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

by James George Frazer

Yet while Pausanias accepted on the whole the religion of his country, he was by no means blind to the discrepancies and improbabilities of many Greek myths and legends, and he speaks somewhat disdainfully of the unquestioning faith of the multitude in the stories they had heard from childhood. “Falsehood in general,” he says, “passes current among the multitude because they are ignorant of history and believe all that they have heard from childhood in choirs and tragedies.” And again he observes that “it is not easy to persuade the vulgar to change their opinions.” From the former of these passages it appears that Pausanias was little disposed to place implicit faith in the utterances of the poets on matters of tradition. Elsewhere he intimates his doubts still more plainly. Speaking of the hydra, which he maintains had not more than one head, he says that the poet Pisander multiplied the creature’s heads “to make the monster more terrific, and to add to the dignity of his own verses.” Again, he mentions that the poets have declared certain objects of art to be works of Hephaestus, and that obsequious public opinion has chimed in with them, but he for his part rejects all such relics as spurious save one. The only poet to whose authority he inclined to bow was Homer, whose testimony he often appeals to with respect. He held that many old stories were true enough in their origin, but had fallen into discredit by reason of the distortions and exaggerations to which they had been subjected by the narrators. The particular story which suggests this remark is the legend that Lycaon had been turned into a wolf on sacrificing a babe to Lycaean Zeus. Pausanias believes the legend, but he rejects as incredible the assertion that at every subsequent sacrifice to Zeus on Mount Lycaeus a man had been turned into a wolf, and he does not stick to brand as humbugs the persons who gave out that the Arcadian boxer Damarchus had been so transformed. “Lovers of the marvellous,” he observes, “are too prone to heighten the marvels they hear tell of by adding touches of their own; and thus they debase truth by alloying it with fiction.”

His disbelief
of
certain
myths.

The attitude of incredulity which Pausanias maintained towards many of the current legends is declared by him in the most unequivocal manner. He speaks of “the many falsehoods believed by the Greeks,” and reminds us that though he is bound to record Greek stories he is not bound to believe them, and that as a matter of fact he does not believe them all. The myths of the transformations of gods and men into animals and plants seem especially to have stuck in his throat. He does not believe that Zeus changed himself into a cuckoo to win the love of Hera, and as to the story of the transformation of Cycnus into a swan, he says roundly: “That a man should be turned into a bird is to me incredible.” Nor will he hear of Narcissus’s love for his own reflexion in the glassy pool and his wondrous change into the flower that bore his name. “It is sheer folly,” he remarks, “to suppose that a person who has reached the age of falling in love should be unable to distinguish between a man and his reflexion,” and as for the flower in question he has chapter and verse for it to prove that it grew before Narcissus was born. The companion story of the transformation of Hyacinth into the flower he does not treat quite so cavalierly. “It may not be literally true,” he tells us, “but let it pass.” Further, he cannot believe that the beasts followed Orpheus as he sang, and that the minstrel journeyed down to hell to win back his lost Eurydice. Again, while he believes in giants, he rejects as a silly story the notion that they had serpents instead of feet, and he supports his scepticism by referring to the corpse of one of these monstrous beings which had been found in the bed of the river Orontes enclosed in a coffin eleven ells long. Often, without formally refusing his assent to some tale of wonder, he quietly hints his incredulity by indicating that he leaves his readers to believe it or not as they feel inclined. Thus after telling how pigs thrown into the halls of Demeter at Potniae were supposed to re-appear next year at Dodona, he adds, almost sarcastically: “The tale may possibly find credence with some people.” Other marvels which he dismisses with a sneer are the sowing of the dragon’s teeth by Cadmus and the springing up of armed men; the sprouting of Hercules’s club into a tree when he set it on the ground; the wonderful vision of Lynceus who could see through the trunk of an oak-tree; and the story that at a certain rock in Megara the sad Demeter stood and called back her daughter from the darkling road down which she had vanished.

His rationalistic
interpretation
of some
myths.

