Description of Greece

Description of Greece (Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις) is a work by the ancient geographer Pausanias (c. 110 – c. 180).



Pausanias' Description of Greece comprises ten books, each of them dedicated to some part of Greece. His tour begins in Attica (Ἀττικά) and continues with Athens, including its suburbs or demes. Then the work goes with Corinthia (Κορινθιακά), Laconia (Λακωνικά), Messenia (Μεσσηνιακά), Elis (Ἠλιακά), Achaea (Ἀχαϊκά), Arcadia (Ἀρκαδικά), Boeotia (Βοιωτικά), Phocis (Φωκικά), and Ozolian Locris (Λοκρῶν Ὀζόλων). The work more than just described topography: it includes a cultural geography of ancient Greece in which Pausanias not only described architectural and artistic objects, but also reviewed the historical and mythological underpinnings of the culture that created them.

Description
Although the author was not a naturalist by trade, he does tend to comment on the physical aspects of the ancient landscape. Pausanias wrote about the pine trees located on the coast of Ancient Elis, the wild boars and the deer in the oak woods of Seliana (Phelloe), and the crows amid the oak trees in Alalcomenae. Towards the end of Description of Greece, Pausanias touches on the fruits of nature and products, such as the date palms of ancient Aulis, the wild strawberries at Mount Helicon, the olive oil in Tithorea, as well as the "white blackbirds" of Mount Kyllini (Cyllene) and the tortoises of Arcadia.

Additionally, Pausanias was motivated by his interest in religion. His work has been regarded as some kind of "journey into identity", referring to that of the Greek beliefs and heritage. Pausanias describes the religious art and sacred architecture of many famous sites such as Olympia and Delphi. However, even in the most remote Greek regions, he was fascinated by many kinds of holy relics, depictions of deities, and other mysterious and sacred things. For example, at Thebes, Pausanias views the ruins of the house of the poet Pindar, the shields of warriors who died at the famous Battle of Leuctra, the statues of Arion, Hesiod, Orpheus, and Thamyris. He also visited the grove of the Muses on Helicon and saw the portraits of Polybius and of Corinna at Tanagra in Arcadia.

Pausanias was mostly interested in relics of antiquity, rather than contemporary architecture or sacred spaces. As Christian Habicht, a modern day classicist who wrote a multitude of scholarly articles on Pausanias, says: "He definitely prefers the sacred to the profane and the old to the new, and there is much more about classical art of Greece than the about contemporary, more about gods, altars, and temples, than about statues of politicians or public buildings."

The end of Description of Greece remains mysterious: some believe that Pausanias died before finishing his work, and others believe his strange ending was intentional. He concludes his Periegesis with a story about a Greek author, thought to be Anyte of Tegea, who has a divine dream. In the dream, she is told to present the text of Description of Greece to a wider Greek audience in order to open their eyes to "all things Greek".

Reception
Description of Greece left only faint traces in the known Greek corpus. "It was not read", Habicht relates, "there is not a single quotation from it, not even a single mention of the author, not a whisper before the sixth century (Stephanus Byzantius), and only three or two references to it throughout the Middle Ages." Eighteen surviving manuscripts of Pausanias were known in the 1830s, copies from the fifteenth or sixteenth century, with three perhaps older than the rest. They are full of lacunae and errors, and all appear to depend on a single manuscript, now missing, that managed to be copied. Niccolò Niccoli, a collector of manuscripts from antiquity, had this archetype in Florence around 1418. After his death in 1437, it was sent to the library of San Marco, Florence, ultimately disappearing after 1500.

The first printed edition (editio princeps) was printed in 1516 in Venice, by the firm of Aldus Manutius (who had died the previous year). The editor was Marcus Musurus (Μάρκος Μουσοῦρος Markos Mousouros; Marco Musuro; c. 1470 – 1517) from Venetian Crete who had made his career in Italy, and already edited many classic Greek authors.

It was translated into Latin by Romolo Amaseo, printed in Rome in 1547, with a combined Greek and Latin edition from Thomas Fritsch of Leipzig in 1696. An Italian translation followed in 1593 (Mantua by Alfonso Bonacciuoli). A French translation by Nicolas Gédoyn was published in 1731. It was again translated into Latin by Germans, published in 1896.

English translations
Translations into English begin rather late, with Thomas Taylor (London, 1794). A widely known version of the text was translated by William Henry Samuel Jones and is available through the Loeb Classical Library. The translation as Guide to Greece by Peter Levi is popular among English speakers, but is often thought to be a loose translation of the original text: Levi took liberties with his translation that restructured Description of Greece to function like a general guidebook to mainland Greece. Sir James George Frazer also published six volumes of translation and commentary of Description of Greece; his translation remains a credible work of scholarship to readers of Pausanias today.