His noticesof thenaturalproductsof Greece.
It is one of the marks of a widening intellectual horizon that as his work goes on Pausanias takes more and more notice of the aspect and natural products of the country which he describes. Such notices are least frequent in the first book and commonest in the last three. Thus he remarks the bareness of the Cirrhaean plain, the fertility of the valley of the Phocian Cephisus, the vineyards of Ambrosus, the palms and dates of Aulis, the olive-oil of Tithorea that was sent to the emperor, the dykes that dammed off the water from the fields in the marshy flats of Caphyae and Thisbe. He mentions the various kindsof oaks that grew in the Arcadian woods, the wild-strawberry bushes of Mount Helicon on which the goats browsed, the hellebore, both black and white, of Anticyra, and the berry of Ambrosus which yielded the crimson dye. He observed the flocks of bustards that haunted the banks of the Phocian Cephisus, the huge tortoises that crawled in the forests of Arcadia, the white blackbirds of Mount Cyllene, the two sorts of poultry at Tanagra, the purple shell fished in the sea at Bulis, the trout of the Aroanius river, and the eels of the Copaic Lake. All these instances are taken from the last three books. In the earlier part of his work he condescended to mention the honey of Hymettus, the old silver mines of Laurium, the olives of Cynuria, the fine flax of Elis, the purple shell of the Laconian coast, the marble of Pentelicus, the mussel-stone of Megara, and the green porphyry of Croceae. But of the rich Messenian plain, known in antiquity as the Happy Land, where nowadays the traveller passes, almost as in a tropical region, between orange-groves and vineyards fenced by hedges of huge fantastic cactuses and sword-like aloes, Pausanias has nothing more to say than that “the Pamisus flows through tilled land.”
Hisaccount ofthe state ofthe roads.
On the state of the roads he is still more reticent than on that of the country. The dreadful Scironian road—theVia MalaofGreece—which ran along a perilous ledge of the Megarian sea-cliffs at a giddy height above the breakers, had lately been widened by Hadrian. An excellent carriage road, much frequented, led from Tegea to Argos. Another road, traversable by vehicles, went over the pass of the Tretus, where the railway from Corinth to Argos now runs; and we have the word of Pausanias for it that a driving-road crossed Parnassus from Delphi to Tithorea. On the other hand the road from Sicyon to Titane was impassable for carriages; a rough hill-track led from Chaeronea to Stiris; the path along the rugged mountainous coast between Lerna and Thyrea was then, as it is now, narrow and difficult; and the pass of the Ladder over Mount Artemisius from Argos to Mantinea was so steep that in some places steps had to be cut in the rock to facilitate the descent. Of the path up to the Corycian cave on Mount Parnassus our author truly observes that it is easier for a man on foot than for mules and horses. Greek mules and horses can, indeed, do wonders in the way of scrambling up and down the most execrable mountain paths on slopes that resemble the roof of a house; but it would sorely tax even their energies to ascend to the Corycian cave.
The real interest of Pausanias, however, lay neither in the country nor in the people of his|Hisdescriptionsofthe monuments.|own age, but in those monuments of the past, which, though too often injured by time or defaced by violence, he still found scattered in profusion over Greece. It is to a description of them that the greater part of his work is devoted. He did not profess to catalogue, still less to describe, them all. To do so might well have exceeded the powers of any man, however great his patience and industry. All that a writer could reasonably hope to accomplish was to make a choice of the most interesting monuments, to describe them clearly, and to furnish such comments as were needful to understanding them properly. This is what Pausanias attempted to do and what, after every deduction has been made for omissions and mistakes, he may fairly be said to have done well. The choice of the monuments to be described necessarily rested with himself, and if his choice was sometimes different from what ours might have been, it would be unreasonable to blame him for it. He did not write for us. No man in his sober senses ever did write for readers who were to be born some seventeen hundred years after he was in his grave. In his wildest dreams of fame Pausanias can hardly have hoped, perhaps under all the circumstances we ought rather to say feared, that his book would be read, long after the Roman empire had passed away, by the peoplewhom he calls the most numerous and warlike barbarians in Europe,[1]by the Britons in their distant isle, and by the inhabitants of a new world across the Atlantic.
1. “Antoninus the Second,” he tells us (viii. 43. 6), “inflicted punishment on the Germans, the most numerous and warlike barbarians in Europe.”
1. “Antoninus the Second,” he tells us (viii. 43. 6), “inflicted punishment on the Germans, the most numerous and warlike barbarians in Europe.”
His preferencefor theolder overthe laterart.
