, Princess of Troezen, made pregnant by sleeping with both Aegeus, King of Athens, and the god Poseidon on the same night, and who later gave birth to the hero Theseus. But then, what modem tourist has never been frustrated at least once by the ignorance of thieir guides, even those paid handsomely for their supposed expertise.
Pausanias accurately described another dilemma regarding guides at popular tourist sites. "The Argive guides," he wrote, "themselves are aware that not all the stories they tell are true, yet they stick with them, for it is not easy to persuade the public to change their opinions"- thus astutely recognizing that tourists themselves often want to be lied to, as long as the embroidery of "fiction" is more entertaining than the dryness of "fact".
In Olympia, Pausanias paid tribute to a guide named Aristarchos who won the prize for telling the tallest tale- "it would be wrong for me to pass over his story", he wrote in admiration of his guide's straight-faced exaggeration. Aristarchos told Pausanias of having found a perfectly preserved corpse of a Elian soldier lodged in the roof joints of the Temple of Hera, who had died many years earlier while defending it from attackers. "I am bound to record the Greek traditions, but I am not bound to believe them all," he said with a wink and a nod.
While Pausanias was most attentive to architecture, painting, and sculpture, he was not blind to landscape and agriculture. Much like a modem guidebook's analysis of local gastronomy, he too often singled oul regional delicacies- Messenian oranges and grapes, honey from Hymettus, and olives from Cynuria- for special attention.
Of a particular locale just over Mt. Parnassos from Delphi, he wrote, "the oil from the olives of Tithorea is inferior in quantity to the oil from Attica and Sikyon, but for the color and taste they give better oil even than Spain or the island oflstria. They use it for distilling all sorts of scented ointments, they take this oil to the emperor."
How did Pausanias decide which regions of Greece to include in his guide? Where, from his point of view, did Greek territory begin and where did it end? He wrote that his intention was to describe "all Greek matters", so it was understandable that he left out Macedonia and Thrace, considered semi-barbarian hinterlands in the mind of this proud philhellene- but why does he not write of Thessaly, the Aegean islands, and the great Greek cities of Sicily and Italy?
It seems that, under Roman domination, Pausanias wanted his fellow Greeks to focus more on the well springs of their spirit than on the physical spread of their civilization. He worried that Greeks, now spread out all over the known world, were beginning to forget from whence they came. The Perigeisis was to remind them, and for this reason Pausanias wrote as much about Arkadia, poor in physical monuments yet rich in myth and legend, as he did about Athens.
Was Pausanias also motivated to write because of his religion? Was he perhaps as much a religious pilgrim as a cultural sightseer? He clearly was more interested in spiritual sites and buildings- temples and sacred springs, altars and holy caves- than he was in, for instance, a town's bouleuterion (council room), odeion (music hall), or metroon (archive).
Just as guides today tell mosque visitors to remove shoes before entering or tell female church visitors to cover their heads- so Pausanias instructed readers how to approach the shrine of a particular god or goddess. At Olympia, he wrote, "let us go round all the altars. I shall take them in the same order that sacred practice dictates that sacrifice should be offered to them. They sacrifice first to the Hearth goddess, then to the Olympian Zeus, thirdly... " and so on and so on.
Some guides go still farther, saying, for example, how to light candles before a Catholic saint or how to pay a Hindu priest for performing puja. Just so, Pausanias specified the details of devotional procedure. At the shrine of the goddess Demeter at Phigalia, he wrote, "according to traditional local observance, I slaughtered nothing... the sacred law for her sacrifice dictates that fruit of cultivated trees, honeycomb, and greasy unspun wool be laid on the altar, with oil poured over them."
However, certain practices were for the initiated only and could never be explained. Of secret rituals at the temple of the Kabeiroi in Boiotia, he wrote "the curious will have to forgive me if I remain silent." At the sacred Alkyonian lake where Dionysos descended to Hades to rescue his mortal mother Semele, he wrote, "it would be sacrilegious if I publically reported the night celebration that takes place every year."
But Pausanias was at heart a religious skeptic, as he makes clear when he visited a place called Actaeon's Bed on Mount Kithairon, where many Greek myths had unfolded. It was said here that Actaeon had spied upon Artemis, goddess of the hunt, while she bathed unclothed, after which, in a rage, she turned him into a stag so that his own hounds tore him to bloody pieces.
Pausanias retells the story, but adds an alternative explanation- a simple matter of the dogs having rabies, and of Actaeon being in the wrong place at the wrong time. "I am sure that it had nothing to do with any god," he wrote of Actaeon's death. "It was simply a contagious madness which seized on his hounds. They went mad and would have tom apart anyone they came across without distinction."
To understand what Pausanias set out to do by writing this book, one should ask, What did the idea of "travel" really mean to the Greeks? For this farflung people, living across mountains and seas from their cities and and holy places, travel was a quotidian activity, almost like cooking or fishing, a means to an end, one of life's necessary tasks- merely a matter of "getting from here to there". It certainly was not the best way to show one' s greatness- battling the Hydra or cleaning the Augean stables was for that, just ask Hercules.
In only two previous works was the act of travelling the author's central theme. In the Odyssey, travel was the occasion to write about a Greek hero. In Xenophon' s Anabasis, travel was the occasion to write about himself. Herodotus travelled the world in order to write history, while Strabo traveled in order to write geography.
Yet the Perigeisis was different- a book first and foremost about travel as an end in itself. One might say that until the time of Pausanias, Greeks traveled in order to live. After Pausanias, and especially for those inveterate tourists whom all of us know today, it has now become common to live in order to travel.