Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece
remain a crucial source for the state of Greece and of classical scholarship
around 1900 even if some aspects of his work have now been superseded
by more recent editions and commentaries. Like Winckelmann, Frazer
tapped into intellectual trends of his own time and discovered a new way
of reading Pausanias, as well as opening up a new field of scholarly enquiry
which had an impact well beyond classics. Frazer’s association with
Pausanias can be traced back to 1884 when he signed a contract to publish
a translation of the Periegesis. By this time the steadily increasing tourism
to Greece meant that such a work was likely to find many readers, as the
quotation at the beginning of this chapter shows. By 1886, however,
Frazer had changed his mind: he now wanted to add a commentary which,
to the disquiet of his publisher, was steadily growing in size. There was no
doubt that there was a need for a full commentary which would take into
account the recent developments in Greek archaeology. 50
By 1888 the
Pausanias project had ground to a halt: Frazer had been sidetracked – he
was now preparing ‘a work on comparative mythology’, the extraordinarily
influential Golden Bough, published in its earliest version in 1890. 51
Ackermann shows that Frazer had long been interested in anthropology,
a subject constantly fuelled by new observations from many parts of the
planet which were becoming more easily accessible, but were as yet little
affected by western culture. In 1884, around the time when he started to
work on Pausanias, Frazer formed a close friendship with Robertson
Smith, a biblical scholar and anthropologist, and this seems to have
triggered his own extensive enquiries in this field. 52
This new interest was to keep Frazer occupied for the rest of his life, but
this did not mean that Pausanias was set aside. On the contrary, the
Golden Bough would not have been possible without Frazer’s work on the
Periegesis, because at its centre is the desire to find a new interpretation
of ancient myths and rituals, and Pausanias was a major source of
material for these anthropological studies. The idea of adding a commentary
to the translation was, in fact, probably a reaction to his new
anthropological interests, and many of the notes that were included in
Frazer’s Pausanias when it finally appeared in 1898 are distinctly ‘Golden
Bough-ish’. Frazer’s argument focuses on similarities between Greek traditions
and the countless details about non-western cultures that
researchers were collecting all around the world. His studies drew on a
wide range of ancient sources, but there is no doubt that the Periegesis was
crucial for this line of enquiry, because unlike many other ancient texts, it
presents myths and religion in their local context. In fact, Pausanias’
interest in comparisons between different versions of Greek myths and his
attempts to explain some of the more unusual rituals he found in Greece
coincide with major themes of most Victorian explorers’ enquiries.
Frazer’s new approach led to an image of Greek culture that differed
significantly from earlier ideas: where Pausanias’ eighteenth-century
readers had found cities full of art works, inhabited by a people that had
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