Characterof Pausanias.
In truth Pausanias was a man made of common stuff and cast in a common mould. His intelligence and abilities seem to have been little above the average, his opinions not very different from those of his contemporaries.|Hispoliticalopinions.|While he looked back with regret to the great age of Greek freedom, he appears to have acquiesced in the Roman dominion as inevitable, acknowledging the incapacity of the degenerate Greeks to govern themselves, the general clemency of the Roman rule, and especially the wisdom and beneficence of the good emperors under whom it was his happiness to live. Of democracy he had no admiration. He thought the Athenians the only people who ever throve under it, and on observing that the slaves who fought and died for Athens were buried with their masters, he remarks with apparent surprise that even a democracy can occasionally be just. With his turn for study and for brooding over the past, it was natural that he should prefer a life of privacy to the cares and turmoils of a public career. Accordingly we find that he admired the prudence of Isocrates who lived placidly to old age in the shade and tranquillityof retirement, and that he censured implicitly the imprudence of Demosthenes, whose fiery genius hurried him through the storm and sunshine of public life to exile and a violent death.
Such a preference, implied rather than expressed, says much for the decay of public spirit in Greece. Our author himself was conscious that his lot had fallen on evil days. He speaks sorrowfully of the olden time when the gods openly visited the good with honour, and the bad with their displeasure; when the benefactors of mankind were raised to the rank of divinities, and evil-doers were degraded into wild beasts and stones. “But in the present age,” he adds mournfully, “when wickedness is growing to such a height, and spreading over every land and city, men are changed into gods no more, save in the hollow rhetoric which flattery addresses to power; and the wrath of the gods at the wicked is reserved for a distant future when they shall have gone hence.” We cannot doubt that here he glances covertly at the practice of deifying the Roman emperors, which seems to have stirred his honest indignation as a mark of the supple servility and political degeneracy of the age. Nor was he a stranger to those graver thoughts on the vaster issues of life and history which the aspect of Greece in its decline was fitted to awake. The sight of the great city ofMegalopolis lying in ruins brings to his mind the high hopes with which it had been founded, and that again ushers in a train of melancholy reflexions on the instability of human affairs. He thinks how from so many golden cities of the ancient world—from Nineveh and Babylon, from Thebes and Mycenae—the glory had passed away; how nature itself, which seems so stable, is subject to great mutations; how transitory, then, is earthly glory, how brief and frail the life of man!
His ethicalviews.
On the passions which move men and make history he seems to have thought much like other people. He knew that avarice is the cause of many crimes, and that love is the source both of great happiness and of great misery. Yet he appears to have held that the mischief wrought by the passion of love outweighs the good it brings; for after telling how, by washing in the river Selemnus, men and women were supposed to forget their love, he adds that if there is any truth in this story great riches are less precious to mankind than the water of the Selemnus. Again, he has a sincere admiration for the heroic virtues, and a genuine detestation of baseness and depravity of all sorts. Treason he stigmatises as the foulest of crimes. He considers that the bold and disinterested patriot Thrasybulus, who freed his country and healed her dissensions, was the best of all the famousmen of Athens, and that the deed of Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae was the most splendid feat of arms in Grecian history. He praises his Spartan namesake for his courteous treatment of the captive Coan lady and for rejecting the base proposal of the wretch who would have had him mutilate the corpse of the gallant Mardonius. He speaks with sympathy of the brave men worthy of a happier fate who fell on the tyrant Lachares, of those who would have wrested Piraeus from the Macedonians had they not been done by their confederates to death, and of those others whom on the great day Cimon led to victory by sea and land. He tells how in the last fight with the Romans, before the day was lost, the Achaean general fled, leaving his men to shift for themselves, and he contrasts his selfish cowardice with the soldierly devotion of an Athenian cavalry officer who on the disastrous retreat from Syracuse brought off his regiment safe, then wheeled about and, riding back alone, found the death he sought in the midst of the enemy.
Hisreligiousopinions.Belief inthe gods.