It is not always, however, that Pausanias meets seemingly miraculous stories with a blank negation. He had too much good sense to do that. He knew that our experience does not exhaust the possibilities of nature, and he endeavoured accordingly to trim the balance of his judgment between hasty credulity on the one side and rash disbelief on the other. Thus after pointing out that, if the descriptions of the strange creatures of distant lands are false in some particulars, they are true or at least not improbable in others, he concludes: “So careful should we be to avoid hasty judgments on the one hand, and incredulity in matters of rare occurrence on the other.” In his endeavour to winnow the true from the false, to disentangle the ravelled skein of tradition, he has often recourse to that convenient and flexible instrument—rationalistic or allegorical interpretation. We have seen with what ease he thus disencumbered himself of Cerberus’s superfluous heads and reduced that animal from a very extraordinary dog to a very ordinary serpent. The miraculous story of the death of Actaeon, rent in pieces by his hounds at the instigation of Artemis, gives him no trouble: it was a simple case of hydrophobia. Medusa was a beautiful African queen who met Perseus at the head of her troops. Titan was an early astronomer who resided near Sicyon and passed for a brother of the sun for no other reason than that he made observations on that luminary. The fable that Procne and Philomela were turned into a nightingale and a swallow arose merely from a comparison of their mournful cries to the plaintive notes of these birds. In one passage, indeed, under the fierce light of criticism the gods themselves seem on the point of melting away like mist before the sun, leaving behind them nothing but the clear hard face of nature, over which for a while the gorgeous pageantry of their shifting iridescent shapes had floated in a golden haze. The passage occurs in the description of Aegium, where our author fell in with a Phoenician of Sidon with whom he discussed the philosophic basis of the belief in Aesculapius, coming to the conclusion that the god was nothing but the air and his father Apollo nothing but the sun. Had Pausanias followed up this line of thought he might, like Schiller, have seen as in a vision the bright procession of the gods winding up the long slope of Olympus, sometimes pausing to look back sadly at a world where they were needed no more. But the whole tenour of his work goes to show that, if here he had a glimpse of a higher truth, it was only a flash-light that went out leaving him in darkness.

His change
of view as
to myths.

In a later passage he makes a confession of his faith in matters of mythology. After telling the barbarous tale how the cannibal Cronus, intending to devour his infant son Poseidon, had been cozened by Rhea into swallowing a foal, he goes on: “When I began this work I used to look on these Greek stories as little better than foolishness; but now that I have got as far as Arcadia my opinion about them is this: I believe that the Greeks who were accounted wise spoke of old in riddles, and not straight out; and, accordingly, I conjecture that this story about Cronus is a bit of Greek philosophy. In matters of religion I will follow tradition.” This seems to be practically a recantation of earlier, perhaps youthful scepticism. The tales which he had once ridiculed as absurd he now finds to be full of deep, if hidden, wisdom. Meditation and perhaps still more the creeping paralysis of age, which brings so many men to a dull acquiescence in beliefs and practices which they had spurned in youth, appear to have wrought a mental revolution in Pausanias. The scoffer had become devout.

His treatment
of
discrepant
traditions.

Yet to a pious believer the discrepancy between Greek traditions must have been a sore stumbling-block. Pausanias tripped over it again and again. “Greek traditions,” says he, “are generally discrepant.” “The legends of the Greeks differ from each other on most points, especially in the genealogies.” “The old legends, being unencumbered by genealogies, left free scope for fiction, especially in the pedigrees of heroes.” “Most things in Greece are subjects of dispute.” In face of such differences Pausanias, when he does not content himself with simply enumerating the various traditions, chooses to follow either the most generally received version or the one which on any ground appears to him the most probable. With his sober unimaginative temperament and bias to rationalism, it was natural that between conflicting versions of the same tradition he should choose the one which clashed least with experience. Thus he relates the two stories told of the way in which the people of Tanagra acquired the Triton whose stuffed carcase was the glory of the town. One story ran that the creature had been slain by Dionysus himself in single combat; according to the other, a common mortal had found the Triton lying drunk on the beach and had chopped off his head with an axe. The latter version of the tale is described by Pausanias as “less dignified but more probable.” Tritons, it is true, whether drunk or sober, are not common objects of the sea-shore; but there was no need to heighten the marvel by lugging in Dionysus. Again, the death of Aristodemus, the ancestor of the two royal houses of Sparta, was variously narrated. “Those who wish to invest him with a halo of glory,” writes Pausanias, “say that he was shot by Apollo”; but the truer story was that he had been knocked on the head by the children of Pylades. Again, he regards with suspicion the claims of men and women to be the husbands and wives, the sons and daughters of gods and goddesses. “The Moon, they say, loved Endymion, and he had fifty daughters by the goddess. Others, with more probability, say that Endymion married a wife.” “Cadmus made a distinguished marriage if he really married, as the Greeks say he did, a daughter of Aphrodite and Ares.” Then as to reputed sons of gods. “That Corinthus was a son of Zeus has never yet, so far as I know, been seriously asserted by anybody except by a majority of the Corinthians themselves.” Oenomaus was a son of Alexion, “though the poets have given out that he was a son of Ares.” The father of Augeas was Eleus, “though those who magnify his history give the name of Eleus a twist, and affirm that Augeas was a son of the sun.” The crafty Autolycus “was reputed to be a son of Hermes, though in truth his father was Daedalion.” The story that Orpheus had the Muse Calliope for his mother is stigmatised by our author as a falsehood. Rivers that appeared in the character of fathers were also viewed by Pausanias with distrust. He held that the father of Eteocles was Andreus, not the river Cephisus; and he believed that the father of Plataea was not the river Asopus but a king of the same name. Other instances of his hesitation to accept legends of divine parentage might be cited.

His
application
of historical
methods to
Greek
traditions.