Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History / Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,'

by James George Frazer

His notices
of historic
monuments.

But his religious bias by no means so warped the mind of Pausanias as to render him indifferent to the historic ground which he trod, and to those monuments of great men and memorable events on which his eye must have fallen at almost every turn. As a scholar he was versed in, and as a patriot he was proud of, the memories which these monuments were destined to perpetuate, and which in the genius of the Greek people have found a monument more lasting than any of bronze or marble. He visited the battlefields of Marathon and Plataea and beheld the trophies of victory and the graves of the victors. At Salamis he saw the trophy of the great sea-fight, but he mentions no graves. Doubtless the bones of many victors and vanquished lay together fathoms deep in the bay. At Chaeronea he saw a sadder monument, the colossal stone lion on the grave of the Thebans who had fallen in the cause of freedom. On the battlefield of Mantinea he found the grave of Epaminondas, at Sparta the grave of Leonidas, and among the pine-woods of the sacred isle that looks across the blue Saronic gulf to Attica the grave of the banished Demosthenes. At Thebes he saw the ruins of Pindar’s house, the shields of the Lacedaemonian officers who fell at Leuctra, and the figures of white marble which Thrasybulus and his comrades in exile and in arms had dedicated out of gratitude for Theban hospitality. In the Grove of the Muses on Helicon he beheld the statues of renowned poets and musicians—Hesiod with his lute, Arion on his dolphin, blind Thamyris, Orpheus holding the beasts spellbound as he sang. At Tanagra he observed the portrait and the tomb of the poetess Corinna, the rival of Pindar; and in several cities of Arcadia he remarked portraits of the Arcadian historian Polybius.

Nowhere, however, did he find historical monuments crowded so closely together as at Athens, Olympia, and Delphi. The great sanctuaries of Olympia and Delphi served in a manner as the national museums and record-offices of Greece. In them the various Greek cities not only of the mother-country but of Italy, Sicily, Gaul, and the East set up the trophies of their victories and deposited copies of treaties and other important documents. |Historic
monuments
at
Olympia.| They offered a neutral ground where natives of jealous or hostile states could meet in peace, and where they could survey, with hearts that swelled with various emotions, the records of their country’s triumphs and defeats. At Olympia our author mentions a tablet inscribed with a treaty of alliance for a hundred years between Elis, Athens, Argos, and Mantinea; another tablet recording a treaty of peace for thirty years between Athens and Sparta; and the quoit of Iphitus inscribed with the terms of the truce of God which was proclaimed at the Olympic festival. Amongst the many trophies of war which he enumerates the most memorable was the image of Zeus dedicated in common by the Greeks who had fought at Plataea, and the most conspicuous, unless we except the figure of Victory on the pillar dedicated by the Messenians of Naupactus, must have been the colossal bronze statue of Zeus, no less than twenty-seven feet high, which the Eleans set up for a victory over the Arcadians. A golden shield, hung high on the eastern gable of the temple of Zeus, proclaimed the triumph of the Lacedaemonian arms at Tanagra. The sight of one-and-twenty gilded shields that glittered on the eastern and southern sides of the temple must have cost Pausanias a pang, for they had been dedicated by the Roman general Mummius to commemorate the conquest of Greece. Another monument that doubtless vexed the patriotic heart of Pausanias was an elegant rotunda with slim Ionic columns resting on marble steps and supporting a marble roof; for the statues which it enclosed, resplendent in gold and ivory, were those of Philip and Alexander, and the building stood as a memorial of the battle of Chaeronea.

Historic
monuments
at
Delphi.

At Delphi the road which wound up the steep slope to the temple of Apollo was lined on both sides with an unbroken succession of monuments which illustrated some of the brightest triumphs and darkest tragedies in Greek history.[history.] Here the proud trophy of the Lacedaemonian victory at Aegospotami, with its rows of statues rising in tiers, confronted the more modest trophy erected by the Athenians for the victory of Marathon. Here were statues set up by the Argives for the share they had taken with the Thebans in founding Messene. Here was a treasury dedicated by the Athenians out of the spoils of Marathon, and another dedicated by the Thebans out of the spoils of Leuctra. Here another treasury, built by the Syracusans, commemorated the disastrous defeat of the Athenians in Sicily. A bronze palm-tree and a gilded image of Athena stood here as memorials of Athenian valour by sea and land at the Eurymedon. Here, above all, were monuments of the victories achieved by the united Greeks over the Persians at Artemisium, Salamis, and Plataea. The golden tripod, indeed, which formed the trophy of Plataea, had disappeared long before Pausanias passed up the Sacred Way, its empty place testifying silently to the rapacity of the Phocian leaders; but the bronze serpent which had supported it still stood erect, with the names of the states that had taken part in the battle inscribed on its coils. A prodigious image of Apollo, five-and-thirty ells high, towering above the other monuments, proclaimed at once the enormity of the crime which the Phocians had committed and the magnitude of the fine by which they had expiated it. High and conspicuous too, on the architrave of the temple, hung the shields which told of one of the latest triumphs of the Greek arms, the repulse and defeat of the Gauls. All these and many more historical monuments Pausanias saw and described at Delphi.

