Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

10. Discovering Greece with Pausanias
lations of this kind on Africa, America and various parts of Asia, as well
as descriptions of the Greek islands and the Peloponnese (Morea). 12 He has
much more comparatively recent information about the islands than about
the Greek mainland, and the interior was apparently almost completely
unfamiliar to westerners. 13 It was the usual practice of geographers at the
time to supply details about unknown areas by relating hearsay or reporting
any information that could be found in ancient texts. The Old World
could offer comparatively rich sources because here it was possible to draw
on Greek and Roman literature, and information about the little known
interior of central and southern Greece could be found in Strabo and
particularly Pausanias. 14 In Greece the abundance of sources presented a
difficult challenge: in the preface Dapper explains that he had planned to
describe the Peloponnese in detail, but there was so much ancient literature
and its landscape was so full of history and ancient sites that he could
not include it all. 15 Many classical texts, particularly the historical works,
refer to the Peloponnese, but the overabundance of attested sites is a
problem unique to Pausanias’ Greece. Dapper cites him extensively; the
first division of the Peloponnese that comes to his mind is that of the
Periegesis, although he was aware of other geographical approaches, and
Strabo supplies much of the general framework. 16
Dapper also included
maps that illustrate his approach particularly well. He offers two versions,
one based on Blaeu, which attempts to provide contemporary place names
but has to resort to a mix of ancient and modern (probably partly invented)
names to fill the interior. The other map, credited to Meursius, seems to
focus on the ancient topography; it features the most important cities as
well as smaller settlements and even small rural sites referred to by
Pausanias (Fig. 11). Both maps are geographically inaccurate, but
although they draw on more than one source they essentially represent
an early attempt to represent Pausanias’ Greek topography through
cartography.
Personal travel experience, however, soon became an essential precondition
for a description of Greece: the 1670s saw a controversy over
Georges Guillet’s widely read work on ancient and modern Athens,
Athènes ancienne et nouvelle. 17 The text is presented as a personal travel
account, complete with exact information about travel companions and
dates for particular stages of the journey. Guillet even records that he was
overwhelmed by his first view of Athens, ‘struck by a sentiment of veneration
for the wonders of antiquity’. 18 Unfortunately for Guillet, Jacob Spon
acquired a copy of the first edition when he was on his way to Greece and
discovered that it did not stand up to scrutiny when compared with the
actual site of Athens, ancient or modern. Guillet answered Spon’s initially
mild criticism with an attack, claiming that Spon himself had not been to
Greece. This resulted in an elaborate refutation in which Spon addressed
specific problems to prove that Athènes ancienne et nouvelle was nothing
more than a skilful compilation based on other travellers’ reports and the
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