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PAUSANIAS


rarely that he allows us to see something of the scenery. But, happily, he notices the pine-trees on the sandy coast of Ehs, the deer and the wild boars in the oak-woods of Phelloe, and the crows amid the giant oak-trees of Alalcomenae. He tells us that " there is no fairer river than the Ladon, " " no reeds grow so tall as those in the Boeotian Asopus, " and the rain that deluges the fallow plain of Mantinea vanishes into a chasm to rise again elsewhere. It is mainly in the last three books that he touches on the products of nature, the wild strawberries of Hehcon, the date-palms of AuUs, and the oHve-oil of Tithorea, as well as the bustards of Phocis, the tortoises of Arcadia and the " white blackbirds " of Cyllene. He is rather reticent as to the character of the roads, but he records, with the gratitude of a traveller, the fact that the narrow and perilous cornice of the Scironian way along the coast of Megara had been made wider and safer by Hadrian. He is inspired by a patriotic interest in the ancient glories of Greece, recognizing in Athens all that was best in the old Greek life, and lamenting the ruin that had befallen the land on the fatal field of Chaeronea. He is most at home in describing the religious art and architecture of Olympia and of Delphi; but, even in the most secluded regions of Greece, he is fascinated by all kinds of quaint and primitive images of the gods, by holy relics and many other sacred and mysterious things. He is interested in visiting the battlefields of Marathon and Plataea, and in viewing the Athenian trophy on the island of Salamis, the grave of Demosthenes at Calauria, of Leonidas at Sparta, of Epaminondas at Mantinea, and the colossal lion guarding the tomb of the Thebans on the Boeotian plain. At Thebes itself he views the shields of those who died at Leuctra, and the ruins of the house of Pindar; the statues of Hesiod and Arion, of Thamyxis and Orpheus, in the grove of the Muses on Helicon; the portrait of Corinna at Tanagra, and of Polybius in the cities of Arcadia. At Olympia he takes note of the ancient quoit of Iphitus inscribed with the terms of the Olympic truce, the tablets recording treaties between Athens and other Grecian states, the memorials of the victories of the Greeks at Plataea, of the Spartans at Tanagra, of the Messenians at Naupactus, and even those of Philip at Chaeronea and of Mummius at Corinth. At Delphi, as he climbs the sacred way to the shrine of Apollo, he marks the trophies of the victories of the Athenians at Marathon and on the Eurymedon, of the united Greeks at Artemisium, Salamis and Plataea, of the Spartans at Aegospotami, of the Thebans at Leuctra, and the shields dedicated in memory of the repulse and defeat of the Gauls at Delphi itself. At Athens, he sees pictures of historic battles, portraits of famous poets, orators, statesmen and philosophers, and inscriptions recording the laws of Solon; on the AcropoUs, the trophy of the Persian wars, the great bronze statue of Athena; at the entrance to the harbour of the Peiraeus, the grave of Themistocles; and, outside the city, the monuments of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, of Cleisthenes and Pericles, of Conon and Timotheus, and of all the Athenians who fell in battle, except the heroes of Marathon, " for these, as a meed of valour, were buried on the field."

In the topographical part of his work, he is fond of digressions on the wonders of nature, the signs that herald the approach of an earthquake, the phenomena of the tides, the ice-bound seas of the north, and the noonday sun which at the summer solstice casts no shadow at Syene. While he never doubts the existence of the gods and heroes, he sometimes criticizes the myths and legends relating to them. His main interest is in the monuments of ancient art, and he prefers the works of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. to those of later times. At Delphi he adm.ires the pictures of Polygnotus, closing the seven chapters of his minute description with the appreciative phrase: " so varied and beautiful is the painting of the Thasian artist " (x. 31, 2). In sculpture his taste is no less severe. Even in the " uncouth " work of Daedalus, he recognizes " a touch of the divine " (ii. 4, s). In architecture, he admires the prehistoric walls of Tiryns, and the " Treasury of Minyas, " the Athenian Propylaea, the theatre of Epidaurus, the temples of Bassae and Tegea, the walls of Messene, the Odeum at Patrae, as well as the building

of the same name lately built at Athens by Herodes Atticus (vii. 20, 6), and finally the Stadium which that munificent Athenian had faced with white marble from the quarries of Pentelicus. His descriptions of the monuments of art are plain and unadorned; they bear the impress of reality, and their accuracy is confirmed by the extant remains. He is perfectly frank in his confessions of ignorance. When he quotes a book at second hand he takes pains to say so.

