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

by James George Frazer

He perhaps
modelled
his style on
that of
Hegesias.

This union of seemingly opposite faults, this plainness without simplicity, this elaboration without richness, may perhaps be best explained by Boeckh’s hypothesis, that he modelled his style on that of his countryman Hegesias of Magnesia, a leader of the Asiatic school of rhetoric, who, aping the unadorned simplicity of Lysias’s manner, fell into an abrupt and jerky, yet affected and mincing style, laboriously chopping and dislocating his sentences so that they never ran smooth, never by any chance slid into a rounded period with an easy cadence. Dionysius of Halicarnassus declares peevishly that in all the voluminous works of Hegesias there was not a single well-written page, and that the man must have gone wrong not from stupidity but of set purpose and malice prepense, otherwise he could not have helped writing a good sentence now and then by accident. Frigid conceits and a puerile play upon words were mistaken by this perverse writer for literary beauties, and in the effort to stud his pages with these false jewels he sacrificed both pathos and truth. In this respect, indeed, Pausanias happily did not follow the bad example of his predecessor. His writings are entirely free from paltry conceits and verbal quibbles. The thought is always manly and direct, however tortuous may be the sentence in which he seeks to express it. If he imitated Hegesias, it was apparently in the arrangement of the words and sentences alone.

Whatever may be thought of this theory, the attention which Pausanias obviously bestowed on literary style is in itself wholly laudable. Such attention is a simple duty which every author owes to his readers. Pausanias cannot be blamed for trying to write well; the pity is that with all his pains he did not write better. He was anxious not to be needlessly tedious, not to inflict on the reader mere bald lists of monuments strung together on a topographical thread. He aimed at varying the phraseology, at shunning the eternal repetition of the same words in the same order. Yet he steered clear of one shoal only to run aground on another. If to some extent he avoided monotony and attained variety of expression, it was too often at the cost of simplicity and clearness. The natural order of the words was sacrificed and a crabbed contorted one substituted for it merely in order to vary the run of the sentences. For the same reason a direct statement was often discarded in favour of an indirect one, with the result that a reader who happens to be unfamiliar with the author’s manner is sometimes at a loss as to his meaning. For example, it has been questioned whether he means that there was a statue of Aeschylus in the theatre at Athens and one of Oenobius on the Acropolis. Yet any person conversant with his style must feel sure that in both these cases Pausanias intends to intimate the existence of the statue, and that if he does not affirm it in so many words this is due to no other cause than a wish to turn the sentence in another way. Similar instances could easily be multiplied. The ambiguity which so often arises from this indirect mode of statement is one of the many blots on the style of Pausanias. Such as it is, his style is seen at its best in some of the longer historical passages, notably in the spirited narratives of the Messenian wars and the Gallic invasion. Here he occasionally rises to a fair level of literary merit, as for example in describing the evil omens that preceded and hastened the death of the patriot king Aristodemus, and again in relating the impious attack of the Gauls on Delphi and their overwhelming repulse. Through the latter narrative there runs, like a strain of solemn music, an undertone of religious faith and fervour which greatly heightens the effect.

Pausanias’s
use of
previous
writers.

In these and similar historical episodes we must allow something for the influence on Pausanias’s style of the literary authorities whom he followed. The warmer tinge of the descriptions, the easier flow of the sentences may not be wholly due to the ardour of the writer’s piety, to the swell of his patriotic feelings. Something of the movement, the glow, the solemn strain, the martial fire may have been caught by him from better models. This brings us to the enquiry, What books did Pausanias use in writing his own? and how did he use them? Unfortunately we are not and probably never shall be in a position to answer these questions fully. Like most ancient writers Pausanias is sparing in the citation of his authorities, and it is clear that he must have consulted books of which he makes no mention. And when to this we add that the works of most of the writers whom he does cite have perished or survive only in a few disjointed fragments, it becomes clear that any hope of acquiring a complete knowledge of his literary sources and mode of using them must be abandoned. Many attempts have been made of late years to identify the lost books consulted by Pausanias; but from the nature of the case it is plain that such attempts must be fruitless. One of them will be noticed presently. Meantime all that I propose to do is to indicate some of the chief literary and documentary sources which Pausanias expressly cites, and to illustrate by examples his method of dealing with them.

Distinction
between
the historical
and
descriptive
parts of
Pausanias’s
work.