In religion as in morals Pausanias seems to have occupied a position not unlike that of his contemporaries. That it did not occur to him to doubt the existence of the gods and heroes of Greek mythology is clear from the tenour of his work as well as from many observations which he lets fall. Thus for example, he tellsus that to see the gods in bodily shape was perilous; that Pan possessed, equally with the greatest of the gods, the power of answering prayer and requiting the wicked; and that down to his own time there was preserved at a city on the Euphrates the very rope, plaited of vine and ivy branches, with which Dionysus had spanned the river on his march to India. Even the criticisms which he sometimes offers on myths and legends prove that in the act of rejecting them wholly or in part he does not dream of questioning the reality of the divine or heroic personages of whom they were told. Thus, to give instances, while he examines and rejects the claims set up on behalf of various objects to be works of Hephaestus, he admits the genuineness of one of the objects, thereby clearly taking for granted the existence of the smith-god himself. Again, observing an image of Aphrodite with fetters on her feet he tells how, according to one tradition, Tyndareus had put this indignity on the goddess to punish her for bringing his daughters to shame. “This explanation,” declares Pausanias with decision, “I cannot accept for a moment It would have been too silly to imagine that by making a cedar-wood doll and dubbing it Aphrodite he could punish the goddess.” Obviously our author, if he has small reverence for the image and none at all for the tradition of its origin,cherishes an unfaltering faith in the reality of the goddess. Again, he denies that Semele was ever, as Greek tradition would have it, rescued from hell by Dionysus, and the reason he gives for his incredulity is that Semele was the wife of Zeus and therefore could not die. Yet again, after telling the legend of Eurypylus and the wonderful chest in which he kept a portable god, he mentions only to reject the tradition that Eurypylus received the chest from Hercules. “Sure am I,” says he, “that Hercules knew all about the chest, if it really was such a wonderful chest, and I do not believe that knowing about it he would ever have given it away to a comrade in arms.” Once more, Pausanias cannot bring himself to believe that Hercules ever carried his anger at a friend’s daughter so far as to condemn her to remain a spinster for the rest of her days and to serve him in that capacity as his priestess. He opines that while Hercules was still among men, “punishing other people for presumption and especially for impiety, it is not likely that he would have established a temple with a priestess all for himself, just as if he were a god.”
Hisscepticismas to hell.
There is one side, however, of Greek religion as to which Pausanias shows himself consistently sceptical, if not incredulous. He had serious doubts as to the existence of a subterranean hell. “It is not easy,” he says, “to believe that godshave an underground abode in which the souls of the dead assemble.” He speaks of the “supposed subterranean realm” of Pluto, and in the cave at Taenarum, which was thought to be one of the mouths of hell, he looked in vain for any passage leading down to the nether world. Cerberus in particular, the hound of hell, is roughly handled by Pausanias, who ruthlessly strips him of his superfluous heads, reduces him to a commonplace serpent, and seems to take a malicious pleasure in enumerating all the places where the animal was said to have been haled up by Hercules. But though Pausanias had his doubts as to hell, he seems to have believed in the existence of the soul after death; for in a passage which has been already quoted he speaks of the punishment that awaits the wicked in another life. At the same time his belief in the doctrine was apparently not very firm; at least he refers to it somewhat hesitatingly in mentioning the Messenian tradition that the soul of the dead hero Aristomenes had fought against his old foes the Lacedaemonians at Leuctra. “The first people,” he there tells us, “who asserted that the soul of man is immortal were the Chaldeans and the Indian magicians; and some of the Greeks believed them, especially Plato, the son of Aristo. If everybody accepts this tenet, there can be no gainsaying the view that hatred of the Lacedaemonians has rankledin the heart of Aristomenes through all the ages.”
Hisattitude tovariousdeities.
Amongst the gods Pausanias assigns the first place to Zeus. He alone is superior to Destiny, to which all the other gods must submit; he is the ruler and guide of the Fates, and knows all that they have in store for man. Of the Fates themselves Fortune is, in our author’s opinion, the most powerful; she it is whose resistless might sweeps all things along at her will, determining the growth and decay of cities, the revolutions of nature, and the destiny of man. Yet Pausanias’s own devotions seem to have been paid rather to Demeter than to Zeus or the Fates. He visited Phigalia chiefly for the sake of the Black Demeter to whom he sacrificed at the mouth of the cave; he relates at length the history of her image; and he describes in unusual detail the sanctuary and images of Demeter and Proserpine at Lycosura. Again, he had been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries; he loves to trace their diffusion from Eleusis over the rest of Greece; he speaks of the Andanian mysteries as second in point of sanctity to the Eleusinian alone; he tells us that the Greeks of an earlier age esteemed the latter as far above all other religious exercises as the gods were above heroes; and he expresses his own conviction that there was nothing on which the blessing of God rested in so full ameasure as on the rites of Eleusis and the Olympic games. His religious awe of the mysteries, silencing his antiquarian garrulity, forbade him to describe not only the rites but the sacred precincts in which they were celebrated. Once more, on Mount Panhellenius in Aegina he sacrificed to the images of the kindred deities Damia and Auxesia according to the ritual observed in sacrificing at Eleusis. Another deity in whom Pausanias seems to have been especially interested was Aesculapius. He examines the legends of the god’s parentage, discusses his nature, and traces the spread of his worship from Epidaurus. Along with his belief in the gods and in the resistless power of Fate our author apparently cherished a dim faith in a divine providence which watches over the affairs of man. In speaking of the exploits of Theseus in Crete he remarks that “nothing less than the hand of Providence could reasonably be supposed to have brought him and his comrades safe back, guiding him through all the mazy intricacies of the labyrinth, and leading him unseen, when his work was done, through the midst of his enemies.”
