Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

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Pausanias: the Man and his Time
In those days men were guests of the gods and shared a table with them
because of their righteousness and piety; the gods openly honoured the good
and their wrath reached those who had done wrong. Indeed, in those days
[some] men became gods who are still worshipped today. … But in my time,
when evil has grown so much and has spread over every land and city, men
are no longer turned into gods, except in words and flattery addressed to the
powerful, and the wrath of the gods is reserved for later when they have gone
hence. 1 (Paus. 8.2.4-5)
It is usually taken for granted that Pausanias keeps a low personal profile
in his text, but sometimes he does step forward to voice his opinions –
rarely more forcefully than in the passage quoted above. In it he expresses
earnest religious views, and he criticises the circumstances of his own time
in a tone that suggests strong feelings. This rare outburst is an important
reminder that the man behind the mild-mannered commentary offered in
the Periegesis might not be as disinterested a reporter as he is often
assumed to be. Pausanias is notoriously elusive: he does not provide much
information about himself, and little can be said about him for certain, at
least if we are merely looking for hard facts about the man behind the
book. What we know about his personality also has to be pieced together
from sometimes contradictory statements in the Periegesis, combined with
conjecture based on an assessment of the cultural context. It is a standard
procedure in any study of an ancient author to assemble and discuss such
details, and I shall return to these issues later.
Rather than asking ‘who is the man behind the text?’ we first need to
consider what Pausanias wanted his readers to think about him as an
author. It is important to remember that the text represents only what he
intended to say about himself, the literary persona he wanted his readers
to see. For example, the almost conspicuous silence about his own travel
experience is in itself a conscious pose which needs further investigation.
It is a standard procedure in literary studies to investigate how an author
presents himself, and how the writer’s personality relates to the narrator
who emerges from the text. Since Pausanias has hardly been taken
seriously as an author, such a narratological approach had not even been
attempted until very recently, 2 and much remains to be done in this field.
My discussion focuses on Pausanias’ efforts to present himself as a trustworthy,
detached reporter and knowledgeable commentator, aims that
readers today have to bear in mind when they attempt to interpret
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