Pausanias of Antioch: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary
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ARAM, 23 (2011) 669-691. doi: 10.2143/ARAM.23.0.2959678 PAUSANIAS OF ANTIOCH: INTRODUCTION, TRANSLATION, AND COMMENTARY Dr. BENJAMIN GARSTAD (Grant MacEwan University, Canada) Pausanias of Antioch is, even amongst fragmentary Greek authors, a minor and obscure figure. His fragments are few and often slender, and for the most part found in two sixth-century works, the Ethnika of Stephanos of Byzantium and the Chronicle of John Malalas.1 Perhaps most scholarly attention has been paid to him with a view to distinguishing him from the much more famous Pausanias the Periegete (fl. c. AD 150), the author of the Periegesis or Descrip- tion of Greece. The remains of Pausanias of Antioch are not, however, entirely insignificant, since as the fragments of a – most likely – first century AD work on the foundation of Antioch they offer us insight into the ktistic literature, the writing on city foundations, of the later Hellenistic and early Imperial periods. This was the literature which provided Virgil with an outline for the Aeneid and the city chroniclers of late antiquity with sources. No prose ktisis survives intact and very few survive at all; this makes the insights we can glean from the fragments of Pausanias particularly valuable, especially in the study of the works influenced by ktistic literature. INTRODUCTION Several ancient authors went under the name Pausanias, but Fragment 1 confirms that the Pausanias who dealt with the foundations of Antioch and other eastern cities was himself from Antioch (although not every citation of ‘Pausanias’ in Stephanos of Byzantium belongs to him), especially since it has been demonstrated that the ‘Pausanias of Damascus’ in T 1 is actually another author. FF 2 and 4 give us reason to identify Stephanos’ Pausanias, who wrote on the foundation of eastern cities, with the Pausanias cited by Malalas. He was indeed Pausanias of Antioch. 1 See P. Chuvin, “Les foundations syriennes de Séleucos Nicator dans la Chronique de Jean Malalas” in Géographie historique au Proche-orient (Syrie, Phénicie, Arabie, grecques, romaines, byzantines), ed. P.-L. Gatier, et al. (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1988) 99-110; E. Frézouls, “La fondation des villes chez Malalas” in Mélanges Pierre Lévêque 8: Religion, anthropologie et société, ed. M.-M. Mactoux & E. Geny (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994) 217-34. 994097_ARAM_23_31_Garstad.indd4097_ARAM_23_31_Garstad.indd 669669 111/02/131/02/13 008:388:38 670 PAUSANIAS OF ANTIOCH Pausanias’ date, however, remains uncertain. Foerster conjectured that Pau- sanias was the source for Libanius’ statement that Antioch had been destroyed by earthquakes three times in the past (Or. 11.228 [347]), and that the earth- quakes mentioned by Malalas were also taken from Pausanias, and so dated Pausanias some time after the last-mentioned earthquake in AD 115.2 Domninos and Pausanias are cited in Malalas for the first earthquake to strike Antioch in 148 BC (8.24; F 10B), but Pausanias is only added from the Slavonic text. Malalas mentions two more earthquakes, in AD 37 and 115 (10.18, 11.8, 9), but cites no authorities. Foerster excluded Domninos as a source for Libanius because he thought him to be a Nestorian. But Foerster’s conjecture assumes: 1) that Libanius’ source for the three earthquakes must be one which might be known to modern scholars, 2) that Domninos was Malalas’ source for all three earthquakes, and that Pausanias was in turn Domninos’ source, even though they are only cited for one, and 3) that Domninos can be positively identified as a Nestorian or Christian Patriarch of Antioch, which is highly dubious.3 Foerster’s date for Pausanias of sometime after 115 deserves a hearing, but is far from conclusive. The fragments (11A, 11) suggest that the last event known to have been discussed by Pausanias was either the death of Sosibios (possibly in the reign of Augustus, 31 BC – AD 14, but perhaps afterward), or the establishment of the Olympic games at Antioch (AD 43/4). In F 11 Pausanias is not specifi- cally cited as a source for the information provided on the games, but rather for the information on Sosibios. Presumably Pausanias ceases to be cited after this point in Malalas’ Chronicle because his work on Antioch did not treat later events. A – perhaps early – first-century AD date therefore seems plausible. An earlier date (rather than the fourth-century one suggested by Jacoby4) might be corroborated by the essentially unchristian nature of the fragments. Diller states that Pausanias was one of Malalas’ immediate sources,5 but this seems very unlikely. Domninos was probably the intermediary through whom Malalas knew the material of Pausanias.6 There is an unsettling coincidence not only in the names, but also in the inter- ests of Pausanias of Antioch and his better-preserved namesake, Pausanias the Periegete. Both seem to have written primarily on monuments and antiquities. 