Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

4. Greek Travel Writing: Between Report and Invention
which the poet labels as lies should be less believable than the much more
fantastic ‘truth’: Odysseus, the paradigmatic traveller and adventurer, is
also the ultimate unreliable narrator. Greek travel literature would never
lose its connection with its epic but dubious beginnings, and travellers’
reports, even those that were perhaps truthful descriptions of faraway
regions, often attracted doubts from learned commentators. This may
explain why, in spite of the importance of travelling for the literary élite,
few ‘respectable’ authors ever wrote detailed accounts of their journeys,
except, perhaps, in the guise of different literary genres, particularly
history.
Modern travel literature often focuses on emotional responses to a
journey and gives much room to the transforming impact of the experience
on an individual’s character, knowledge or spiritual state. There are few
ancient Greek accounts of actual journeys that focus on a traveller’s
experience and personal reaction in a similar way. As we have seen in the
last chapter, Greeks saw travelling as a means of acquiring knowledge and
wisdom, and there are stories about the journeys of famous wise men,
although few could qualify as travel literature. Philostratos’ Life of Apollonios
includes a fantastic account of the sage’s trip to India, which focuses
on relating his reflections on what he saw on the journey and his philosophical
conversations with people he met along the way, such as the
Indian sophists. 13
Pilgrimages are journeys that emphasise a traveller’s
personal experience, but there are few extensive texts that could be
interpreted as a record of the reflections and reactions of pagan Greek
pilgrims. 14 The most extensive surviving example, Aelius Aristeides’ Sacred
Tales, is a kind of memoir offering a uniquely personal view of the
author’s activities with a special emphasis on his relationship with the god
Asklepios during a long struggle with various real or imagined illnesses.
This text includes accounts of many journeys, some routine trips of a
sophist at the top of his profession, and others undertaken in search of
healing, usually on the advice of Asklepios. Aristeides’ comments document
various aspects of travelling, from mundane practicalities and
complaints about uncomfortable transport to ideas about the personal
spiritual meaning of particular journeys. 15
Travel experiences play a more significant role in Greek fiction, particularly
in the novels, a genre originating in the Hellenistic period. A majority
of the preserved examples follow their main characters on a series of
journeys, with pirates, storms and shipwrecks as crucial plot devices. The
narrative rarely leaves the confines of the familiar world of the Greeks and
their neighbours around the Mediterranean, and the exotic is usually
represented by ‘familiar’ barbarians such as Persians or Egyptians,
strange people who nevertheless had clear characteristics well-known
from classical literature. There is some variation in how the different
authors use travel as a narrative device, but, on the whole, the stories pay
comparatively little attention to geographical or ethnographical detail,
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