When we examine Pausanias’s choice of monuments we find that, like his account of the country and people, it was mainly determined by two leading principles, his antiquarian tastes and his religious curiosity. In the first place, the monuments described are generally ancient, not modern; in the second place, they are for the most part religious, not profane. His preference for old over modern art, for works of the fifth and fourth centuriesB.C.over those of the later period, was well founded and has been shared by the best judges both in ancient and modern times. Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Quintilian, and our author’s own contemporary, Lucian, perhaps the most refined critic of art in antiquity, mention no artist of later date than the fourth centuryB.C.The truth is, the subjugation of Greece by Macedonia struck a fatal blow at Greek art. No sculptor or painter of the first rank was born after the conquest. It seemed as if art were a flower that could only bloom in freedom; in the air of slavery it drooped and faded.Thus if Pausanias chose to chronicle the masterpieces of the great age of art rather than the feebler productions of the decadence, we can only applaud his taste. Yet we may surmise that his taste was here reinforced by his patriotism. For he was more than a mere antiquary and connoisseur. He was a patriot who warmly sympathised with the ancient glories of his country and deeply mourned its decline. He recognised Athens as the representative of all that was best in Greek life, and he can hardly find words strong enough to express his detestation of the men who by weakening her in the Peloponnesian war directly prepared for the conquest of Greece by Macedonia. The battle of Chaeronea he describes repeatedly as a disaster for the whole of Greece, and of the conqueror Philip himself he speaks in terms of the strongest reprobation. The men who had repelled the Persians, put down the military despotism of Sparta, fought against the Macedonians, and delayed, if they could not avert, the final subjugation of Greece by Rome were for him the benefactors of their country. He gives a list of them, beginning with Miltiades and ending with Philopoemen, after whom, he says, Greece ceased to be the mother of the brave. And as he mentions with pride and gratitude the men who had served the cause of freedom, so he expresseshimself with disgust and abhorrence of the men who had worked for the enslavement of Greece to Persia, to Macedonia, and to Rome. His style, generally cold and colourless, grows warm and animated when he tells of a struggle for freedom, whether waged by the Messenians against the Spartans, or by the Greeks against the Gauls, or by the Achaeans against the Romans. And when he has recorded the final catastrophe, the conquest of Greece by Rome, he remarks as with a sigh that the nation had now reached its lowest depth of weakness, and that when Nero afterwards liberated it the boon came too late—the Greeks had forgotten what it was to be free.
His preferenceforreligiousover profaneart.
The preference which Pausanias exhibits for the art of the best period is not more marked than his preference for sacred over profane or merely decorative art, for buildings consecrated to religion over buildings devoted to the purposes of civic or private life. Rarely does he offer any general remarks on the aspect and architectural style of the cities he describes. At Tanagra he praises the complete separation of the houses of the people from the sanctuaries of the gods. Amphissa, he tells us, was handsomely built, and Lebadea could compare with the most flourishing cities of Greece in style and splendour. On the other hand he viewed with unconcealed disdain the squalor and decayof the Phocian city of Panopeus, “if city it can be called that has no government offices, no gymnasium, no theatre, no market-place, no water conducted to a fountain, and where the people live in hovels, just like highland shanties, perched on the edge of a ravine.” In the cities he visited he does indeed notice market-places, colonnades, courts of justice, government offices, fountains, baths, and the houses and statues of famous men, but the number of such buildings and monuments in his pages is small compared to the number of temples and precincts, images and votive offerings that he describes, and such notice as he takes of them seldom amounts to more than a bare mention. The civic buildings that he deigns to describe in any detail are very few. Amongst them we may note the Painted Colonnade at Athens with its famous pictures, the spacious and splendid Persian Colonnade at Sparta with its columns of white marble carved in the shape of Persian captives, the market-place at Elis, and the Phocian parliament-house with its double row of columns running down the whole length of the hall and its seats rising in tiers from the columns up to the walls behind.
Hisdescriptions ofreligiousmonuments.
It is when he comes to religious art and architecture that Pausanias seems to have felt himself most at home. If in his notice of civic buildings and monuments he is chary of details,he is lavish of them in describing the temples and sanctuaries with their store of images, altars, and offerings. The most elaborate of his descriptions are those which he has given of the temple of Zeus at Olympia with the great image of the god by Phidias, the scenes on the Chest of Cypselus in the Heraeum at Olympia, the reliefs on the throne of Apollo at Amyclae, and the paintings by Polygnotus in the Cnidian Lesche at Delphi. But, apart from these conspicuous examples; almost every page of his work bears witness to his interest in the monuments of religion, especially when they were more than usually old and quaint. Among the queer images he describes are the thirty square stones revered as gods at Pharae; the rough stones worshipped as images of Love and Hercules and the Graces at Thespiae, Hyettus, and Orchomenus; the pyramidal stone which represented Apollo at Megara; the ancient wooden image of Zeus with three eyes on the acropolis of Argos; the old idol of Demeter as a woman with a horse’s head holding a dove in one hand and a dolphin in the other; the figure of a mermaid bound fast with golden chains in a wild wood at the meeting of two glens; the image of the War God at Sparta in fetters to hinder him from running away; the bronze likeness of an unquiet ghost clamped with iron to a rock to keep him still;an image of Athena with a purple bandage on her wounded thigh; a pair of wooden idols of Dionysus with shining gilt bodies and red faces; and tiny bronze images of Castor and Pollux, a foot high, on a rocky islet over which the sea broke foaming in winter, but could not wash them away. Some of the images he describes as tricked out with offerings of devout worshippers. Such were an image of Pasiphae covered with garlands; a figure of Hermes swathed in myrtle boughs; a crimson-painted idol of Dionysus emerging from a heap of laurel leaves and ivy; and a statue of Health almost hidden under tresses of women’s hair and strips of Babylonish raiment in the shade of ancient cypresses at Titane. Among the appointments of the sanctuaries he mentions, for example, altars made of the ashes or blood of the victims, perpetual fires, a golden lamp that burned day and night in the Erechtheum, a gilt head of the Gorgon on the wall of the Acropolis, a purple curtain in the temple of Zeus, a golden and jewelled peacock dedicated by Hadrian to Hera, the iron stand of Alyattes’s bowl, chains of liberated prisoners, hanging from the cypresses in the grove of Hebe, and bronze railings round the shaft down which the enquirer, clad in a peculiar costume, descended by a ladder to consult the oracle of Trophonius.
