Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

4. Greek Travel Writing: Between Report and Invention
Mediterranean world. Statements about personal research on location had
apparently become an indispensable means of establishing the credibility
of a scholarly work, whether they were accurate or not. 54 Second Sophistic
authors used real or bogus reports of their own experience in various
contexts, from Aristeides’ discussion of the Nile which reports his efforts
to measure Egyptian monuments to Dio’s elaborate travel stories that
serve as context for philosophical discussions. 55 Lucian parodies this tradition
when his hero Menippos visits the underworld and the heavens to
solve philosophical problems by seeing the evidence for himself. 56
Autopsy and travel experience are at the centre of Pausanias’ Periegesis,
providing a basic structure and a motivation for detailed research,
but, just as in other texts, they are also a source of authority:
I will not deny that the Tantalos who was the son of Thyestes or Broteas
(both versions are given) and who was married to Klytaimnestra before
Agamemnon is buried here; but he who, according to tradition, was the son
of Zeus and Plouto is buried on Mount Sipylos – I know because I have seen
it (idôn oida), and the grave is worth seeing. 57 (Paus. 2.22.3)
Pausanias settles an argument about conflicting mythical stories simply
by asserting his personal knowledge: ‘I know because I have seen it.’ 58
Other Second Sophistic authors’ cavalier attitude to statements of autopsy
led some scholars to suspect that the Periegesis was just a compilation of
second-hand information presented as original research, and it is likely
that similar suspicions could have arisen in antiquity. 59 Pausanias must
have been aware that autopsy as an overused literary topos had become
almost meaningless, and he went to great lengths to indicate that his
research was authentic and recent. Numerous references to the current
state of Roman Greece, including the description of many hardly impressive
sites or ruined monuments, give an impression of immediacy which
would be difficult to achieve in a compilation from earlier texts. Reports
about disappointments add to this picture of authenticity, for example
when a long trip to Phigalia to see an unusual statue of Demeter results
in the discovery that it had been destroyed some decades earlier. 60
Pausanias can therefore juxtapose his own description of contemporary
circumstances with the outdated information that inspired this particular
trip.
It is quite clear that in his efforts to authenticate and evaluate his
sources Pausanias takes his lead from historiography. Many readers of the
Periegesis feel immediately reminded of Herodotos, and there is no question
that the similarities are deliberate. Arrian and Lucian produced texts
in Herodotos’ Ionian Greek, but Pausanias decided not to go so far. 61 He
follows the historian in a more subtle way, by imitating his manner of
establishing credibility through personal experience. Pausanias’ text resembles
Herodotos’ Histories most closely when he reports his reaction to
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