Before doing so it is desirable to point out explicitly a distinction which, though obvious in itself, has apparently been overlooked or slurred over by some of Pausanias’s critics. The matter of his work is of two sorts, historical and descriptive: the one deals with events in the past, the other with things existing in the present. For his knowledge of past events, except in so far as they fell within his own lifetime and observation, Pausanias was necessarily dependent either on written documents or on oral testimony, in short on the evidence of others; no other source of information was open to him. For his knowledge of things existing in the present, on the other hand, he need not have been indebted to the evidence of others, he may have seen them for himself. It does not, of course, follow that what he may have seen he did actually see. His descriptions of places and things, like his narratives of events that happened before his time, may all have been taken from books or from the mouths of other people; only it is not, as in the case of the historical narratives, absolutely necessary that they should be so derived. This distinction is so elementary and obvious that to call attention to it may be deemed superfluous. Yet some of the critics appear to labour under an impression that, if they can show the historical parts of Pausanias’s work to have been taken from books, they have raised a presumption that the descriptive or topographical parts were also so taken. They do not, indeed, put so crass a misapprehension into words, but they seem to be influenced by it. To brush away these mental cobwebs it is only needful to realise clearly that, though Pausanias certainly could not have witnessed events which happened before he was born, he was not therefore necessarily debarred from seeing things which existed in his own lifetime. In investigating the sources of his information it is desirable to keep the historical and the descriptive parts of his work quite distinct from each other and to enquire into each of them separately.

Poets
used by
Pausanias.

To begin with the historical, in the widest sense of the word, we find that Pausanias drew his accounts of the mythical and heroic ages in large measure from the poets. Homer is his chief poetical authority, but he also makes use of the later epics such as the Cypria, the Eoeae, the Little Iliad, the Minyad, the Naupactia, the Oedipodia, the Returns (Nostoi), the Sack of Ilium by Lesches, the Thebaid, and the Thesprotis. Of these the Thebaid was esteemed by him next to the Iliad and Odyssey. On questions of genealogy he often cites the early poets Asius and Cinaethon. Among the works attributed to Hesiod he frequently refers to the Theogony and the Catalogue of Women, and he once quotes the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. That he knew the Alexandrian poet Euphorion of Chalcis is shown by two references to his writings. The most ancient Greek hymns in his opinion were those of Olen; he cites several of them. Again, the testimony of Pamphos, author of the oldest Athenian hymns, is often appealed to by Pausanias. Among the lyric poets whose works he knew, such as Alcaeus, Alcman, Archilochus, Pindar, Sappho, and Stesichorus, he appears to have ranked Pindar first; at least he refers to his poems far oftener than to those of the others. Among the elegiac poets he quotes Tyrtaeus and Simonides. With the great tragic and comic poets he shows but little acquaintance; Aeschylus is the only one whose authority he appeals to repeatedly. He refers once to the testimony of Sophocles, but only to reject it; once to that of Aristophanes; never to that of Euripides. On the other hand, he seems to have devoted a good deal of attention to the critical study of the older poets. He had investigated the dates of Homer and Hesiod and the question of Homer’s native country. Nor did he neglect to enquire into the genuineness of many poems that passed under famous names. He tells admiringly how a contemporary of his own, Arrhiphon of Triconium, detected the spuriousness of certain verses attributed to an old Argive poet Philammon, by pointing out that the verses were in the Doric dialect which had not yet been introduced into Argolis in Philammon’s time. Among the works ascribed to Musaeus he held that nothing was genuine except the hymn to Demeter composed for the Lycomids; some of the verses which passed under the name of Musaeus he set down as forgeries of Onomacritus. The hymns of Orpheus were ranked by him next to those of Homer for poetical beauty, but he saw that some of the verses attributed to Orpheus were spurious. He had grave doubts as to the Theogony being a genuine work of Hesiod; and he informs us that the reading of a poem fathered on Linus sufficed to convince him of its spuriousness. Of the works which circulated under the name of the early Corinthian poet Eumelus one only, he tells us, was held to be genuine. He could not believe that Anaximenes had written a certain epic on Alexander the Great. As to the epic called the Thebaid, which he admired, he reports the view of Callinus that the author was Homer, adding that “many respectable persons have shared his opinion.”

Historians
used by
Pausanias.