Hisinterest inrelics.
Again, Pausanias loves to notice the things, whether worshipped or not, which were treasured as relics of a mythical or legendary past. Such were the remains of the clay out of which Prometheus had moulded the first man and woman; the stone that Cronus had swallowed instead of his infant son; the remains of the wild-strawberry tree under which Hermes had been nourished; the egg which the lovely Leda had laid and out of which Castor and Pollux had been hatched; the ruins of the bridal chamber where Zeus had dallied with Semele; the mouldering hide of the Calydonian boar; and the old wooden pillar, held together by bands and protected from the weather by a shed, which had stood in the house of Oenomaus. In the temple of Artemis at Aulis, now represented by a ruined Byzantine chapel in a bare stony field, the traveller was shown the remains of the plane-tree under which the Greeks had sacrificed before setting sail for Troy, and on a neighbouring hill the guides pointed out the bronze threshold of Agamemnon’s hut. But the most revered of all the relics described by Pausanias seems to have been the sceptre which Hephaestus was said to have made and Agamemnon to have wielded. It was kept and worshipped at Chaeronea. A priest who held office for a year guarded the precious relic in his house and offered sacrifices to it daily,while a table covered with flesh and cakes stood constantly beside it. A ruder conception of religion than is revealed by this practice of adoring and feeding a staff it might be hard to discover amongst the lowest fetish-worshippers of Western Africa. And this practice was carried on in the native city and in the lifetime of the enlightened Plutarch! Truly the extremes of human nature sometimes jostle each other in the street.
His noticesof historicmonuments.
But his religious bias by no means so warped the mind of Pausanias as to render him indifferent to the historic ground which he trod, and to those monuments of great men and memorable events on which his eye must have fallen at almost every turn. As a scholar he was versed in, and as a patriot he was proud of, the memories which these monuments were destined to perpetuate, and which in the genius of the Greek people have found a monument more lasting than any of bronze or marble. He visited the battlefields of Marathon and Plataea and beheld the trophies of victory and the graves of the victors. At Salamis he saw the trophy of the great sea-fight, but he mentions no graves. Doubtless the bones of many victors and vanquished lay together fathoms deep in the bay. At Chaeronea he saw a sadder monument, the colossal stone lion on the grave of the Thebans who had fallen inthe cause of freedom. On the battlefield of Mantinea he found the grave of Epaminondas, at Sparta the grave of Leonidas, and among the pine-woods of the sacred isle that looks across the blue Saronic gulf to Attica the grave of the banished Demosthenes. At Thebes he saw the ruins of Pindar’s house, the shields of the Lacedaemonian officers who fell at Leuctra, and the figures of white marble which Thrasybulus and his comrades in exile and in arms had dedicated out of gratitude for Theban hospitality. In the Grove of the Muses on Helicon he beheld the statues of renowned poets and musicians—Hesiod with his lute, Arion on his dolphin, blind Thamyris, Orpheus holding the beasts spellbound as he sang. At Tanagra he observed the portrait and the tomb of the poetess Corinna, the rival of Pindar; and in several cities of Arcadia he remarked portraits of the Arcadian historian Polybius.
Nowhere, however, did he find historical monuments crowded so closely together as at Athens, Olympia, and Delphi. The great sanctuaries of Olympia and Delphi served in a manner as the national museums and record-offices of Greece. In them the various Greek cities not only of the mother-country but of Italy, Sicily, Gaul, and the East set up the trophies of their victories and deposited copies of treaties and other important documents.|HistoricmonumentsatOlympia.|They offered a neutral ground where natives of jealous or hostile states could meet in peace, and where they could survey, with hearts that swelled with various emotions, the records of their country’s triumphs and defeats. At Olympia our author mentions a tablet inscribed with a treaty of alliance for a hundred years between Elis, Athens, Argos, and Mantinea; another tablet recording a treaty of peace for thirty years between Athens and Sparta; and the quoit of Iphitus inscribed with the terms of the truce of God which was proclaimed at the Olympic festival. Amongst the many trophies of war which he enumerates the most memorable was the image of Zeus dedicated in common by the Greeks who had fought at Plataea, and the most conspicuous, unless we except the figure of Victory on the pillar dedicated by the Messenians of Naupactus, must have been the colossal bronze statue of Zeus, no less than twenty-seven feet high, which the Eleans set up for a victory over the Arcadians. A golden shield, hung high on the eastern gable of the temple of Zeus, proclaimed the triumph of the Lacedaemonian arms at Tanagra. The sight of one-and-twenty gilded shields that glittered on the eastern and southern sides of the temple must have cost Pausanias a pang, for they had been dedicated by the Roman general Mummius to commemorate theconquest of Greece. Another monument that doubtless vexed the patriotic heart of Pausanias was an elegant rotunda with slim Ionic columns resting on marble steps and supporting a marble roof; for the statues which it enclosed, resplendent in gold and ivory, were those of Philip and Alexander, and the building stood as a memorial of the battle of Chaeronea.
