Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece
Xenophon before them, most of these probably focused on the historical
events while leaving some room for details about the regions and peoples
they encountered.
Alexander’s scientific staff were credited with significant advances in
obtaining reliable knowledge about the east, although their original records
apparently did not survive for long, so that Strabo, around the
beginning of the Common Era, knew them only through another source. 36
A number of officials who served under Alexander and his immediate
successors also wrote about India. The best known of these accounts is
Nearchos’ Indike, which was the main source for Arrian’s work of the same
title. Nearchos’ work dealt with Indian geography, peoples, customs and
animals, followed by a periplous-style account of his voyage from the Indus
to the mouth of the Tigris in the Persian Gulf. For Strabo, Nearchos and
his fellow naval commander and geographical author Onesikritos were
men who ‘speak the truth, but with a stammer’: 37 the results may not have
been very reliable, but at least they were trying to represent India in a
realistic manner. In the long run, however, Alexander’s exploits apparently
did not have a lasting impact on how travellers described distant
regions of Asia: Strabo scathingly cites Megasthenes and Deimachos,
ambassadors to the court of the Maurya kings in the late fourth and early
third century BC, as examples of authors for whom personal experience
was apparently no obstacle to a return to the old well-rehearsed reports of
miracles and monstrous people. 38 In fact, Alexander himself soon became
the hero of the Alexander Romance, a tradition that produced a collection
of fantastic adventures among the strange peoples of an imaginary east, a
return to epic fiction that was now set in an India that owed more to the
colourful early reports of Skylax and Ktesias than to the sober accounts
generated by his own campaign. 39
Away from the murky waters of untrustworthy travellers’ tales, there
was a long tradition of texts about places or regions which did not talk
about travelling at all. The earliest example is the Catalogue of Ships in
the Iliad, which simply lists the names of many Greek tribes and cities in
a roughly geographical order. Many place names are given epithets such
as ‘sandy’, ‘well-built fortress’ or ‘rich in sheep’, but these sparse attributes,
though usually quite appropriate, are clearly not intended to provide
a meaningful description of a place or landscape. This list could be seen as
the beginning of factual geography, because it provides a geographical
framework which remained an authoritative source for Greek historical
topography. 40
We have already encountered the periplous as an early form of travellers’
account, but the norm of the genre was probably a coastal description
listing places without reference to a particular voyage.
After the Megarians are the cities of the Athenians. And the first in Attica
is Eleusis, where the sanctuary of Demeter is, and a fortification. By this is
52