Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece
and there is little comment on the process of travelling, unless it is directly
relevant to the plot. 16 Greek novels seem almost exclusively interested in
those aspects of travelling that ‘real’ travellers’ accounts ignore: they focus
on the adventure and the dangers of travelling, and dwell on the hardships
that a traveller might endure, including the separation from one’s home,
family and true love. In the process the characters themselves change:
they become more experienced and acquire new knowledge, not scientific
expertise of any kind, but rather knowledge about themselves or other
characters in the story. Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, a Latin adaptation of a
Greek novel also known from a version preserved among the works of
Lucian, offers an extreme example of a traveller changed by his experience.
The main character and narrator, Lucius, is turned into an ass,
which allows the author to explore a unique angle on the process of
travelling, by telling most of his story from the perspective of a beast of
burden. The main transformation of the character, however, occurs only
when he has regained his human form: his ordeal, followed by a divine
epiphany, leads him to become a devout follower of the goddess Isis. 17
Such an interior perspective remains exceptional: most Greek travel
accounts almost exclusively focus on geographical or ethnographical information,
describing what the traveller saw, rather than relating personal
feelings or reactions to specific events. Many of these texts are reports of
explorers or adventurers, and the boundary between reality and invention
is decidedly blurred. It is difficult to tell whether the available sample is
representative, because many relevant fragments are found in the context
of geographical discussions, particularly in Strabo’s Geography. Our
knowledge of ancient explorers’ reports is probably biased towards those
dealing with the most distant and exotic regions because these required
most discussion in geographical works. Strabo’s summaries of scientific
debates in the Hellenistic period demonstrate that ancient scholars could
hardly agree on which texts should be discarded as fiction. The most
extensive debate concerned the Odyssey and its geographical setting, and
there were a number of different theories concerning the location of
particular episodes of the story. Most geographers agreed that the epic was
essentially a factual account with some poetic embellishment, and
Eratosthenes’ view that it had nothing to do with actual geography remained
an extreme position. 18
There was less agreement about other
authors who did not have the benefit of Homer’s venerable authority. As
Strabo’s examples of such debates show, opinions differed so much that
almost every account of far-off regions had at some point been labelled as
fiction and as fact in different scholarly works. 19
The tradition of written travellers’ accounts probably began with seafarers’
logs, preserving information about distances, landmarks and
harbours to facilitate orientation for future voyages. This seems to be the
origin of the periplous, an ancient genre of texts describing coastlines. 20
Most periploi are plain lists of places and the distances between them,
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