HistoricmonumentsatDelphi.
At Delphi the road which wound up the steep slope to the temple of Apollo was lined on both sides with an unbroken succession of monuments which illustrated some of the brightest triumphs and darkest tragedies in Greekhistory.history.Here the proud trophy of the Lacedaemonian victory at Aegospotami, with its rows of statues rising in tiers, confronted the more modest trophy erected by the Athenians for the victory of Marathon. Here were statues set up by the Argives for the share they had taken with the Thebans in founding Messene. Here was a treasury dedicated by the Athenians out of the spoils of Marathon, and another dedicated by the Thebans out of the spoils of Leuctra. Here another treasury, built by the Syracusans, commemorated the disastrous defeat of the Athenians in Sicily. A bronze palm-tree and a gilded image of Athena stood here as memorials of Athenian valour by sea and land at the Eurymedon. Here, above all, were monuments of the victories achieved by theunited Greeks over the Persians at Artemisium, Salamis, and Plataea. The golden tripod, indeed, which formed the trophy of Plataea, had disappeared long before Pausanias passed up the Sacred Way, its empty place testifying silently to the rapacity of the Phocian leaders; but the bronze serpent which had supported it still stood erect, with the names of the states that had taken part in the battle inscribed on its coils. A prodigious image of Apollo, five-and-thirty ells high, towering above the other monuments, proclaimed at once the enormity of the crime which the Phocians had committed and the magnitude of the fine by which they had expiated it. High and conspicuous too, on the architrave of the temple, hung the shields which told of one of the latest triumphs of the Greek arms, the repulse and defeat of the Gauls. All these and many more historical monuments Pausanias saw and described at Delphi.
HistoricmonumentsatAthens.
At Athens among the portraits of famous men that attracted his attention were statues of the statesmen Solon, Pericles, and Lycurgus, the generals Conon, Timotheus, and Iphicrates, the orators Demosthenes and Isocrates, the philosopher Chrysippus, and the poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Menander. In the Prytaneum were preserved copies of the laws of Solon. The colonnades that flanked themarket-place were adorned with pictures of the battles of Marathon, Oenoe, and Mantinea, and in one of them—the celebrated Painted Colonnade—our author observed bronze shields, smeared with pitch to preserve them from rust, which had been taken from the Spartans at Sphacteria. On the Acropolis stood, as a trophy of the Persian wars, the immense bronze statue of Athena, of which the blade of the spear and the crest of the helmet could be seen far off at sea. Close at hand in the Erechtheum the traveller was shown the sword of Mardonius and the corselet of Masistius, who had fallen while leading the Persian cavalry to the charge at Plataea. In Piraeus he saw the sanctuary of Aphrodite which Conon had built after vanquishing the Lacedaemonian fleet off Cnidus, and at the entrance to the great harbour, in view of the ships sailing out and in, the grave of Themistocles who had won for Athens the empire of the sea. But no place in Greece was richer in monuments of the historic past, none seems to have stirred Pausanias more deeply than that memorable spot outside the walls of Athens where, within the narrow compass of a single graveyard, were gathered the mortal remains of so much valour and genius. Here lay not a few of the illustrious men who by their counsels, their swords, or their pens had made Athens great and famous, and hitherthe ashes of humbler citizens, who had died for their country, were brought from distant battlefields to rest in Attic earth. His description of this the national burying-ground of Athens has not, indeed, the pensive grace of Addison’s essay on the tombs in the Abbey. It is little more than a bare list of the names he read on the monuments, but there almost every name was a history as full of proud or mournful memories as the names carved on the tombs in Westminster and St. Paul’s or stitched on the tattered and blackened banners that droop from the walls of our churches. The annals of Athens were written on these stones—the story of her restless and aspiring activity, her triumphs in art, in eloquence, in arms, her brief noon of glory, and her long twilight of decrepitude and decay. No wonder that our traveller paused amid monuments which seemed, in the gathering night of barbarism, to catch and reflect some beams of the bright day that was over, like the purple light that lingers on the slopes of Hymettus when the sun has set on Athens.
His digressionsonnaturalcuriosities.
