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

by James George Frazer

In religion as in morals Pausanias seems to have occupied a position not unlike that of his contemporaries. That it did not occur to him to doubt the existence of the gods and heroes of Greek mythology is clear from the tenour of his work as well as from many observations which he lets fall. Thus for example, he tells us that to see the gods in bodily shape was perilous; that Pan possessed, equally with the greatest of the gods, the power of answering prayer and requiting the wicked; and that down to his own time there was preserved at a city on the Euphrates the very rope, plaited of vine and ivy branches, with which Dionysus had spanned the river on his march to India. Even the criticisms which he sometimes offers on myths and legends prove that in the act of rejecting them wholly or in part he does not dream of questioning the reality of the divine or heroic personages of whom they were told. Thus, to give instances, while he examines and rejects the claims set up on behalf of various objects to be works of Hephaestus, he admits the genuineness of one of the objects, thereby clearly taking for granted the existence of the smith-god himself. Again, observing an image of Aphrodite with fetters on her feet he tells how, according to one tradition, Tyndareus had put this indignity on the goddess to punish her for bringing his daughters to shame. “This explanation,” declares Pausanias with decision, “I cannot accept for a moment It would have been too silly to imagine that by making a cedar-wood doll and dubbing it Aphrodite he could punish the goddess.” Obviously our author, if he has small reverence for the image and none at all for the tradition of its origin, cherishes an unfaltering faith in the reality of the goddess. Again, he denies that Semele was ever, as Greek tradition would have it, rescued from hell by Dionysus, and the reason he gives for his incredulity is that Semele was the wife of Zeus and therefore could not die. Yet again, after telling the legend of Eurypylus and the wonderful chest in which he kept a portable god, he mentions only to reject the tradition that Eurypylus received the chest from Hercules. “Sure am I,” says he, “that Hercules knew all about the chest, if it really was such a wonderful chest, and I do not believe that knowing about it he would ever have given it away to a comrade in arms.” Once more, Pausanias cannot bring himself to believe that Hercules ever carried his anger at a friend’s daughter so far as to condemn her to remain a spinster for the rest of her days and to serve him in that capacity as his priestess. He opines that while Hercules was still among men, “punishing other people for presumption and especially for impiety, it is not likely that he would have established a temple with a priestess all for himself, just as if he were a god.”

His
scepticism
as to hell.

There is one side, however, of Greek religion as to which Pausanias shows himself consistently sceptical, if not incredulous. He had serious doubts as to the existence of a subterranean hell. “It is not easy,” he says, “to believe that gods have an underground abode in which the souls of the dead assemble.” He speaks of the “supposed subterranean realm” of Pluto, and in the cave at Taenarum, which was thought to be one of the mouths of hell, he looked in vain for any passage leading down to the nether world. Cerberus in particular, the hound of hell, is roughly handled by Pausanias, who ruthlessly strips him of his superfluous heads, reduces him to a commonplace serpent, and seems to take a malicious pleasure in enumerating all the places where the animal was said to have been haled up by Hercules. But though Pausanias had his doubts as to hell, he seems to have believed in the existence of the soul after death; for in a passage which has been already quoted he speaks of the punishment that awaits the wicked in another life. At the same time his belief in the doctrine was apparently not very firm; at least he refers to it somewhat hesitatingly in mentioning the Messenian tradition that the soul of the dead hero Aristomenes had fought against his old foes the Lacedaemonians at Leuctra. “The first people,” he there tells us, “who asserted that the soul of man is immortal were the Chaldeans and the Indian magicians; and some of the Greeks believed them, especially Plato, the son of Aristo. If everybody accepts this tenet, there can be no gainsaying the view that hatred of the Lacedaemonians has rankled in the heart of Aristomenes through all the ages.”

His
attitude to
various
deities.

Amongst the gods Pausanias assigns the first place to Zeus. He alone is superior to Destiny, to which all the other gods must submit; he is the ruler and guide of the Fates, and knows all that they have in store for man. Of the Fates themselves Fortune is, in our author’s opinion, the most powerful; she it is whose resistless might sweeps all things along at her will, determining the growth and decay of cities, the revolutions of nature, and the destiny of man. Yet Pausanias’s own devotions seem to have been paid rather to Demeter than to Zeus or the Fates. He visited Phigalia chiefly for the sake of the Black Demeter to whom he sacrificed at the mouth of the cave; he relates at length the history of her image; and he describes in unusual detail the sanctuary and images of Demeter and Proserpine at Lycosura. Again, he had been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries; he loves to trace their diffusion from Eleusis over the rest of Greece; he speaks of the Andanian mysteries as second in point of sanctity to the Eleusinian alone; he tells us that the Greeks of an earlier age esteemed the latter as far above all other religious exercises as the gods were above heroes; and he expresses his own conviction that there was nothing on which the blessing of God rested in so full a measure as on the rites of Eleusis and the Olympic games. His religious awe of the mysteries, silencing his antiquarian garrulity, forbade him to describe not only the rites but the sacred precincts in which they were celebrated. Once more, on Mount Panhellenius in Aegina he sacrificed to the images of the kindred deities Damia and Auxesia according to the ritual observed in sacrificing at Eleusis. Another deity in whom Pausanias seems to have been especially interested was Aesculapius. He examines the legends of the god’s parentage, discusses his nature, and traces the spread of his worship from Epidaurus. Along with his belief in the gods and in the resistless power of Fate our author apparently cherished a dim faith in a divine providence which watches over the affairs of man. In speaking of the exploits of Theseus in Crete he remarks that “nothing less than the hand of Providence could reasonably be supposed to have brought him and his comrades safe back, guiding him through all the mazy intricacies of the labyrinth, and leading him unseen, when his work was done, through the midst of his enemies.”

