Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece
recurring themes in the Periegesis are due to this source material rather
than to an overarching and somewhat artificial literary scheme.
The location of historical logoi is a result of conscious decisions about
the structure of the text and the relevance that should be attached to
particular monuments or locations, and such considerations can lead to
results that seem counter-intuitive to a modern reader. For example,
Pausanias had to find an appropriate location for the biography of Philopoimen,
a citizen of Megalopolis and general of the Achaian League who
was assassinated in Messene. In his descriptions of Messene and Megalopolis
Pausanias mentions Philopoimen, but each time he deliberately
interrupts his account of local history, postponing his discussion of the
great man with a cross-reference. 29 A lengthy biography is finally presented
as part of the description of Tegea, a city that had no particular
connections with Philopoimen, except that there was a pedestal with a
noteworthy epigram in his honour. 30 We have come across this passage
before: Pausanias discovered the epigram when investigating inscriptions
on empty statue bases outside the theatre of the city. Since an empty
statue base is hardly a monument worth writing about, it seems likely that
the biography of Philopoimen was postponed to justify the inclusion of this
epigraphical discovery.
Pausanias’ efforts as historiographer have often been dismissed as
inferior, and traditionally scholarship was mainly concerned with identifying
his literary sources. The Periegesis contains a lot of historical
information that is unique, particularly for the Hellenistic period, and
there are many details that are not found elsewhere, which potentially
makes it an important source. Pausanias’ historical accounts, however,
have also attracted justified criticism because there are numerous factual
errors which he should have been able to avoid by consulting the literary
sources available at the time. 31 Some of these problematic passages can be
understood in the context of his aims, his use of local sources and his
willingness to include details that differed from what could be found in
well-known literary works. 32 Nevertheless, every piece of historical information
in the Periegesis needs to be evaluated with particular care, a
process of scholarly scrutiny that has been going on for a long time and
which is well-documented in the different commentaries. Mere fact-checking,
however, should not stand in the way of investigating Pausanias’
methods as a historian. On the following pages I investigate how he
tackles crucial aspects of historiography, namely source criticism, chronology,
the interpretation and presentation of his material and his thoughts
on the causes of historical events.
As we have seen in Chapter 3, Pausanias’ research in Greece allowed
him to hear many stories on site, local tradition that was tied to particular
places or monuments and could still be adapted and changed every time it
was presented to an audience. A large amount of such material is included
in the Periegesis, and the process of integrating oral tradition with the
80