Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

4. Greek Travel Writing: Between Report and Invention
of specific journeys. 4 In addition one might also consider a wide range of
texts that offer information about particular sites or regions, either general
guidebooks or books catering to specific interests, such as specialist
guides and sometimes literary works or compilations that constitute
appropriate reading for a particular place. The ancients had neither a
clearly defined genre of travel writing, nor a notion of books specifically
written for travellers; on the contrary, the texts discussed here were
variously associated with different genres such as historiography, geography,
epic poetry and narrative literature, and many relevant texts survive
only in fragments. This may explain why a comprehensive discussion of
ancient travel literature has never been attempted. Is it worthwhile to use
a modern category, namely ‘travel writing’, to analyse a set of ancient texts
which were not perceived as belonging to one common group in antiquity?
In such a situation one has to be careful to avoid assumptions about
connections that ancient readers would perhaps not have made themselves.
Nevertheless, the works I am discussing in the next two chapters
all have something in common: they tackle the problem of representing
geography, landscape and travellers’ observations and experiences as a
text. A comparison of different approaches illustrates the range of options
available to an ancient writer who set out to create a piece of travel
writing, and the implications of choosing a particular mode of describing
a journey or region.
As we shall see, Pausanias’ reaction to different traditions of ancient
travel writing is complex: he avoids association with some kinds of travel
report, while he depends on conventions established to describe foreign
regions and customs in historical or geographical texts. There are parallels
in other ancient texts to most aspects of Pausanias’ project, but nothing
suggests that he considers his work as part of a specific genre of travel
literature; neither, in spite of the unique scope and complexity of the
Periegesis, do his statements about plans and methods give the impression
that he intended to establish a new genre. If Pausanias expresses affinities
with any genre, it is historiography. In the next two chapters I juxtapose
the Periegesis with other travel texts to analyse the choices Pausanias
made in designing his description of Greece. The implications of different
conventions of travel writing for an author’s credibility will be central to
this discussion.
I begin with texts that deal with travellers’ experiences and personal
observations. This category of literary works contains many examples that
are difficult to separate from fiction and fantasy. In order to get a full view
of the connections between ancient Greek literature and individual or
collective travel experiences we have to cast the net wider, looking at a
rather disparate group of texts that, like Pausanias’ Periegesis, explicitly
draw on the knowledge acquired through travelling without dwelling on
the process of specific journeys. Many genres and branches of ancient
learning benefited from a knowledge of the wider world. Geography and
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