His beliefin theactive interferenceofthe gods inhumanaffairs.
The gods, in the opinion of Pausanias, were neither cold abstractions nor blessed beings who, lapped in the joys of heaven, took no thought for the affairs of earth. They actively interfered in the course of events, rewarding the virtuousand punishing the wicked. They were the givers of good things to men; and if their rewards had been more open and manifest in days of old, the prosperity of the pious Athenians was a standing proof that even in later times the gods had not forgotten to recompense their worshippers. Yet, like most people who lay themselves out to justify the ways of God to man, Pausanias was readier to detect the hand of the deity in the miseries and misfortunes of his fellow-creatures than in their joys and blessings. The confidence with which he lays his finger on the precise misdeed which drew down on a malefactor the wrath of a justly offended god implies an astonishing familiarity with the counsels of the Almighty. He knew that the Persians were defeated at Marathon because they had angered Nemesis by bringing, in the pride of their hearts, a block of marble which they proposed to set up as a trophy of their expected victory; that the destruction of Sparta and Helice by earthquakes was due to the wrath of Poseidon at the violation of his sanctuaries; that the ruin and death of Mithridates had been brought to pass by Apollo, whose sacred island had been sacked by the king’s general; that Sulla’s miserable end was a direct consequence of his guilt in tearing Aristion from the sanctuary of Athena; and that the wrath of the Eleusinian goddesses abode on the Megariansfor ever because they had encroached on the sacred land and murdered a herald who warned them to desist. Again, he shrewdly suspects that the long misfortunes of the Messenians flowed directly from the anger of the Dioscuri at the impious presumption of two Messenian youths; and he surmises that gods and heroes combined to wreak their displeasure on the devoted head of Cleomenes, who had tampered with the Delphic oracle, ravaged the sacred Eleusinian land, and burned the grove of the hero Argus. The Delphic Apollo was quick and powerful, according to Pausanias, to defend his honour and to visit with vengeance the sacrilegious persons who dared to assail his sanctuary or rifle his treasures. King Archidamus, who had fingered the sacred moneys, fell in battle in a foreign land and his corpse weltered unburied; the Phlegyans, who made a raid on Delphi, perished by thunderbolts and earthquakes; and it was in all the majesty of thunder, lightning, and earthquake that at a later time the god stood forth to repel the Gauls. Amongst the punishments with which the gods were thought to visit unwarranted intrusions into their sanctuaries, blindness and madness had a special place. King Aepytus, on forcing his way into the shrine of Poseidon at Mantinea, which none might enter, was instantly struck blind and died soon afterwards; some Persiansoldiers who ventured into the sanctuary of the Cabiri near Thebes became crazed and in that state put an end to themselves; and it was believed that if any defiled or impious person entered the sanctuary of the Eumenides at Cerynea he would go mad on the spot.
His beliefin oracles.
Believing in the gods, Pausanias naturally believed in their official utterances, the oracles. The Delphic oracle, he thinks, foretold the battle of Leuctra and various episodes in the Messenian wars; and he appeals to one of its answers as conclusive evidence that the mother of Aesculapius was Coronis. He relates how the accidental exposure of the bones of Orpheus was followed by the destruction of the city of Libethra in accordance with a prediction of Dionysus in Thrace, and he narrates the fatal disasters which Epaminondas, Hannibal, and the Athenians incurred by misunderstanding oracular answers sent them from Delphi, Ammon, and Dodona. The history of Macedonia, its rise and its fall, had been predicted by the Sibyl, if we may believe Pausanias, who quotes her prophecy; and he assures us that the inroad of the Gauls into Asia had been foretold by Phaennis a generation before the event took place. He had himself consulted the oracle of Trophonius, and has left us a curious account of the ceremonies observed by enquirers at the shrine. In his day, he informs us, the mostinfallible oracle was that of Amphilochus at Mallus in Cilicia.
Hiscriticism ofmyths.
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 authorityhe 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 disbeliefofcertainmyths.
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 andmen 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 rationalisticinterpretationof somemyths.
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 leastnot 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 whichfor 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 changeof view asto 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 straightout; 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 treatmentofdiscrepanttraditions.
