Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece
presentation of every site, particularly once it is restored and opened to
visitors, is a matter of interpretation and selection. In Greece these
decisions were often guided by Pausanias’ description and therefore also
influenced by his preferences. 34
The Periegesis also had a profound impact on how travellers wrote about
the Greek landscape. A learned travel account would include references to
relevant ancient sources as a matter of course, and all the major descriptions
of Greece combine paraphrases of notes made en route with carefully
selected information from ancient texts and earlier modern travel books.
Just like Pausanias, many later travel writers chose to provide a historical
overview before they embarked on the description of a site, and the
Periegesis often supplies the main details for these introductions. Moreover,
Pausanias creates an imaginary Greece which combines the visible
landscape with monuments and memories that were lost, and his travelling
readers in modern times would have found this approach very
familiar. Their descriptions of the Greek landscape often contain much
more than a traveller could actually still see on the surface: most
writers combine their own observations with Pausanias’ description,
and it is not always made clear when we move from the present
landscape into the past. The following passage is Dodwell’s description
of the way from Mantinea to Orchomenos, a route we have already
encountered in Chapter 5.
On quitting Mantineia on the 9th [March 1806] for the ruins of Orchomenos,
we traversed the middle of the ancient city, and were thirteen minutes in
going from the western wall. We here crossed the ditch formed by the Ophis,
and, proceeding in a northern direction through the middle of the plain, in
an hour and four minutes from the walls of Mantineia, came to the foundations
of a building composed of large stones. Pausanias [8.12] mentions two
roads from Mantineia to Orchomenos, on one of which were the stadium of
Ladas, a temple of Diana, and a lofty tumulus of earth, which some believed
to be the tomb of Penelope. In this vicinity a mountain was covered with the
ruins of the ancient Mantinea, near which rose the fountain Alalkomenia.
Thirty stadia from the town were the ruins of the village Maira. On the other
road the topographer mentions the monument or tomb of Anchises, and a
temple of Venus at the mountain called Anchisia, which separated the
Orchomenian and Mantinean territories. (Dodwell (1819) 424)
This is clearly presented as the record of an actual journey made in March
1806, but in fact, most of what Dodwell describes was not actually visible
and is directly taken from Pausanias’ text. Ancient place names are used
matter-of-factly throughout, and, apart from the wall of Mantinea and the
foundation of an ancient building, this description ‘borrows’ Pausanias’
ancient landscape instead of describing that of the early nineteenth century.
Not all travellers’ accounts of this period achieved such a seamless
transition between ancient and modern Greece, but most did at times
lapse into descriptions that give distances in stadia or note art works that
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