Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece SUSAN E. ALOCOCK JOHN F. CHERRY JAS ELSNER, Editors OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Pausanias pausanias Travel and Memory in Roman Greece Edited by Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, & Jas´Elsner 3 2001 1 Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota´ Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Saˆo Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright ᭧ 2001 by Oxford University Press Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pausanias : travel and memory in Roman Greece / edited by S.E. Alcock, J.F. Cherry & J. Elsner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-512816-8 (cloth) 1. Pausanias. Description of Greece. 2. Greece—Description and travel—Early works to 1800. 3. Greece—Antiquities. 4. Greece—Historiography. I. Alcock, Susan E. II. Cherry, John F. III. Elsner, Jas´. DF27.P383 P38 2000 938'.09—dc21 00-022461 Frontispiece: Location of principal places mentioned in the book. 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Silvia, Britten, and Bax This page intentionally left blank Preface This volume is dedicated to the principle that Pausanias deserves more—and more ambitious—treatment than he tends to receive. The editors independently discovered, early in their careers, what Konstan here calls “the joys of Pausa- nias”: Elsner, for instance, through his interest in pilgrimage; Alcock with her exploration of landscapes in Roman Greece.1 Part of the fascination of using him, we found, was that the Periegesis was infinitely richer, and more stimu- lating, than one would have expected from its conventional reputation. Over the centuries, Pausanias has, of course, been considered a happy survival, a mar- velous cornucopia, an ancient Baedeker, and a sturdy resource to mine for names and places, fragments of history, and versions of myth. He has also been peri- odically decried as long-winded, tedious, inaccurate, and digressive. The idea that the Periegesis might have much more to offer than either an interesting factual bricolage or a way to generate checklists of civic cults was, at least until quite recently, rarely considered. That situation is now changing drastically, and for once, a clear turning point can be identified. It is fair to say that this collection of essays would never have had its genesis without the revolutionary work of Christian Habicht and his 1982 Sather Classical Lectures, published in 1985 as Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece (rev. ed., 1998). Habicht not only offered a passionate and co- gent defense of the Periegete’s accuracy but also began to place the account in its own historical and social context and to push the edges of its interpretive envelope. His decision to take Pausanias seriously, coupled with a simultaneous growing curiosity about the world of the so-called Second Sophistic, has con- tributed to a florescence of “Pausaniacs” at the end of the millennium: books,2 conference proceedings,3 an index verborum,4 a fast-growing assemblage of ar- ticles throughout the 1990s, and—not least—two new critical editions with ex- tensive commentary book by book5. This outburst, as Henderson notes, parallels a similar surge of interest at the turn of the nineteenth century, which one might perhaps call the “First Pausanian Sophistic.” Habicht provided a seminal impetus in late-twentieth- century studies, in part by uniting the best in German- and English-language viii Preface scholarship and by combining historical and archeological approaches; likewise, the late nineteenth century left an extraordinarily erudite and interdisciplinary scholarly monument to tower over its Pausanias, in the form of the great six- volume translation and commentary made by Sir James George Frazer (1854– 1941). At the center of Frazer’s work throughout the 1880s and 1890s (“a work on which I have spent, well or ill, some of the best years of my life”),6 his Pausanias’s “Description of Greece” not only is an authoritative summation of its field across all areas of contemporary study in all the European languages but was also a crucial opening and scholarly supplement to Frazer’s more fa- mous and influential interests, including the study of mythology, ritual, and anthropology.7 Pausanias, it would seem, appears to intrigue people in a fin-de- sie`cle, transitional or commemorative mood, as well as scholars (like Frazer and the “Cambridge Ritualists”) eager to transgress disciplinary boundaries, whether in the late twentieth century or the late nineteenth. We decided to fan the flames of the modern Pausanian revival by assem- bling within a single volume a diverse cast of characters: classicists, ancient historians, archaeologists, art historians, historical