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

by James George Frazer

The Enneacrunus
episode.

More famous than either of these difficulties is one which occurs in Pausanias’s account of Athens. Here in the middle of describing the market-place, which lay to the north-west of the Acropolis, he suddenly without a word of warning transports the reader to the Enneacrunus fountain, which lay in the bed of the Ilissus, not far from the Olympieum, at the opposite extremity of the city; then, having despatched the fountain and some buildings in its neighbourhood, he whirls the reader back to the market-place, and proceeds with his description of it as if nothing had happened. Of the many attempts to clear up this mystery, as by supposing either a dislocation of the text or a confusion in the author’s notes or the existence of another fountain near the market-place which may have been shown to him as the Enneacrunus, none is free from serious difficulties. That he fell into error through copying blindly and unintelligently from a book is possible but very improbable. As it is practically certain that he visited Athens and saw both the market-place and the Olympieum, the chances that he should not have seen the Enneacrunus and should therefore have been driven to borrow his description of it from a book are so small that they may be neglected.

Law-courts
at Athens
and altars
at Olympia.

Other passages which Pausanias may perhaps have taken either wholly or in part from books are his account of the Athenian law-courts and his list of the altars at Olympia. Neither of these passages, it is true, is demonstrably infected by error or confusion, though there is some ground for suspecting the existence of confusion in the enumeration of the altars. But in both of them the author departs from the topographical order of description, which is so characteristic of his method, and arranges the monuments together simply on the ground of their belonging to the same class. These departures from his usual principle of order suggest that in both cases Pausanias may have borrowed from written documents in which the monuments were grouped together according to kind rather than in topographical order. Another set of monuments which Pausanias links together by a chain other than the topographical are the buildings erected by Hadrian in Athens. It is possible that he may have taken his list of them from the inscription in the Athenian Pantheon which recorded them all.

These are perhaps the most notable passages in Pausanias, which might be thought to bear traces of having been derived either wholly or in part from written documents rather than from personal observation. In none of them are the indications so clear as to amount to a proof of borrowing. At most they raise a probability of it, nothing more.

Predecessors
of
Pausanias.

It would be neither surprising nor unnatural if in writing his Description of Greece Pausanias not only consulted, as we know he did, but borrowed from the works of previous writers on the same subject. Any one who undertakes to write a guide-book to a country may legitimately borrow from his predecessors, provided he has taken the trouble to ascertain for himself that their descriptions are still applicable to the country at the time he is writing. Pausanias in his character of the Camden of ancient Greece had many predecessors whose writings he may and indeed ought to have consulted. But of their works only the titles and a few fragments have come down to us, and these contain nothing to show that Pausanias copied or had even read them. The most considerable of the fragments—those which pass under the name of Dicaearchus the Messenian—have been already examined, and we have seen how different in scope and style was the work to which they belonged from that which Pausanias has left us. No one would dream of maintaining that Pausanias copied his description of Greece from the pseudo-Dicaearchus. The most famous of the antiquaries who preceded Pausanias seem to have been Diodorus, Polemo, and Heliodorus, all of whom earned by their writings the title of The Periegete or Cicerone. |Diodorus.| Of these the earliest was Diodorus, who is not to be confounded with the Sicilian historian of that name. He published works on the tombs and townships of Attica, of which a few fragments survive. |Heliodorus.| They seem to have been composed before 308 B.C. Heliodorus lived in the reign of Ptolemy Epiphanes and wrote a work on the Acropolis of Athens in no less than fifteen books, of which only a few brief fragments have come down to us. There is some reason to think that Pausanias cannot have consulted it. |Polemo.| Polemo of Ilium flourished in the first part of the second century B.C., and was the author of many special treatises on the monuments of Greece. Amongst them were works on the Acropolis of Athens, on the eponymous heroes of the Attic townships and tribes, on the Sacred Way, on the Painted Colonnade at Sicyon, on the votive offerings at Lacedaemon, on the founding of the cities of Phocis, on the treasuries at Delphi, and many more. More than a hundred extracts from or references to his works have come down to us; and if we may judge from them, from the number and variety of the treatises he published, and from the praise of Plutarch we shall be inclined to pronounce Polemo the most learned of all Greek antiquaries. His acquaintance both with the monuments and with the literature seems to have been extensive and profound. The attention which he bestowed on inscriptions earned for him the nickname of the ‘monument-tapper.’ His works were certainly extant later than the time of Pausanias, since they are freely quoted by Athenaeus. It would, therefore, be strange if Pausanias did not study them, dealing as many of them did with the same subjects on which he touched in his Description of Greece. Yet the existing fragments of Polemo hardly justify us in supposing that Pausanias was acquainted with the writings of his learned predecessor. Certainly they lend no countenance to the view that he borrowed descriptions of places and monuments from them. This will appear from an examination of those fragments of Polemo which deal with subjects falling within the scope of Pausanias’s work. We shall look, first, at the things mentioned by both writers, and, second, at the things mentioned by Polemo alone. The fragments are numbered as in the editions of L. Preller and Ch. Müller, to which the reader is referred for the Greek text.

First, then, let us take the things mentioned by both Polemo and Pausanias.

Polemo
and
Pausanias
compared.

Fragment ii. In his description of the Acropolis at Athens, Polemo mentioned a sculptor Lycius, son of Myron. So does Pausanias in his description of the Acropolis.