Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

4. Greek Travel Writing: Between Report and Invention
the island of Salamis, with a city and a harbour. Next the Piraeus and the
Legs [the Long Walls?] and Athens. And the Piraeus has three harbours.
Anaphlystos, a fort with a harbour; Sounion, a promontory with a fort; a
sanctuary of Poseidon; Thorikos, a fort with two harbours; Rhamnous, a fort.
And there are many other harbours in Attica. Circumnavigation of the
Athenian territory: 1140 stadia: from the Iapis territory to Sounion 490
stadia, from Sounion as far as the borders of the Boiotians 650 stadia. 41
(Pseudo-Skylax 57)
This description of Attica is taken from the anonymous Periplous of the
Great Sea which dates from the late fourth century BC and was falsely
attributed to Skylax of Karyanda. The work describes the whole Mediterranean,
following the coasts in a long clockwise route from Spain via the
coasts of Italy, Greece and Syria to North Africa. The author focuses on
the most basic features, and even a place as famous as Athens hardly
distracts him from his purpose. A similar literary genre, the stadiasmos,
listed places and distances along overland routes. 42
These texts represent the beginning of Greek geographical writing, and
as a literary equivalent to maps they may well have contributed to the
development of early cartography in sixth century Ionia. 43
In the same
period Hekataios of Miletos wrote his Periodos Ges (Journey Around the
World) which recorded geography in the manner of a periplous but also
established geography as a science concerned with the shape of the earth
and the position of the continents. Later geographers paid more attention
to overviews, using geometrical comparisons to explain better how different
places related to each other in space. Nevertheless, geographical works
remained concerned with describing the world by listing regions and
places, even if, as we can observe in Strabo’s Geography, they might allow
more space for additional material such as descriptions of the landscape,
historical details or information about the life of the locals. 44 The ancient
mode of describing the world by listing places with a few attributes did not,
however, become obsolete: in the second century AD a certain Dionysios
composed a work entitled Periegesis of the Inhabited World which described
the whole world in about 1,200 epic verses. 45
Texts dealing with specific regions or sites in greater detail are particularly
dependent on knowledge gained by a visit. Pausanias’ work was not
the first to offer descriptions of sites and monuments: from the late
classical period there were books that dealt with particular sites. These
included at least three books on Athenian monuments by a Diodoros
dating from the fourth century, and a number of works by Polemon of Ilion,
for example on the Athenian Acropolis, monuments of Sparta, treasuries
in Delphi and three books on his native city, written probably in the early
second century BC. As far as we can tell, these works presented monuments
together with accounts of local history and customs. The fragments
suggest that their interests are similar to the topics Pausanias includes in
his logoi, but since we are dealing with whole books on single sites the
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