Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

7. Describing a City
special festival, and on the way they stopped at Panopeus to perform
dances. 9
Pausanias’ efforts to discover these traces of a Homeric past
suggest that the most disappointing feature of the town was not the poor
settlement, but the lack of tangible connections with its apparently impressive
history. In Stymphalos a similar approach led to a deceptively
favourable representation of a site in decline because there were still some
sights and stories worth recording. Pausanias presents some local traditions,
and there was one temple which provided a satisfactory link to the
famous story of Herakles’ hunt of the Stymphalian birds. The poor state
of the contemporary community, if there were any inhabitants left at all,
is never mentioned.
In Panopeus and Stymphalos past and present were hardly compatible,
so that Pausanias had to decide how to evaluate their relative importance.
Pausanias’ reaction in each case shows that what he writes about a city is
strongly influenced by his sense of the connections between the past and
the contemporary landscape. 10 In what follows I use the city of Tegea to
illustrate how Pausanias organises the description of a city, and how he
integrates the physical landscape with the past. 11 Tegea was a middlesized
city in Arkadia which had received some notice in the major Greek
texts, for example an entry in the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships and a small
but notable role in the historical accounts of Herodotos, Thucydides and
Xenophon. 12 The most widely known feature of the city was its temple of
Athena Alea, a sanctuary of supraregional importance. 13
Pausanias reports
that an ancient temple on the site had burned down in 395 BC, and
that it was replaced by a new building, designed by the eminent artist
Skopas. 14
This temple of the mid-fourth century was excavated in the
1880s, and further work between 1985 and 1992 investigated the remains
of the archaic temple and uncovered traces of continued cult activity on
the site going back to the early Iron Age at least. 15 The urban settlement
itself is less well-known, in spite of extensive excavations on the ancient
agora which remain unpublished. In recent years the area of the city has
also been investigated by intensive archaeological field survey, which has
clarified some aspects of the general layout of the town (Fig. 10). 16 Major
features of the urban landscape can therefore be located, but it is impossible
to determine the exact location of most of the monuments described in
the Periegesis.
In small towns Pausanias selects only a few notable sights, without
much attention to their location, but larger sites with many monuments
had to be organised in some way. In Athens some features of the landscape
are grouped together thematically, but the usual pattern in the rest of the
Periegesis is a topographical description. By the time Pausanias reached
Elis he expected his readers to take this for granted, because when he
arranges the monuments of Olympia by type rather than location he
stresses several times that he is abandoning his usual practice of following
routes around the site. 17 The topographical descriptions of sites probably
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