These passages, which I have perhaps quoted at too great length, may suffice. I will spare the reader a long description of Mount Pelion, its pine-woods, its wild flowers, and its simples, which seems to be a fragment of the same work. Two points only in the description of the mountain may be mentioned. The writer tells us that the knowledge of certain simples was hereditary in a single family, who kept it a profound secret, though they refused to accept any money from the sick people whom they tended, deeming it would be impious to do so. These herbalists claimed to be descended from the centaur Chiron. Again, we learn from the writer how in the greatest heat of summer, when the Dog Star rose, a procession of men of good birth and in the prime of life, all chosen by the priest and all clad in sheepskins, ascended through the pine-woods to the cave of Chiron and a sanctuary of Zeus on the top of the mountain. He mentions the sheepskins as a proof of the great height of Mount Pelion, as if without them the men would have shivered on the mountain even while the plains below were sweltering and baking in the heat. But it is more probable that the sheepskins had some religious significance.
The
pseudo-Dicaearchus
and
Pausanias
compared.
This account of the procession of skin-clad men to the cave and sanctuary on the top of the high mountain reads not unlike a passage in Pausanias. But how different is almost all the rest of this writer’s description of Greece from that of Pausanias! Instead of a dull patient enumeration of monuments, arranged in topographical order and seldom enlivened even by a descriptive epithet, we have slight highly-coloured sketches of the general appearance of the towns—the white city of Tanagra on the hill with the pretty painted porches of the houses; Chalcis with its handsome buildings, its shady trees, its flowing springs, its spacious market beside the narrows where the tide runs fast and the porters are busy unlading the ships in the harbour; Thebes in summer with its fine new streets, its verdure, its fruit and flowers, and the balmy freshness of the perfumed air blowing over gardens; Thebes in winter, swept by bitter cutting winds, the streets deep in mud and whitened by the falling snow; Athens with its old narrow lanes and mean houses, and now and then a glimpse between them of the resplendent Parthenon, like a sun-burst, high up against the sky. Then again as to the people, what a contrast between the grave Pausanias, who hardly allows us to see them except at their devotions, and the sparkling writer who so often lifts the veil of the past and lets us catch a glimpse of the bustling motley crowd and hear the hum of their voices—the crowd that ceased to bustle and the voices that fell silent so long ago. We see the hungry populace at Athens forgetting their empty stomachs in the joys of the theatre and pageant; the frail beauties ogling; the literary pests scribbling lampoons in their garrets or wriggling in the grasp of the law. On the highways we behold the travellers walking in fear of robbers or taking their ease at their inn. At Oropus we watch the custom-house officers diving into the baggage of exasperated travellers, who mutter curses. At Tanagra we shake hands with the bluff well-to-do farmer, comfortable, kindly, and contented, who has a hearty welcome for the stranger and a bit and a sup for the beggar who knocks at his door. In the streets of Thebes we jostle with your ruffling swaggering blades, your bullies and swashbucklers, who will knock you down for a word and cut your throat in a dark lane if you dare to whisper a word that reflects on the course of justice, or rather of injustice, in their native city. And moving amongst these ruffians are tall graceful women, muffled up to their eyes, their yellow hair gathered in knots on the top of their heads, their purple shoes peeping from under their white dresses, their soft voices contrasting with the gruff deep bass of the men. Again the scene shifts. We are no longer among the streets and gardens of Thebes, but on the beach at Anthedon with the salt smell of the sea in our nostrils and the cool sea-breeze fanning our brow. We see the fisher-folk, with their ruddy weather-beaten faces and their finger-nails eaten away by the brine, baiting their hooks among the sea-weed on the shore, or hammering away at a new fishing-boat, or ferrying travellers across the beautiful strait to Euboea.
These pictures of a vanished world are worth something. They have life, warmth, and colour; but the colours, we can hardly doubt, are heightened unduly. The lights are too high, the shadows too deep. We cannot believe that the population of Oropus consisted exclusively of cut-throats and custom-house officers; that the farmers of Tanagra were all bluff and virtuous; that none but good men struggling nobly with adversity resided at Chalcis; that no lawsuit at Thebes ever lasted less than thirty years. The writer, it is plain, has exaggerated for the sake of literary effect. And he has a strong leaning to gossip and scandal. He extenuates the praise of Boeotia in the mouth of a poet on the ground of a painful episode in the bard’s private history, and he retails with evident relish the current tattle as to the characteristic vices of the various Boeotian towns. On the whole this lively, superficial, gossipy work, with its showy slap-dash sketches of life and scenery, cannot compare in solid worth with the dry and colourless, but in general minute and accurate description of Greece which Pausanias has given us. In the writings of Pausanias we certainly miss the warmth and animation of the other, the pictures of contemporary life and character, the little touches that bring the past and the distant vividly before us. His book is too much a mere catalogue of antiquities, the dry bones of knowledge unquickened by the breath of imagination. Yet his very defects have their compensating advantages. If he lacked imagination he was the less likely to yield to that temptation of distorting and discolouring the facts to which men of bright fancy are peculiarly exposed, of whom it has been well said that they are like the angels who veil their faces with their wings.
