Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

10. Discovering Greece with Pausanias
traditional collections of relevant texts. 19 In spite of his methods, however,
Guillet had shown the right instinct: autopsy was again becoming crucial
to establish a travel writer’s credibility, just as it had been in antiquity.
Spon produced the first detailed account of a journey through Greece;
this was followed by an English version by his travel companion George
Wheler. 20 They visited Athens and investigated its monuments but they
were also the first to use Pausanias as a guide for journeys through the
Greek countryside, from the Corinthian Gulf via Delphi through Boiotia
to Attica, and then again on a trip from Athens to Corinth. Inscriptions
usually serve to identify ancient remains, but Pausanias supplies the basic
topographical information about ancient sites and sometimes even helps
to locate individual monuments. 21 Spon and Wheler apparently recalled
crucial passages of the Periegesis from memory: they did not have a copy
of Pausanias with them, as we find out when we read that a particular
question had to be postponed until they could consult a copy that belonged
to the British consul at Athens. 22
Spon’s original French travel account
combines comments on their own travel experiences and research activities
with details found in the literary sources. Most sites are introduced
with an overview of local history – just as in the Periegesis – and Pausanias
supplies most of the material for these passages.
Spon and Wheler are at the beginning of a long tradition of travellers
who used Pausanias as a travel guide to Greece and its ancient remains.
British travellers in particular began to produce travel accounts that
focused on the historical topography. 23 Wherever they follow Pausanias’
route their description of the landscape almost inadvertently becomes a
commentary on the ancient text, comparing the Periegesis with the landscape
they saw themselves, commenting on the remains of monuments it
mentions and ‘updating’ its information. The most notable travel accounts
of this kind were written by Richard Chandler, who visited Greece in the
1760s, and three travellers who toured individually in the first years of the
nineteenth century, namely Edward Dodwell, William Gell and William
Leake. 24
At this point, recent travel accounts still could not replace the
Periegesis, and classically trained western visitors had little hope that the
local people would supply valuable information about their illustrious
past.
A traveller must not expect to derive any information whatever from the
generality of Greeks upon the antiquities of their country, but must extricate
himself as well as he can, from the dark mazes of conjecture and uncertainty,
by the topographical light of Pausanias, and by the few scattered materials
of some other authors. (Dodwell (1819) II.403-4)
The traveller’s own observation is therefore always juxtaposed with the
ancient text, often without much interest in contemporary circumstances.
Gell points out that by the early nineteenth century an author almost
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