geographers, intellectual his- torians, and cultural anthropologists. The intention was very much to expand both the appreciation and the scholarly exercise of Pausanias: in part by inviting some of the best people available in their respective fields to participate, in part through the sheer “shock value” of seeing such variant disciplines and such different investigations placed side by side. The collection is divided into three roughly equal parts: “Pausanias and his Periegesis, the Traveler and the Text”; “Studies and comparisons”; and “Nach- leben.” The divisions reflect some of the main currents, realized or potential, in research on the Periegesis. Part I might be perceived as the more traditional in tone, dealing as it does with the individual author and the nature of the com- position. In chapter 1 Jas´ Elsner immediately establishes the case for seeing the Description of Greece as a literary construct and not as a farrago to be dismem- bered at will. Ewen Bowie, in chapter 2, responding to the work of Habicht, contributes an up-to-date review of central questions regarding the authorship, inspiration, date, and motivations lying behind the Periegesis. In chapters 3 and 4, C. P. Jones and Ian Rutherford each explore specific topics within this broader ambit: the former investigating and assessing the source for much of Pausanias’s information (his guides), the latter reexamining the arguments over the heated question of whether or not his activities could be termed “pilgrimage.” Part II offers a selection of studies that spring from the text of the Perie- gesis. In two cases, these focus on specific sections of Pausanias: the Chest of Kypselos (5.17.5–19.10) in chapter 7, by A. M. Snodgrass, and the Messeniaka of Book IV in chapter 8, by Susan E. Alcock. Snodgrass uses the famous chest at Olympia, and Pausanias’s lengthy exposition of it, to approach a body of issues: not only how Pausanias interpreted works of art but also just what types of challenges particularly attracted him. Pausanias’s account of the “many suf- ferings of the Messenians” (4.29.13), for Alcock, offers one means to explore his strategies of narrative and what they reveal and conceal; their impact on Preface ix later readings of Messenian history and archaeology is patent. In the two other chapters of Part II, Pausanias is drawn into a wider discourse. In chapter 6 Ada Cohen situates Pausanias in the realm of artistic innovations, with the unprec- edented visual representation of travel in Hellenistic and Roman times. James I. Porter, also does something quite unusual, in chapter 5, by juxtaposing Pau- sanias with Longinus and Dio Chrysostom. By considering the Periegesis as something fit to be discussed in the context of other authors and their creations, entirely new fields of inquiry are opened up, be it Pausanias’s relation to the “sublime” or his place in the wider literary landscape of the Second Sophistic. Part III explores the Nachleben—the powerful, if much underestimated, aftershock of Pausanias’s writings that followed his rediscovery and printing in the Renaissance. Because of his very matter-of-factness, his apparent transpar- ency, Pausanias was long taken (equally matter-of-factly) at harmless face value. Only recently have the judgments and instincts he instilled in his innumerable later readers begun to be realized in their full efficacy. In chapter 10, J. M. Wagstaff’s exegesis of the work of Colonel William Martin Leake (1777– 1860)—and of Leake’s reliance on Pausanias—demonstrates the interdepend- ence of travelers’ accounts through the ages. Susan Buck Sutton approaches this same dependence from a different angle in chapter 9, describing how one small section, a couple of sentences in Book II, has guided the viewing of a single Greek valley for nearly two millennia. Far from a blameless Baedeker, Pausanias emerges as a central shaping force in perceptions of just “what was important” (and what not important) about Greece—perceptions that are astonishingly per- vasive still today. In chapters 11 and 12, John Henderson and Mary Beard explore this phenomenon in the late nineteenth century, through the figures of “feeble Farnell” and Jane Ellen Harrison and their very different readings of the Periegesis. The former bought completely and complacently into an elevated, Olympian version of the Pausanian vision, whereas the latter, exploring the cracks and “byways of Pausanias’s synthesis,” perceived that the Periegete ac- tually “lets out quite unconsciously a good part of the secret”—a secret of loss and change and nostalgia. In addition to the main commissioned essays, we invited a number of spe- cialist commentators—some expert in Pausanian studies and others in adjacent fields such as the historiography of travel—to respond to the book with shorter pieces.