Character
of Pausanias.
In truth Pausanias was 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
political
opinions.| While he looked back with regret to the great age of Greek freedom, he appears to have acquiesced in the Roman dominion as inevitable, acknowledging the incapacity of the degenerate Greeks to govern themselves, the general clemency of the Roman rule, and especially the wisdom and beneficence of the good emperors under whom it was his happiness to live. Of democracy he had no admiration. He thought the Athenians the only people who ever throve under it, and on observing that the slaves who fought and died for Athens were buried with their masters, he remarks with apparent surprise that even a democracy can occasionally be just. With his turn for study and for brooding over the past, it was natural that he should prefer a life of privacy to the cares and turmoils of a public career. Accordingly we find that he admired the prudence of Isocrates who lived placidly to old age in the shade and tranquillity of retirement, and that he censured implicitly the imprudence of Demosthenes, whose fiery genius hurried him through the storm and sunshine of public life to exile and a violent death.
Such a preference, implied rather than expressed, says much for the decay of public spirit in Greece. Our author himself was conscious that his lot had fallen on evil days. He speaks sorrowfully of the olden time when the gods openly visited the good with honour, and the bad with their displeasure; when the benefactors of mankind were raised to the rank of divinities, and evil-doers were degraded into wild beasts and stones. “But in the present age,” he adds mournfully, “when wickedness is growing to such a height, and spreading over every land and city, men are changed into gods no more, save in the hollow rhetoric which flattery addresses to power; and the wrath of the gods at the wicked is reserved for a distant future when they shall have gone hence.” We cannot doubt that here he glances covertly at the practice of deifying the Roman emperors, which seems to have stirred his honest indignation as a mark of the supple servility and political degeneracy of the age. Nor was he a stranger to those graver thoughts on the vaster issues of life and history which the aspect of Greece in its decline was fitted to awake. The sight of the great city of Megalopolis lying in ruins brings to his mind the high hopes with which it had been founded, and that again ushers in a train of melancholy reflexions on the instability of human affairs. He thinks how from so many golden cities of the ancient world—from Nineveh and Babylon, from Thebes and Mycenae—the glory had passed away; how nature itself, which seems so stable, is subject to great mutations; how transitory, then, is earthly glory, how brief and frail the life of man!
His ethical
views.
On the passions which move men and make history he seems to have thought much like other people. He knew that avarice is the cause of many crimes, and that love is the source both of great happiness and of great misery. Yet he appears to have held that the mischief wrought by the passion of love outweighs the good it brings; for after telling how, by washing in the river Selemnus, men and women were supposed to forget their love, he adds that if there is any truth in this story great riches are less precious to mankind than the water of the Selemnus. Again, he has a sincere admiration for the heroic virtues, and a genuine detestation of baseness and depravity of all sorts. Treason he stigmatises as the foulest of crimes. He considers that the bold and disinterested patriot Thrasybulus, who freed his country and healed her dissensions, was the best of all the famous men of Athens, and that the deed of Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae was the most splendid feat of arms in Grecian history. He praises his Spartan namesake for his courteous treatment of the captive Coan lady and for rejecting the base proposal of the wretch who would have had him mutilate the corpse of the gallant Mardonius. He speaks with sympathy of the brave men worthy of a happier fate who fell on the tyrant Lachares, of those who would have wrested Piraeus from the Macedonians had they not been done by their confederates to death, and of those others whom on the great day Cimon led to victory by sea and land. He tells how in the last fight with the Romans, before the day was lost, the Achaean general fled, leaving his men to shift for themselves, and he contrasts his selfish cowardice with the soldierly devotion of an Athenian cavalry officer who on the disastrous retreat from Syracuse brought off his regiment safe, then wheeled about and, riding back alone, found the death he sought in the midst of the enemy.
His
religious
opinions.
Belief in
the gods.