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 unimaginativetemperament 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 Endymionmarried 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.
Hisapplicationof historicalmethods toGreektraditions.
But in his criticism of Greek legends Pausanias did not confine himself to the simple test of experience. He did not merely ask whether a story agreed more or less with thelaws of nature, and accept or reject it accordingly. In historical enquiries the application of such a criterion obviously cannot carry the enquirer beyond the first step. Pausanias went much further. He introduced considerations drawn from general probability, from chronology, from the monuments, from a comparison with other traditions, from the relative weight to be attached to the authorities by which each version of a legend was supported. In fact, far from being hide-bound in the trammels of tradition, he moved freely among the materials at his disposal, accepting this and rejecting that in obedience to the dictates of a reasonable and fairly enlightened criticism. Thus, he rejects the Sophoclean version of the death of Oedipus because it conflicts with the Homeric. He will not allow that a bronze image of Athena at Amphissa can have formed part of the Trojan spoils, and that a bronze image of Poseidon at Pheneus can have been dedicated by Ulysses, because at the time of the Trojan war and in the lifetime of Ulysses the art of casting in bronze had not yet been invented. He refuses to believe that the grave of Dejanira was at Argos, because she was known to have died at Trachis and her grave to be not far from Heraclea. Among the several places in Greece that set up claims to be the Oechalia of Homer, our author decides in favour of Carnasium inMessenia, because the bones of Eurytus were there. The tradition that the mysteries at Celeae had been founded by a man of Eleusis named Dysaules, who had been driven into exile after a battle between the Eleusinians and Athenians, is rejected by Pausanias on the grounds that no such battle took place and that no such person is mentioned by Homer. The legend that Daedalus joined Aristaeus in colonising Sardinia is set aside by him for the reason that Daedalus lived several generations after Aristaeus, and therefore could not possibly have shared with him in a colony or in anything else. Similarly he argues on chronological grounds against the traditions that Achilles had been a suitor of Helen; that Timalcus went to Aphidna with the Dioscuri; and that the Telamon and Chalcodon who marched with Hercules against Elis were the well-known Telamon of Aegina and Chalcodon of Euboea. The Spartan tradition as to the image of Brauronian Artemis is preferred by Pausanias to the Athenian, and that for a variety of reasons which he sets forth in detail.
Thus Pausanias criticised Greek myths and legends according to his lights, and if his lights did not shine very brilliantly the fault was not his.
His taste in art.
Of his taste in painting and sculpture we are scarcely able to judge, partly because he ischary of his praise, generally confining himself to a simple mention or description of the work before him, partly because so few of the works described by him have survived to our time.|His taste inpainting.|The paintings are all gone. A little blue pigment on a ruined wall at Delphi is all that remains of those frescoes of Polygnotus which excited the admiration of antiquity. That Pausanias himself admired them is clear, both from the length of his description and from the words with which he brings it to a close: “So varied and beautiful is the painting of the Thasian artist.” Elsewhere he seems to have lost no opportunity of describing extant pictures of Polygnotus, though he does not always mention his name. A painting of Drunkenness by Pausias apparently struck Pausanias especially, for he tells us that “in the picture you can see the crystal goblet and the woman’s face through it.” But the only pictures, besides those of Polygnotus at Delphi, on which he deigns to bestow a dry word of commendation are a couple of paintings on tombstones, one of them by Nicias, as to whom Pausanias tells us elsewhere that he had been the greatest painter of animals of his time.
His taste insculpture.