To relieve the tedium of the topographical part of his work, Pausanias has introduced digressions on the wonders of nature and of foreign lands. Thus, for example, having mentioned the destruction of Helice by an earthquake, he describes the ominous signs whichherald the approach of a great earthquake—the heavy rains or long droughts, in winter the sultry weather, in summer the haze through which the sun’s disc looms red and lurid, the sudden gusts, the springs of water drying up, the rumbling noises underground. Further, he analyses the different kinds of shocks, determines the nature of the one which destroyed Helice, and describes the immense wave which simultaneously advanced on the doomed city from the sea. He refers to the ebb and flow of the ocean, to the ice-bound sea and frozen deserts of the north, to the southern land where the sun casts no shadow at midsummer. He tells how the Chinese rear the silkworm, and describes both silk and the silkworm more correctly than any writer who preceded and than some who followed him. It has been suggested that he derived his information, directly or indirectly, from a member of the Roman embassy which appears from the evidence of Chinese historians to have been sent by the emperor Marcus Antoninus to the far East and to have reached the court of China in October 166A.D.Again, he describes the Sarmatians of northern Europe leading a nomadic life in the depths of their virgin forests, subsisting by their mares, ignorant of iron, clad in corselets made of horse-hoofs, shooting arrows barbed with bone from bowsof the cornel-tree, and entangling their foes in the coils of their lassoes.
Among the curiosities which seem to have especially interested him were the huge bones he met with in various places. Generally he took them to be bones of giants, but one of them he described more happily as that of a sea-monster. Probably they were all bones of mammoths or other large extinct animals, such as have been found plentifully in modern times in various parts of Greece, for example near Megalopolis, where he saw some of them. Again, he is particularly fond of describing or alluding to strange birds and beasts, whether native to Greece or imported from distant countries. Thus he mentions a reported variety of white blackbirds on Mount Cyllene which had attracted the attention of Aristotle, and he describes almost with the exactitude of a naturalist a small venomous viper of northern Arcadia which is still dreaded by the inhabitants. He refers to the parrots and camels and huge serpents of India, and he describes briefly but correctly the ostrich and the rhinoceros. He gives a full and sober account of the method of capturing the bison, and another of the mode of catching the elk which contrasts very favourably with the absurd account of it given by Caesar. At Tanagra he saw the stuffed or pickled Triton, or whatpassed for such, of which the Tanagraeans were so proud that they put a figure of a Triton on the coins which they minted in the lifetime of Pausanias. In the island of Poroselene he enjoyed, he assures us, the spectacle of a tame dolphin that came at a boy’s call and allowed him to ride on its back.
His report of this last spectacle, though it is confirmed by another witness, may raise a doubt as to his credibility. Professor Alfred Newton, whom I have consulted on the subject, kindly informs me that he knows of no modern evidence to bear Pausanias out, but that considering the widespread belief of the ancients in the familiarity of dolphins he does not think it inconceivable that in those days the creatures lived in little fear of mankind. We cannot judge, he says, by the behaviour of animals at the present day of what they might or did do before persecution began. “When the Russians,” he continues, “discovered Bering’s Island in 1741, they found its shores thronged by a big sea-beast (theRhytina gigasof naturalists), which, never having seen men before, had no fear of them, and the Russians (shipwrecked as they were) used to wade in the water andmilkthe ‘cows.’ The confidence was misplaced, and within thirty years or so every one of the animals had been destroyed, and the species extirpated.” Thus it seemsnot impossible that dolphins may have been tamer in antiquity than they are now, and that Pausanias may really have seen what he tells us he saw. But perhaps the exhibition at Poroselene was a hoax.
DescriptionofGreece bythe pseudo-Dicaearchus.
So much for the contents of Pausanias’s book. Before we enquire into the character of the writer and the sources from which he drew his materials it may be instructive to compare his work with the fragments of another ancient description of Greece which have come down to us. The comparison will help us to understand better both what we have gained and what we have lost by the idiosyncrasies of Pausanias. The fragments commonly pass under the name of the eminent Messenian writer Dicaearchus, a pupil of Aristotle; but from internal evidence we may conclude that the work of which they formed part was written by a later author at some time between 164B.C.and 86B.C.The nature of the work may be gathered from the following free translation or paraphrase, which is also slightly abridged.
“ The road to Athens is a pleasant one, running between cultivated fields the whole way. The city itself is dry and ill supplied with water. The streets are nothing but miserable old lanes, the houses mean, with a few better ones among them. On his firstarrival a stranger could hardly believe that this is the Athens of which he has heard so much. Yet he will soon come to believe that it is Athens indeed. A Music Hall, the most beautiful in the world, a large and stately theatre, a costly, remarkable, and far-seen temple of Athena called the Parthenon rising above the theatre, strike the beholder with admiration. A temple of Olympian Zeus, unfinished but planned on an astonishing scale; three gymnasiums, the Academy, Lyceum, and Cynosarges, shaded with trees that spring from greensward; verdant gardens of philosophers; amusements and recreations; many holidays and a constant succession of spectacles;—all these the visitor will find in Athens.
