Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

10. Discovering Greece with Pausanias
they clearly did not find on an abandoned site. Leake explains his reasoning
behind presenting so much that was ancient and no longer visible:
Although the description of the ancient cities of Peloponnesus, which I have
extracted in an abridged form from Pausanias, relate in some instances to
places, of which not a vestige now remains to illustrate the Greek topographer,
I have nevertheless introduced them all, because, by the addition of a
few pages, the present work is thus rendered more complete, and because
the reader is thus enabled to compare every part of Peloponnesus as
Pausanias found it, with the view which it presented to the follower of his
steps, after an interval of sixteen centuries. I am, moreover, much inclined
to believe, that the descriptions which the ancient traveller has given of the
cities of Greece – of their distribution, mode of decoration, monuments, and
productions of art, would, if better known, be useful to the cultivators of the
fine arts in general; that they might have a tendency to assist the public
discrimination on these subjects. (Leake (1830) viii-ix)
For Leake, Greece is not complete without Pausanias’ ancient landscape,
and he clearly estimates the didactic value of ancient cities as much higher
than that of the landscape he saw in the last years of Ottoman rule. For
visitors with antiquarian interests, Pausanias’ description was an integral
part of the landscape, and in their imagination his sites and monuments
were as present as what they actually saw.
During centuries of travel writing about Greece, Pausanias has had a
formative influence on general ‘habits’ that are shared by most texts that
attempt to present a systematic account of Greek sites or landscapes. As
Sutton has shown in her study of modern descriptions of Nemea,
Pausanias can subtly dictate the agenda for a site, and his main themes
and preferences echo even in recent travel guides which do not share the
antiquarian outlook of earlier travellers. 35 More generally, the Periegesis
had a strong influence on how Greece was presented in guidebooks. All
early guides to Greece draw heavily on Pausanias. One of the earliest, the
Baedeker guide of 1883, was edited from extensive notes compiled by H.G.
Lolling on research trips in Greece between 1876-81. 36 Lolling’s text and
the Baedeker guide follow the tradition of integrating Pausanias’ description
with the contemporary landscape. Once an increasing number of
excavations were under way, the combination of archaeological finds and
Pausanias’ detailed description also presented a niche for a new kind of
guidebook, the ‘cultural guide’ which, like Pausanias, ignores practicalities
of travel in order to focus on history and monuments. The earliest
guide of this kind, Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens (1890) by
Harrison and Verrall, was in fact intended as an archaeological commentary
on Pausanias, but soon attracted many buyers who took it to Greece
to enhance their visit to the ancient monuments. 37 The Periegesis continues
to have a strong influence on modern guidebooks to Greece, as a source
both for explanations of ancient sites and for mythical stories or details
141