He has been well described by J. G. Frazer as " a man made of common stuff and cast in a common mould; his intelligence and abilities seem to have been little above the average, his opinions not very different from those of his contemporaries." His literary style is " plain and unadorned yet heavy and laboured"; it is not careless or slovenly; the author tried to write well, but his " sentences are devoid of rhythm and harmony " {Introduclion, pp. xlix., Ixix.).

In considering his use of previous writers, we must draw a distinction between the historical and the descriptive parts of his work. In the former it was necessary for him to depend on written or oral testimony; in the latter it was not. In the historical passages, his principal poetic authority is Homer; he frequently quotes the Thcogony of Hesiod, and he often refers to Pindar and Aeschylus. His writings are full of echoes of Herodotus, and his debt to Thucydides and Xenophon extends beyond the isolated mention of their names (i. 3, 4; vi. 19, 5). He has carcfuUy studied the Elean register of the Olympic victors; he makes large use of inscriptions, and has generally examined them with care and copied them with accuracy. In the descriptive portion the question arises whether he derived his knowledge from personal observation, or from books, or from both. He does not profess to have seen everything, but he does not acknowledge that he has borrowed any of his descriptions from previous writers. He " cannot commend the men who took the measurements " of the Zeus at Olympia (v. II, 9). "A certain writer, " who states that a particular spring is the source of an Arcadian river, " cannot have seen the spring himself, or spoken with any one who had; I have done both " (viii. 41, 10). There are fifty passages in which he either directly states or implies that he had seen the things that he describes. All of these have been carefully collected and examined by R. Heberdey (1804), who, by using a distinctive type in marking on a map the places " seen " by Pausanias, and by joining those places by lines representing the routes described by him, has shown the large extent of the author's travels in Greece. The complicated coast of Hermionis has, however, been incorrectly described (ii. 34, 8 seq.), and there is some confusion in the account of the three roads leading to the north from Lepreiis, in the extreme south of Elis (v. 5, 3).

A greater difficulty has long been felt in connexion with the " Enneacrunus episode " in the description of Athens (i. 8, 6, and 14, 1-6). In the midst of the account of the market-place, north-west of the Acropolis, the reader is transported to the fount-ain of Enneacrunus and to some buildings in its neighbourhood, and is suddenly brought back to the market-place. It has been naturally assumed that the Enneacrunus can only be the fountain of that name in the bed of the Ilissus. If so, the description of the fountain is out of place, and its insertion at this point has been ascribed either to some confusion in the author's notes or to a dislocation in the text. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the description may really refer to some other fountain near the market-place, which was shown to Pausanias as the Enneacrunus. Thus it has been held by Dr Dorpfeld that the name Enneacrunus was originally applied to a spring west of the Acropolis, that the old name of this spring, Callirrhoe, had been abandoned from the time when Peisistratus converted it into a " fountain with nine jets, " and that the names Callirrhoe and Enneacrunus were afterwards transferred to another fountain in the bed of the Ilissus. The evidence of his own excavations has led him to place the original Enneacrunus near the eastern foot of the hill of the Pnyx, and to identify certain adjacent remains with the buildings mentioned by Pausanias. If this opinion is correct, the account of the Enneacrunus, and the neighbouring buildings, in Pausanias, ceases to be an " episode, " and falls into the natural sequence of the narrative. (The " episode " has been fully discussed by the expounders and translators of Pausanias, and by the writers on the topography of Athens. Dr Dorpfeld's views are clearly set forth in Miss J. E. Harrison's Primitive Athens (1906). A. Malinin's paper (Vienna,