“ The products of the country are priceless in quality but not too plentiful. However, the frequency of the spectacles and holidays makes up for the scarcity to the poorer sort, who forget the pangs of hunger in gazing at the shows and pageants. Every artist is sure of being welcomed with applause and of making a name; hence the city is crowded with statues.
“ Of the inhabitants some are Attic and some are Athenian. The former are gossiping, slanderous, given to prying into the business of strangers, fair and false. The Athenians are high-minded, straightforward, and staunch infriendship. The city is infested by a set of scribblers who worry visitors and rich strangers. When the people catches the rascals, it makes an example of them. The true-born Athenians are keen and critical auditors, constant in their attendance at plays and spectacles. In short, Athens as far surpasses all other cities in the pleasures and conveniences of life as they surpass the country. But a man must beware of the courtesans, lest they lure him to ruin. The verses of Lysippus run thus:
‘If you have not seen Athens, you’re a stock;If you have seen it and are not taken with it, you’re an ass;If you are glad to leave it, you’re a pack-ass.’
‘If you have not seen Athens, you’re a stock;If you have seen it and are not taken with it, you’re an ass;If you are glad to leave it, you’re a pack-ass.’
‘If you have not seen Athens, you’re a stock;If you have seen it and are not taken with it, you’re an ass;If you are glad to leave it, you’re a pack-ass.’
‘If you have not seen Athens, you’re a stock;
If you have seen it and are not taken with it, you’re an ass;
If you are glad to leave it, you’re a pack-ass.’
“ Thence to Oropus by Psaphides and the sanctuary of Zeus Amphiaraus is a day’s journey for a good walker. It is all up-hill,[2]but the abundance and good cheer of the inns prevent the traveller from feeling the fatigue. Oropus is a nest of hucksters. The greed of the custom-house officers here is unsurpassed, their roguery inveterate and bred in the bone. Most of the people are coarse and truculent in their manners, for they have knocked thedecent members of the community on the head. They deny they are Boeotians, standing out for it that they are Athenians living in Boeotia. To quote the poet Xeno:
‘All are custom-house officers, all are robbers.A plague on the Oropians!’
‘All are custom-house officers, all are robbers.A plague on the Oropians!’
‘All are custom-house officers, all are robbers.A plague on the Oropians!’
‘All are custom-house officers, all are robbers.
A plague on the Oropians!’
2. This is an odd mistake. In point of fact half of the way is up hill and the other half is down hill. The road rises first gently and then steeply to the summit of the pass over Mount Parnes not far from the ancient Decelea; thence it descends, at first rapidly in sharp serpentine curves, then gradually through a rolling woodland country to the sea at Oropus.
2. This is an odd mistake. In point of fact half of the way is up hill and the other half is down hill. The road rises first gently and then steeply to the summit of the pass over Mount Parnes not far from the ancient Decelea; thence it descends, at first rapidly in sharp serpentine curves, then gradually through a rolling woodland country to the sea at Oropus.
“ Thence to Tanagra is a hundred and thirty furlongs. The road runs through olive-groves and woodlands: fear of highwaymen there is none at all. The city stands on high and rugged ground. Its aspect is white and chalky; but the houses with their porches and encaustic paintings give it a very pretty appearance. The corn of the district is not very plentiful, but the wine is the best in Boeotia. The people are well-to-do, but simple in their way of life. All are farmers, not artisans. They practise justice, good faith, and hospitality. To needy fellow-townsmen and to vagabonds they give freely of their substance, for meanness and covetousness are unknown to them. It is the safest city in all Boeotia for strangers to stay in; for the independent and industrious habits of the people have bred a sturdy downright hatred of knavery. In this city I observed as little as might be of those unbridled impulses which are commonly the source of the greatest crimes. For where people have enough to live on, they do nothanker after lucre, so roguery can hardly show face among them.
“ Thence to Plataea is two hundred furlongs. The road is somewhat desolate and stony, and it rises up the slopes of Cithaeron, but it is not very unsafe. In the city, to quote the poet Posidippus,
‘Two temples there are, a colonnade and old renown,And the baths, and Sarabus’s famous inn.A desert most of the year, it is peopled at the time of the games.’
‘Two temples there are, a colonnade and old renown,And the baths, and Sarabus’s famous inn.A desert most of the year, it is peopled at the time of the games.’
‘Two temples there are, a colonnade and old renown,And the baths, and Sarabus’s famous inn.A desert most of the year, it is peopled at the time of the games.’
‘Two temples there are, a colonnade and old renown,
And the baths, and Sarabus’s famous inn.
A desert most of the year, it is peopled at the time of the games.’
The inhabitants have nothing to say for themselves except that they are Athenian colonists, and that the battle between the Greeks and the Persians was fought in their country.