His belief
in the
active interference
of
the gods in
human
affairs.

The gods, in the opinion of Pausanias, were neither cold abstractions nor blessed beings who, lapped in the joys of heaven, took no thought for the affairs of earth. They actively interfered in the course of events, rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. They were the givers of good things to men; and if their rewards had been more open and manifest in days of old, the prosperity of the pious Athenians was a standing proof that even in later times the gods had not forgotten to recompense their worshippers. Yet, like most people who lay themselves out to justify the ways of God to man, Pausanias was readier to detect the hand of the deity in the miseries and misfortunes of his fellow-creatures than in their joys and blessings. The confidence with which he lays his finger on the precise misdeed which drew down on a malefactor the wrath of a justly offended god implies an astonishing familiarity with the counsels of the Almighty. He knew that the Persians were defeated at Marathon because they had angered Nemesis by bringing, in the pride of their hearts, a block of marble which they proposed to set up as a trophy of their expected victory; that the destruction of Sparta and Helice by earthquakes was due to the wrath of Poseidon at the violation of his sanctuaries; that the ruin and death of Mithridates had been brought to pass by Apollo, whose sacred island had been sacked by the king’s general; that Sulla’s miserable end was a direct consequence of his guilt in tearing Aristion from the sanctuary of Athena; and that the wrath of the Eleusinian goddesses abode on the Megarians for ever because they had encroached on the sacred land and murdered a herald who warned them to desist. Again, he shrewdly suspects that the long misfortunes of the Messenians flowed directly from the anger of the Dioscuri at the impious presumption of two Messenian youths; and he surmises that gods and heroes combined to wreak their displeasure on the devoted head of Cleomenes, who had tampered with the Delphic oracle, ravaged the sacred Eleusinian land, and burned the grove of the hero Argus. The Delphic Apollo was quick and powerful, according to Pausanias, to defend his honour and to visit with vengeance the sacrilegious persons who dared to assail his sanctuary or rifle his treasures. King Archidamus, who had fingered the sacred moneys, fell in battle in a foreign land and his corpse weltered unburied; the Phlegyans, who made a raid on Delphi, perished by thunderbolts and earthquakes; and it was in all the majesty of thunder, lightning, and earthquake that at a later time the god stood forth to repel the Gauls. Amongst the punishments with which the gods were thought to visit unwarranted intrusions into their sanctuaries, blindness and madness had a special place. King Aepytus, on forcing his way into the shrine of Poseidon at Mantinea, which none might enter, was instantly struck blind and died soon afterwards; some Persian soldiers who ventured into the sanctuary of the Cabiri near Thebes became crazed and in that state put an end to themselves; and it was believed that if any defiled or impious person entered the sanctuary of the Eumenides at Cerynea he would go mad on the spot.

His belief
in oracles.

Believing in the gods, Pausanias naturally believed in their official utterances, the oracles. The Delphic oracle, he thinks, foretold the battle of Leuctra and various episodes in the Messenian wars; and he appeals to one of its answers as conclusive evidence that the mother of Aesculapius was Coronis. He relates how the accidental exposure of the bones of Orpheus was followed by the destruction of the city of Libethra in accordance with a prediction of Dionysus in Thrace, and he narrates the fatal disasters which Epaminondas, Hannibal, and the Athenians incurred by misunderstanding oracular answers sent them from Delphi, Ammon, and Dodona. The history of Macedonia, its rise and its fall, had been predicted by the Sibyl, if we may believe Pausanias, who quotes her prophecy; and he assures us that the inroad of the Gauls into Asia had been foretold by Phaennis a generation before the event took place. He had himself consulted the oracle of Trophonius, and has left us a curious account of the ceremonies observed by enquirers at the shrine. In his day, he informs us, the most infallible oracle was that of Amphilochus at Mallus in Cilicia.

His
criticism of
myths.