Description of Greece

• 1. Introduction

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  Description of Greece, known in Greek as Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις, is the only surviving work by the geographer Pausanias, who lived from about 110 to about 180. It reads like the notebook of a traveller who crossed mainland Greece and recorded what he found in its sanctuaries. Yet for most of its history, almost nobody seems to have read it. Why would a writer so devoted to the monuments of the past leave so faint a mark on his own age? What was he really looking for at each stop? And how did the book finally reach the printing press? The answers begin with the route he took.

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• 2. The Route

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  Ten books make up the work, and each one is given to a part of mainland Greece. Pausanias describes his own journeys, so the book follows the path he walked rather than a map of the whole country. The islands are missing, and so are large stretches of the mainland.

  He begins in Attica and then turns to Athens, including its suburbs, which were known as demes. From there the tour moves through Corinthia, Laconia, Messenia, Elis, Achaea and Arcadia. Boeotia and Phocis follow. The last region on his list is Ozolian Locris, where the itinerary stops.

  Topography is not his strength. The book is described as erratic about the layout of the land itself. Its real subject is the cultural geography of ancient Greece, and above all its religious sites.

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• 3. Sacred Over Profane

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  At Thebes, Pausanias looked at the ruins of the house of the poet Pindar. He also saw the shields of warriors who died at the Battle of Leuctra. Nearby stood statues of Arion, Hesiod, Orpheus and Thamyris. On Mount Helicon he visited the grove of the Muses, and at Tanagra he saw portraits of Polybius and of Corinna.

  His motive was an interest in religion, mythology and the local legends clustered around holy places. Even in the most remote regions he was fascinated by relics, depictions of deities and other mysterious sacred things. Some readers have called the book a journey into identity, meaning the identity of Greek belief and heritage. He describes the religious art and sacred architecture of famous sites such as Olympia and Delphi.

  As an art critic he is usually vague and frustratingly brief. Still, his few words are often the only literary source to survive from antiquity, which makes them precious to historians and archaeologists. In the 19th century his accounts were often regarded as unreliable. Archaeological research in the 20th century confirmed various of his descriptions and raised his credibility as a witness among scholars.

  Christian Habicht, a modern classicist who wrote many scholarly articles on Pausanias, summed up his taste. Pausanias, he says, "definitely prefers the sacred to the profane and the old to the new".

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• 4. Notes on Nature

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  Pine trees lined the coast of ancient Elis, according to Pausanias. In the oak woods of Seliana, which he also calls Phelloe, he noticed wild boars and deer. Among the oaks of Alalcomenae he noticed crows. He was no naturalist, but he often paused to comment briefly on the landscapes he passed through.

  Near the end of the book, these remarks turn to the fruits and products of the land. He records the date palms of ancient Aulis and the wild strawberries growing on Mount Helicon. At Tithorea he mentions the olive oil. In Arcadia he notes the tortoises.

  His most unusual entry comes from Mount Kyllini, also spelled Cyllene, where he reports "white blackbirds".

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• 5. Hebrews and Helena

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  Passage 1.5.5 of the work mentions a revolt of the "Hebrews beyond Syria" against Emperor Hadrian. Pausanias generally uses the name "Hebrews" for the Jews, and several passages refer to them.

  In passage 8.16.5, he describes the wondrous tomb of Helena in Jerusalem. He calls Jerusalem a city in the "land of the Hebrews" and says it had been entirely razed by Vespasian.

  Here he slips. He took Helena for a local woman. She was in fact royalty from Adiabene, a kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, and she had converted to Judaism.

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• 6. Silence and Survival

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  "It was not read," writes Habicht. In his words, there is no quotation from the book, no mention of its author, and "not a whisper before the sixth century", when Stephanus Byzantius appears. Across the whole Middle Ages he counts only two or three references to it. The book itself is the only contemporary source about Pausanias.

  Eighteen surviving manuscripts were known in the 1830s, copied in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, though three may be older than the rest. They are full of gaps and errors. All of them appear to descend from one manuscript, now lost, which somehow managed to be copied.

  That ancestor was in Florence around 1418, in the hands of the manuscript collector Niccolò Niccoli. The bibliophile and traveller Cristoforo de' Buondelmonti had brought it into Italy from Greece. After Niccoli died in 1437, it was sent to the library of San Marco in Florence. After 1500 it vanished for good.

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• 7. Print and Translation

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  In 1516 in Venice, the firm of Aldus Manutius issued the first printed edition, known as the editio princeps. Aldus himself had died the year before. The editor was Marcus Musurus, who lived from about 1470 to 1517. He came from Venetian Crete, built his career in Italy and had already edited many classical Greek authors.

  A Latin translation was printed in Rome in 1547. An Italian version followed in Mantua in 1593, by Alfonso Bonacciuoli. Thomas Fritsch of Leipzig produced a combined Greek and Latin edition in 1696. Nicolas Gédoyn published a French translation in 1731, and Germans issued a new Latin translation in 1896.

  English came late. Thomas Taylor published the first translation in London in 1794. William Henry Samuel Jones made a widely known version, available through the Loeb Classical Library. Peter Levi's Guide to Greece is popular with English speakers, but he took liberties, reshaping the book into a general guidebook to mainland Greece.

  Sir James George Frazer published six volumes of translation and commentary. Readers of Pausanias still treat his work as credible scholarship.

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• 8. A Dream at the End

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  The ending of Description of Greece remains a puzzle. Some believe Pausanias died before he could finish. Others think the strange conclusion was deliberate.

  The book closes with a story about a Greek author, thought to be Anyte of Tegea, who has a divine dream. In it, she is told to present the text of Description of Greece to a wider Greek audience. The purpose is to open their eyes to "all things Greek". That phrase is also a fair description of the ten books themselves.

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