“ Thence to Thebes is eighty furlongs. The road is through a flat the whole way. The city stands in the middle of Boeotia. Its circumference is seventy furlongs, its shape circular. The soil is dark. In spite of its antiquity the streets are new, because, as the histories tell us, the city has been thrice razed to the ground on account of the morose and overbearing character of the inhabitants. It is excellent for the breeding of horses; it is all well-watered and green, and has more gardens than any other city in Greece. For two rivers flow through it, irrigating the plain below the city; and water is brought from the Cadmea inunderground conduits which were made of old, they say, by Cadmus. So much for the city. The inhabitants are high-spirited and wonderfully sanguine, but rash, insolent, and overbearing, ready to come to blows with any man, be he citizen or stranger. As for justice they set their face against it. Business disputes are settled not by reason but by fisticuffs, and the methods of the prize-ring are transferred to courts of justice. Hence lawsuits here last thirty years at the very least. For if a man opens his lips in public on the law’s delay and does not thereupon take hasty leave of Boeotia, he is waylaid by night and murdered by the persons who have no wish that lawsuits should come to an end. Murders are perpetrated on the most trifling pretexts. Such are the men as a whole, though some worthy, high-minded, respectable persons are also to be found among them. The women are the tallest, prettiest, and most graceful in all Greece. Their faces are so muffled up that only the eyes are seen. All of them dress in white and wear low purple shoes laced so as to show the bare feet. Their yellow hair is tied up in a knot on the top of the head. In society their manners are Sicyonian rather than Boeotian. They have pleasing voices, while the voices of the men are harsh and deep. The city is one of the best places to pass the summer in, for it has gardens and plenty of coolwater. Besides it is breezy, its aspect is verdant, and fruit and flowers abound. But it lacks timber, and is one of the worst places to winter in by reason of the rivers and the winds; for snow falls and there is much mud. The poet Laon writes in praise of the Boeotians, but he does not speak the truth, the fact being that he was caught in adultery and let off lightly by the injured husband. He says:
‘Love the Boeotian, and fly not Boeotia;For the man is a good fellow, and the land is delightful.’
‘Love the Boeotian, and fly not Boeotia;For the man is a good fellow, and the land is delightful.’
‘Love the Boeotian, and fly not Boeotia;For the man is a good fellow, and the land is delightful.’
‘Love the Boeotian, and fly not Boeotia;
For the man is a good fellow, and the land is delightful.’
“ Thence to Anthedon is one hundred and sixty furlongs. The road runs aslant through fields. Carriages can drive on it. The city, which is not large, stands on the shore of the Euboean sea. The market-place is all planted with trees and flanked by colonnades. Wine and fish abound, but corn is scarce, for the soil is poor. The inhabitants are almost all fishermen living by their hooks, by the purple shell, and by sponges, growing old on the beach among the seaweed and in their huts. They are all of a ruddy countenance and a spare form; the tips of their nails are worn away by reason of working constantly in the sea. Most of them are ferrymen or boat-builders. Far from tilling the ground they do not even own it, alleging that they are descendants of the marine Glaucus, who was confessedly a fisherman.
“ So much for Boeotia. As for Thespiae, it contains ambition and fine statues, nothing else. The Boeotians have a saying about their national faults to the effect that greed lives in Oropus, envy in Tanagra, quarrelsomeness in Thespiae, insolence in Thebes, covetousness in Anthedon, curiosity in Coronea, braggery in Plataea, fever in Onchestus, and stupidity in Haliartus. These are the faults that have drained down into Boeotia as into a sink from the rest of Greece. To quote the verse of Pherecrates:
‘If you have any sense, shun Boeotia.’
‘If you have any sense, shun Boeotia.’
‘If you have any sense, shun Boeotia.’
‘If you have any sense, shun Boeotia.’
So much for the land of the Boeotians.
“From Anthedon to Chalcis is seventy furlongs. As far as Salgoneus the road is level and easy, running between the sea on the one hand and a wooded and well-watered mountain of no great height on the other. The city of Chalcis measures seventy furlongs in circumference. It is all hilly and shaded with trees. Most of the springs are salt, but there is one called Arethusa of which the water, though brackish, is wholesome, cool, and so abundant that it suffices for the whole city. With public buildings such as gymnasiums, colonnades, sanctuaries, and theatres, besides paintings and statues, the city is excellently provided, and the situation of the market-place for purposes ofcommerce is unsurpassed. For the currents that meet in the Euripus flow past the very walls of the harbour, and here there is a gate which leads straight into the market-place, a spacious area enclosed by colonnades. This proximity of the market-place to the harbour, and the ease with which cargoes can be unloaded, attract many ships to the port. Indeed the Euripus itself, with its double entrance, draws merchants to the city. The whole district is planted with olives, and the fisheries are productive. The people are Greek in speech as well as by birth. Devoted to learning, with a taste for travel and books, they bear their country’s misfortunes with a noblefortitudefortitude. A long course of political servitude has not extinguished that inborn freedom of nature which has taught them to submit to the inevitable. To quote a verse of Philiscus:
'Chalcis is a city of most worthy Greeks.'”
'Chalcis is a city of most worthy Greeks.'”
'Chalcis is a city of most worthy Greeks.'”
'Chalcis is a city of most worthy Greeks.'”
