Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

6
A Sense of Time: Pausanias as Historian
The island of Sphakteria lies in front of the harbour just as Rheneia is off the
anchorage at Delos. It seems that places that were once unknown have
achieved fame through the fortunes of men: Kaphereus in Euboia is famous
because of the storm that came over the Greeks with Agamemnon on their
voyage from Troy, and Psyttaleia by Salamis we know from the destruction
of the Persians there. In a similar way the Lakedaimonian defeat made
Sphakteria universally known. 1 (Paus. 4.36.6)
Apart from the Spartan defeat in 425 BC there was nothing worth recording
about Sphakteria: the island was uninhabited and without its association
with a memorable episode in Thucydides’ account of the
Peloponnesian War it would probably have remained ‘invisible’ to readers
of the Periegesis. 2
Pausanias almost seeks to justify his reference to
Sphakteria, and he discusses other historical locations where the contrast
between an unimpressive site and the momentous events that took place
there was particularly striking. There is no doubt that the past has a
strong influence on how Pausanias views the contemporary landscape:
history can make a place worth seeing, even if strictly speaking there is
nothing interesting to see. Geography serves as the main organising
principle of the Periegesis because it determines the order in which the
information is presented. History, however, plays an equally important
role as the main criterion for Pausanias’ selective approach to the landscape.
The past (in the widest sense, including myth) often determines
what is worth recording, and it defines the identities of cities and regions
that give structure to the work as a whole. It is this combination of past,
present and landscape that is so characteristic of Pausanias’ Greece.
A close connection between history and geography was not new. Herodotos
includes much information that we would consider geographical or
ethnographical, and both Polybios and Strabo show that by the Hellenistic
period geography was seen as closely related to history: much depended
on whether scholarly enquiries (historiai) were presented spatially or
chronologically, and which aspects of the material were emphasised, but
both disciplines had an interest in similar cultural themes. 3 Compared to
geographical works, however, the Periegesis gives more room to the past,
and in several places narrative accounts almost overwhelm the topographical
framework. Pausanias not only handles a variety of historical
material from different sources, he also displays some versatility in presenting
the past in different ways, and in adapting his accounts to
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