Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece
about ancient cults that can be used to enliven the ancient remains. Much
of this information is no longer directly based on Pausanias, but has been
passed on from one travel guide to the next: the ancient description has
become part of a ‘canonical’ literary tradition that is attached to particular
sites and monuments.
The landscape was the most concrete connection between the Periegesis
and its later readers, but modern travellers also empathised with
Pausanias’ approach to the heritage of Greece. The idealising views of
Greek culture that dominated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
were inspired by ancient literature, and particularly by the texts produced
in Pausanias’ own cultural environment, the Second Sophistic. Compared
to his modern readers, Pausanias is an insider explaining Greek culture
to a distant audience. At the same time, however, he takes the stance of
an outsider, the visitor from Asia Minor who is fascinated to discover a
landscape full of associations and memories of a great past. Modern
travellers, steeped in the classical tradition just like the pepaideumenoi of
the Roman imperial period, therefore found it easy to sympathise with
many of his interests and attitudes.
In these volumes the ancient state of Greece is described, in order to
illustrate the present and to add new interest to modern localities and
customs, by identifying them with the events or the manners of a more early
period. The reader must never forget, that a classic interest is breathed over
the superficies of the Grecian territory; that its mountains, its valleys, its
streams, are intimately associated with the intimidating presence of the
authors, by whom they have been immortalized. Almost every rock, every
promontory, every river, is haunted by the shadows of the mighty dead.
Every portion of the soil appears to teem with historical recollections; or
it borrows some potent but invisible charm from the inspirations of
poetry, the efforts of genius, or the energies of liberty and patriotism.
(Dodwell (1819) iv)
For Dodwell it is Greek history and the association with ancient literature
that make Greece a worthwhile subject of description. The aims he sets
out in this passage would be a reasonable description of Pausanias’
approach, and the two authors would probably have agreed on the ancient
texts they considered particularly relevant. The aim to discover and
document the many connections between the memorial landscape and the
past is at the centre of Pausanias’ project. He uses site descriptions and
historical or mythical accounts to emphasise the continuity of culture and
tradition in mainland Greece, and there are numerous passages where he
specifically states that an old custom or an ancient artefact was still in
existence. Pausanias has a number of ways of emphasising such continuities
but it is remarkable that these statements are so often expressed in
the first person, ‘down to my own time’, which suggests some emotional
response to the encounter with antiquity in the Greek landscape. 38
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