Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

9. Pausanias and his Readers
book. This chapter therefore offers a discussion of a few highlights in the
reception of Pausanias during the last six hundred years to illustrate how
his work influenced particular areas of modern thought. Much work is yet
to be done in this field, and it is striking how little attention some
commentators on relevant authors pay to Pausanias as a crucial source. 3
It is true that at first sight his work often appears to be not much more
than a faithful quarry of information about ancient Greece, but once ideas
and interpretations are investigated further it becomes clear that his
influence was at times much more profound. The most evident effect of the
Periegesis is without doubt its influence on perceptions of Greece, which
will be discussed in the next chapter. Pausanias has, however, also been
an important source of inspiration for crucial advances in scholarly
thought. Most remarkably, the Periegesis had a formative influence on two
works that are among the most influential books of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, namely J.J. Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst
des Alterthums (History of the Art of Antiquity) of 1764 and J.G. Frazer’s
Golden Bough (1890).
The story of Pausanias’ Periegesis in western Europe starts with a
single manuscript copy that reached Italy from Constantinople soon after
AD 1400. Its owner was Niccolò Niccoli of Florence, an avid collector of
ancient manuscripts, and the first we hear of his copy of Pausanias is in a
letter of 1418 which shows that he had agreed to lend it to an acquaintance
in Venice. This is where Guarino Veronese of Padua may have encountered
the Periegesis. In any case, he became Pausanias’ first known reader
in western Europe and he was highly satisfied with what he saw, as is
recorded in a letter he wrote to Niccoli to express his pleasure in reading
Pausanias’ Corinthian book. 4 Niccoli’s original Byzantine manuscript disappears
from our record at some point in the sixteenth century, but by that
time several copies had been made, and these are the basis for all printed
editions of the text, beginning with Musurus (1516). 5
Since the Periegesis is presented in geographical order it is not easy to
extract information on particular subjects which might be scattered
throughout its ten books, but this apparently did not deter scholars from
using Pausanias as a source for various aspects of ancient culture. One
early professor of Greek, Demetrios Chalkondyles, was reputed to have
memorised the whole work. In fifteenth-century scholarship, the Periegesis
usually supplied evidence to support scholarly arguments about
matters that could be quite unrelated to its themes or aims. For example,
Domizio Calderini, who attempted the first translation into Latin, also
included references to Pausanias in his works on Ovid, Martial and
Statius, and Marcus Musurus, the editor of the first printed version,
quoted the Periegesis in his lectures on the Anthology. 6
This mining of
Pausanias for the many valuable details in his work continues to this day,
but as new aspects of Greek culture came to the attention of scholars
it turned out that there were many subjects where Pausanias could
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