These passages, which I have perhaps quoted at too great length, may suffice. I will spare the reader a long description of Mount Pelion, its pine-woods, its wild flowers, and its simples, which seems to be a fragment of the same work. Two points only in the description of the mountain may be mentioned. The writer tells us that the knowledge of certain simples was hereditary in a single family, who kept it a profound secret, though they refused to accept anymoney from the sick people whom they tended, deeming it would be impious to do so. These herbalists claimed to be descended from the centaur Chiron. Again, we learn from the writer how in the greatest heat of summer, when the Dog Star rose, a procession of men of good birth and in the prime of life, all chosen by the priest and all clad in sheepskins, ascended through the pine-woods to the cave of Chiron and a sanctuary of Zeus on the top of the mountain. He mentions the sheepskins as a proof of the great height of Mount Pelion, as if without them the men would have shivered on the mountain even while the plains below were sweltering and baking in the heat. But it is more probable that the sheepskins had some religious significance.
Thepseudo-DicaearchusandPausaniascompared.
This account of the procession of skin-clad men to the cave and sanctuary on the top of the high mountain reads not unlike a passage in Pausanias. But how different is almost all the rest of this writer’s description of Greece from that of Pausanias! Instead of a dull patient enumeration of monuments, arranged in topographical order and seldom enlivened even by a descriptive epithet, we have slight highly-coloured sketches of the general appearance of the towns—the white city of Tanagra on the hill with the pretty painted porches of the houses; Chalcis with its handsome buildings,its shady trees, its flowing springs, its spacious market beside the narrows where the tide runs fast and the porters are busy unlading the ships in the harbour; Thebes in summer with its fine new streets, its verdure, its fruit and flowers, and the balmy freshness of the perfumed air blowing over gardens; Thebes in winter, swept by bitter cutting winds, the streets deep in mud and whitened by the falling snow; Athens with its old narrow lanes and mean houses, and now and then a glimpse between them of the resplendent Parthenon, like a sun-burst, high up against the sky. Then again as to the people, what a contrast between the grave Pausanias, who hardly allows us to see them except at their devotions, and the sparkling writer who so often lifts the veil of the past and lets us catch a glimpse of the bustling motley crowd and hear the hum of their voices—the crowd that ceased to bustle and the voices that fell silent so long ago. We see the hungry populace at Athens forgetting their empty stomachs in the joys of the theatre and pageant; the frail beauties ogling; the literary pests scribbling lampoons in their garrets or wriggling in the grasp of the law. On the highways we behold the travellers walking in fear of robbers or taking their ease at their inn. At Oropus we watch the custom-house officers diving into the baggage of exasperated travellers, who mutter curses. At Tanagra we shake handswith the bluff well-to-do farmer, comfortable, kindly, and contented, who has a hearty welcome for the stranger and a bit and a sup for the beggar who knocks at his door. In the streets of Thebes we jostle with your ruffling swaggering blades, your bullies and swashbucklers, who will knock you down for a word and cut your throat in a dark lane if you dare to whisper a word that reflects on the course of justice, or rather of injustice, in their native city. And moving amongst these ruffians are tall graceful women, muffled up to their eyes, their yellow hair gathered in knots on the top of their heads, their purple shoes peeping from under their white dresses, their soft voices contrasting with the gruff deep bass of the men. Again the scene shifts. We are no longer among the streets and gardens of Thebes, but on the beach at Anthedon with the salt smell of the sea in our nostrils and the cool sea-breeze fanning our brow. We see the fisher-folk, with their ruddy weather-beaten faces and their finger-nails eaten away by the brine, baiting their hooks among the sea-weed on the shore, or hammering away at a new fishing-boat, or ferrying travellers across the beautiful strait to Euboea.
These pictures of a vanished world are worth something. They have life, warmth, and colour; but the colours, we can hardly doubt, are heightened unduly. The lights are too high,the shadows too deep. We cannot believe that the population of Oropus consisted exclusively of cut-throats and custom-house officers; that the farmers of Tanagra were all bluff and virtuous; that none but good men struggling nobly with adversity resided at Chalcis; that no lawsuit at Thebes ever lasted less than thirty years. The writer, it is plain, has exaggerated for the sake of literary effect. And he has a strong leaning to gossip and scandal. He extenuates the praise of Boeotia in the mouth of a poet on the ground of a painful episode in the bard’s private history, and he retails with evident relish the current tattle as to the characteristic vices of the various Boeotian towns. On the whole this lively, superficial, gossipy work, with its showy slap-dash sketches of life and scenery, cannot compare in solid worth with the dry and colourless, but in general minute and accurate description of Greece which Pausanias has given us. In the writings of Pausanias we certainly miss the warmth and animation of the other, the pictures of contemporary life and character, the little touches that bring the past and the distant vividly before us. His book is too much a mere catalogue of antiquities, the dry bones of knowledge unquickened by the breath of imagination. Yet his very defects have their compensating advantages. If he lacked imagination he was the less likely toyield to that temptation of distorting and discolouring the facts to which men of bright fancy are peculiarly exposed, of whom it has been well said that they are like the angels who veil their faces with their wings.