2 R. Foerster, ‘De Libanio, Pausania, Templo Appolonis Delphico’ in Album gratulatorium in honorem Henrici van Herwerden propter septuagenariam aetatem munere professoris, quod per XXXVIII annos gessit, se abdicantis (Utrecht: Kemink & fil., 1902) 45-54. 3 E. Jeffreys, “Malalas’ sources” in Studies in John Malalas, ed. E. Jeffreys (Sydney: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1990) 178, 187. 4 FGrH 3C2, 938. P. Janiszewski, The Missing Link: Greek pagan historiography in the sec- ond half of the third century and in the fourth century AD (Warsaw, 2006) 187, favours a second or third century date for Pausanias. 5 A. Diller, “The Authors Named Pausanias” TAPA 86 (1955), 276. 6 Jeffreys (1990) 189. 994097_ARAM_23_31_Garstad.indd4097_ARAM_23_31_Garstad.indd 670670 111/02/131/02/13 008:388:38 B. GARSTAD 671 Pausanias the Periegete himself tells us he was from Asia Minor,7 but only later witnesses inform us that Pausanias of Antioch was from Antioch. It is tempting to suggest that Pausanias the Periegete had garnered such a reputa- tion that ‘Pausanias’ became a byword for a periegete or writer of guidebooks, and so the name was assumed by or assigned to Pausanias of Antioch. There is, however, no indication that Pausanias the Periegete was read before Stephanos of Byzantium, let alone that he became famous.8 Nor does it appear that Pausanias the Periegete would allow himself to be distracted from his chosen subject of Greece or required a commission enough to write on the region of Antioch. The relationship of the two authors remains a problem. Pausanias of Antioch, then, was Antiochene, and probably wrote in the first century AD His subject was his home city, its foundation, legendary history, monuments, and remarkable events, though he seems to have written on other Seleucid foundations, especially in the region of Antioch. His approach to myth was rationalizing, but he included the miraculous or supernatural in his accounts of historical events. For ease of reference I have not varied from the numbering of the testimo- nium and fragments in Jacoby, FGrH 854, except in the case of a number of new fragments I have identified. New fragments are marked with a capital letter following the appropriate number. TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY Testimonium 1 CONSTANT. PORPH. De Them. I p. 17: The district called ‘Armeniac’ does not have a fixed or authoritative name, nor is its designation an old one … I think it reasonable to say that it received such a name in the reign of the emperor Heraclius and later times. For Strabo the geographer does not mention a name of this sort … nor does Menippos, who wrote down the distances of the whole inhabited earth, nor indeed Scylax of Caryanda nor Pausanias of Damascus nor any other of the writers of history. T 1 Diller has shown that despite previous opinion to the contrary (based solely on a shared name), Pausanias of Damascus is not to be identified with Pausanias the author of the ktisis of Antioch. Rather, Pausanias of Damascus is most likely the author of the third, unattributed periplus of the Mediterranean with the Euxine Sea in codex D of the Minor Geographers, previously ascribed 7 C. Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 13-5. 8 Habicht (1985) 1-2. 994097_ARAM_23_31_Garstad.indd4097_ARAM_23_31_Garstad.indd 671671 111/02/131/02/13 008:388:38 672 PAUSANIAS OF ANTIOCH to Ps.-Scymnus. This testimonium, therefore, has no bearing on the fragments which follow.9 Fragment 1 STEPH. BYZ. s. v. D¬rov: Doros: a city of Phoenicia … the ethnic form is Dorites … but Pausanias, in the book on the foundation of his home city, calls them Dorieis, writing this way: “Tyrians, Ascalonitans, Dorieis, Rhaphaneotans”. FF 1, 5-8 That Stephanus of Byzantium found the ethnic forms of various cities in the Levant in Pausanias’ work does not necessarily indicate that Pau- sanias dealt with the foundation of each of these cities, especially as some of them, like Gaza and Botrys, were ancient foundations which preceded even the Persian hegemony in the region, let alone that of the Seleucids. Pausanias might have mentioned the natives of these cities as visitors to or inhabitants of the cosmopolitan metropolis of Antioch and its environs. F 2 STEPH. BYZ. s. v. Seleukóbjlov: Seleucobelos: a city of Syria, near *** A citizen is called a ‘Seleucobelites’ or ‘Seleucobelaios’. It is named after Seleucos and Belus; so says Pausanias in the Concerning Antioch. F 2 Pausanias may well have discussed the foundation of Seleucobelos, since it was on the plain of Amyke or Amuk (on the Orontes, some thirty miles south of Antioch), mentioned in F 10 (6), and its name indicates that it was founded or refounded by one of the Seleucids. It might also be another example of the propaganda effort to associate the Seleucid house with Zeus (here under his syncretistic ‘Babylonian epithet’ of Belos) which is evident in the more substantial fragments of Pausanias.