Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece
of the architects and were well worthy of our attention. (24 March 1448).
(Cyriac in Bodnar (2003) 336-8)
As it happens, the site Cyriac visited was in fact not the ancient Mycenae
we know today. 7
Nevertheless, there is no doubt about his pioneering
approach to the remains of antiquity, complete with a sense of how
artefacts are dispersed and reused in later centuries. He talks about his
own travel experience, and he particularly likes to boast about his eminent
acquaintances, but when he turns to the landscape he deals almost
exclusively with monuments, sites and inscriptions. Cyriac travelled with
his own manuscript copies of Thucydides, Pliny’s Natural History, and the
geographical works of Strabo, Pomponius Mela and Ptolemy. 8 One book
that is conspicuously absent from his collection and his comments on
Greece is Pausanias’ Periegesis. 9 The news of its recent discovery apparently
never reached Cyriac, and we are left to speculate what he could have
achieved travelling in Greece with Pausanias, as his like-minded successors
did in centuries to come. Nevertheless, he raises all the issues that
have dominated ‘cultured’ travel in all areas of Graeco-Roman antiquity
ever since the beginning of the Renaissance. Cyriac, like so many travellers
in regions not covered by the Periegesis, demonstrates that without
Pausanias, an antiquarian mind faced with a Greek landscape would still
be asking questions about the identity of ancient sites and connections
between artefacts and the ancient tradition. The Periegesis, however,
covers such topics in more detail than any other ancient text, not least for
the part of the Argolid that Cyriac was trying to explore in the passage
quoted above. Cyriac’s predicament shows why few educated travellers
after him would venture into the Greek landscape without consulting
Pausanias.
These promising beginnings of antiquarian travel in Greece were cut
short just a few years after Cyriac visited the Argolid: Constantinople fell
in 1453, and almost all Greece became part of the Ottoman empire. Few
learned travellers visited Greece for some time afterwards, and the first
texts that demonstrate that the Periegesis was put to the test in the Greek
landscape date to the seventeenth century, when foreign contacts with
Greece were again increasing, notably through the foundation of the
English Levant Company in the late sixteenth century. In the seventeenth
century Catholic orders established monasteries in Athens where the
Capuchins in particular became well-known for their hospitality to foreign
visitors. They even produced the first plan of Athens, and in 1674 a Jesuit,
Jacques Babin, published the first topographical account of Athens to be
based on personal knowledge of the site. 10 Although travel to Greece now
became easier, a surprising number of seventeenth-century texts dealing
with Greek topography were still entirely based on literary sources,
compiled by authors who had probably never visited themselves. 11
In the late seventeenth century Olfert Dapper produced learned compi-
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