Historic
monuments
at
Athens.

At Athens among the portraits of famous men that attracted his attention were statues of the statesmen Solon, Pericles, and Lycurgus, the generals Conon, Timotheus, and Iphicrates, the orators Demosthenes and Isocrates, the philosopher Chrysippus, and the poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Menander. In the Prytaneum were preserved copies of the laws of Solon. The colonnades that flanked the market-place were adorned with pictures of the battles of Marathon, Oenoe, and Mantinea, and in one of them—the celebrated Painted Colonnade—our author observed bronze shields, smeared with pitch to preserve them from rust, which had been taken from the Spartans at Sphacteria. On the Acropolis stood, as a trophy of the Persian wars, the immense bronze statue of Athena, of which the blade of the spear and the crest of the helmet could be seen far off at sea. Close at hand in the Erechtheum the traveller was shown the sword of Mardonius and the corselet of Masistius, who had fallen while leading the Persian cavalry to the charge at Plataea. In Piraeus he saw the sanctuary of Aphrodite which Conon had built after vanquishing the Lacedaemonian fleet off Cnidus, and at the entrance to the great harbour, in view of the ships sailing out and in, the grave of Themistocles who had won for Athens the empire of the sea. But no place in Greece was richer in monuments of the historic past, none seems to have stirred Pausanias more deeply than that memorable spot outside the walls of Athens where, within the narrow compass of a single graveyard, were gathered the mortal remains of so much valour and genius. Here lay not a few of the illustrious men who by their counsels, their swords, or their pens had made Athens great and famous, and hither the ashes of humbler citizens, who had died for their country, were brought from distant battlefields to rest in Attic earth. His description of this the national burying-ground of Athens has not, indeed, the pensive grace of Addison’s essay on the tombs in the Abbey. It is little more than a bare list of the names he read on the monuments, but there almost every name was a history as full of proud or mournful memories as the names carved on the tombs in Westminster and St. Paul’s or stitched on the tattered and blackened banners that droop from the walls of our churches. The annals of Athens were written on these stones—the story of her restless and aspiring activity, her triumphs in art, in eloquence, in arms, her brief noon of glory, and her long twilight of decrepitude and decay. No wonder that our traveller paused amid monuments which seemed, in the gathering night of barbarism, to catch and reflect some beams of the bright day that was over, like the purple light that lingers on the slopes of Hymettus when the sun has set on Athens.

His digressions
on
natural
curiosities.

To relieve the tedium of the topographical part of his work, Pausanias has introduced digressions on the wonders of nature and of foreign lands. Thus, for example, having mentioned the destruction of Helice by an earthquake, he describes the ominous signs which herald the approach of a great earthquake—the heavy rains or long droughts, in winter the sultry weather, in summer the haze through which the sun’s disc looms red and lurid, the sudden gusts, the springs of water drying up, the rumbling noises underground. Further, he analyses the different kinds of shocks, determines the nature of the one which destroyed Helice, and describes the immense wave which simultaneously advanced on the doomed city from the sea. He refers to the ebb and flow of the ocean, to the ice-bound sea and frozen deserts of the north, to the southern land where the sun casts no shadow at midsummer. He tells how the Chinese rear the silkworm, and describes both silk and the silkworm more correctly than any writer who preceded and than some who followed him. It has been suggested that he derived his information, directly or indirectly, from a member of the Roman embassy which appears from the evidence of Chinese historians to have been sent by the emperor Marcus Antoninus to the far East and to have reached the court of China in October 166 A.D. Again, he describes the Sarmatians of northern Europe leading a nomadic life in the depths of their virgin forests, subsisting by their mares, ignorant of iron, clad in corselets made of horse-hoofs, shooting arrows barbed with bone from bows of the cornel-tree, and entangling their foes in the coils of their lassoes.

Among the curiosities which seem to have especially interested him were the huge bones he met with in various places. Generally he took them to be bones of giants, but one of them he described more happily as that of a sea-monster. Probably they were all bones of mammoths or other large extinct animals, such as have been found plentifully in modern times in various parts of Greece, for example near Megalopolis, where he saw some of them. Again, he is particularly fond of describing or alluding to strange birds and beasts, whether native to Greece or imported from distant countries. Thus he mentions a reported variety of white blackbirds on Mount Cyllene which had attracted the attention of Aristotle, and he describes almost with the exactitude of a naturalist a small venomous viper of northern Arcadia which is still dreaded by the inhabitants. He refers to the parrots and camels and huge serpents of India, and he describes briefly but correctly the ostrich and the rhinoceros. He gives a full and sober account of the method of capturing the bison, and another of the mode of catching the elk which contrasts very favourably with the absurd account of it given by Caesar. At Tanagra he saw the stuffed or pickled Triton, or what passed for such, of which the Tanagraeans were so proud that they put a figure of a Triton on the coins which they minted in the lifetime of Pausanias. In the island of Poroselene he enjoyed, he assures us, the spectacle of a tame dolphin that came at a boy’s call and allowed him to ride on its back.