Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

10. Discovering Greece with Pausanias
deserves a more extensive treatment than it can receive in this context,
but I shall introduce a few poignant voices and developments to illustrate
how the Periegesis itself has become instrumental in investing places and
landscapes with ancient (but actually new) meanings and memories.
The rediscovery of ancient Greece in western Europe at the beginning
of the Renaissance began in southern Italy, which was then still partly
inhabited by native speakers of Greek, but it was also aided by connections
with the remnants of the Byzantine empire. In the late fourteenth and
early fifteenth centuries, still before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the
first antiquarians travelled to the east to find unknown ancient Greek
manuscripts for collectors, among them probably the single Byzantine
Pausanias manuscript that reached the west. 2 Most scholars who were
interested in antiquity were, however, satisfied with studying the ancient
texts, both reappraising works that had always been known, and investigating
material that had been newly discovered. Travellers usually had
other interests, and early references to Greece tend to be short notes on a
few harbours where ships stopped on their way elsewhere, usually the
Holy Land. 3
The first traveller who fully recognised the potential of the Greek
landscape and its ancient remains as an object of antiquarian studies was
Cyriac of Ancona. 4 Cyriac, a merchant and largely an autodidact in classical
studies, travelled widely and was involved in the complex politics of the
time just before the fall of Constantinople: he knew the last Byzantine
emperor, had connections at the Ottoman court and was a close associate
of the cardinal who became Pope Eugene IV. 5 Cyriac came to recognise his
extensive travelling activities as an opportunity to collect information
about ancient sites and artefacts, and he has been called the ‘medieval
Pausanias’ as well as the ‘father of classical archaeology’. 6 He approached
the Greek landscape with an antiquarian eye, trying to identify ancient
places and recording ancient artefacts, particularly inscriptions, he discovered
along the way.
We wanted to see whether anything remains in our day of the destroyed city
of Mycenae … first we saw on the Argive plain traces of ancient monuments,
and especially some slabs of shining marble with the most beautiful images
which had been taken in the past by Christians to adorn churches of our
religion from a very ancient temple of Juno; they are thought to be from
among the works of Polykleitos. On the most outstanding of these slabs, on
a stone that was partially broken, we found the following ancient inscription
in Latin …
We searched for ancient remains of Mycenae among the old, uninhabited
Argive villages which provide some traces of the temple of Juno ruined so
long ago. Finally, not far from it and no more than about seven miles from
the city of Argos, towards the north and less than forty stadia from Nauplion,
we saw the remains of the fortress of Mycenae on a steep hill with a rocky
top. Some parts of its ancient walls survive, together with traces of towers
and gates. They are also conspicuous because of the beautiful workmanship
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