In sculpture the taste of Pausanias was apparently austere. He decidedly preferred the earlier to the later art. Of the archaic works attributed to Daedalus he says that they “aresomewhat uncouth to the eye, but there is a touch of the divine in them for all that.” He praises Bupalus, an artist of the sixth centuryB.C., as “a clever architect and sculptor.” But on the whole it was for the sculptors of the fifth centuryB.C.that he chiefly reserved his scanty praise, and amongst them he seemingly preferred the masters of the older manner who immediately preceded Phidias.|Predecessorsof Phidias.|Thus, with regard to Pythagoras of Rhegium, who flourished about 480B.C., he says that he was “a good sculptor, if ever there was one,” and in speaking of the boxer Euthymus he remarks that “his statue is by Pythagoras, and most well worth seeing it is.” Of Onatas, who was at work about 467B.C., he expresses a high opinion: “I am inclined to regard Onatas, though he belongs to the Aeginetan school of sculpture, as second to none of the successors of Daedalus and the Attic school.” This criticism indicates that Pausanias preferred in general the Attic school of sculpture to the Aeginetan, though he considered one master of the latter school as the peer of the greatest Attic sculptors. At Pergamus there was a bronze image of Apollo by this same Onatas which Pausanias describes as “one of the greatest marvels both for size and workmanship.” It is a proof of the independence of Pausanias’s judgment in art that this early sculptor, whom he ranked with|Phidias|Phidias and Praxiteles, is not even mentioned by any other ancient writer except in a single epigram of the Anthology. Another old master of the fifth century whose statues Pausanias often notices is Calamis; on one of them he bestows a word of commendation. A statue by this artist was much admired by Lucian. The great sculptor Myron, a contemporary of Phidias, seems also to have found favour in the eyes of Pausanias, for he mentions that the image of Dionysus on Mount Helicon was the finest of all the artist’s works, next to the statue of Erechtheus at Athens. That Pausanias appreciated the greatness of Phidias is clear from the way in which he speaks of him and from the detail in which he describes the sculptor’s two most famous works, the image of the Virgin Athena at Athens and the image of Zeus at Olympia. Of the latter he observes that the mere measurements of the image could convey no idea of the impression which the image itself made on the beholder. Yet he did not consider it the sculptor’s masterpiece, for as to the image of the Lemnian Athena at Athens he remarks that it is “the best worth seeing of all the works of Phidias.” The preference thus given to this comparatively obscure statue over the image of Zeus which the ancient world agreed in extolling as little less than divine is another proof of the independence of Pausanias’sjudgment in artistic matters; and that his taste here was good is attested by the very high place which his contemporary Lucian, one of the best critics of antiquity, assigns to the same statue. Of Alcamenes our author observes that as a sculptor he was second only to his contemporary Phidias, and with regard to the statue of Aphrodite in the Gardens by this artist he says that “few things at Athens are so well worth seeing as this.” Here, again, our author’s judgment is confirmed by that of Lucian, who describes this image as the most beautiful work of Alcamenes, and draws from it not a few traits for his imaginary statue of ideal beauty which was to combine all the most perfect features of the most celebrated statues. Another sculptor whose style seems to have pleased Pausanias was Naucydes, a brother of the famous Polyclitus, who worked at the end of the fifth or at the beginning of the fourth centuryB.C.A bronze image of Athena by Hypatodorus at Aliphera is declared by Pausanias to be worth seeing both for its size and its workmanship; but the date of this sculptor is somewhat uncertain. Strongylion, whom Pausanias describes as unrivalled in his representations of oxen and horses, seems to have flourished toward the end of the fifth centuryB.C.Among the sculptors of the following century Pausanias praises Cephisodotus|Sculptorsof thefourthcenturyB.C.|for the conception of his statue representing the infant Wealth in the arms of Peace, and the sculptors Xenophon and Callistratus for a similar allegorical work representing Wealth in the arms of Fortune. Further, he commends some of the sculptures of Damophon at Messene,[3]and he has a few words of approbation for several works of Praxiteles, but not one for any work of the other two great masters of the fourth century, Scopas[4]and Lysippus, though he mentions many statues by them. A critic of a taste so severe that he could pass by the works of Scopas and the Hermes of Praxiteles without uttering a syllable of admiration was not likely to take much pleasure in the productions of the decadence. Pausanias notices few and praises none of the successors of Praxiteles. Of the colossal image of Olympian Zeus at Athens, which must have been executed in his own lifetime, he says condescendingly that it was good for its size.
3. The date of Damophon is uncertain, but on the whole the evidence seems to point to his having been at work in the first half of the fourth centuryB.C.Pausanias’s appreciation of Damophon is one more proof of the independence of his judgment in matters of art; for Damophon is mentioned by no other writer of antiquity.
3. The date of Damophon is uncertain, but on the whole the evidence seems to point to his having been at work in the first half of the fourth centuryB.C.Pausanias’s appreciation of Damophon is one more proof of the independence of his judgment in matters of art; for Damophon is mentioned by no other writer of antiquity.
4. However, he admired Scopas as an architect if not as a sculptor (viii. 45. 5). The same may be said of Polyclitus (ii. 27. 5), though the building which Pausanias admired turns out to be by the younger and less distinguished artist of that name.
4. However, he admired Scopas as an architect if not as a sculptor (viii. 45. 5). The same may be said of Polyclitus (ii. 27. 5), though the building which Pausanias admired turns out to be by the younger and less distinguished artist of that name.
It may be noted as significant of Pausanias’s interest in the older sculpture that the onlyartists with whose styles he shows himself so familiar as to recognise them at sight are Calamis, Canachus, Endoeus, and Laphaes, of whom Calamis and Canachus flourished in the early part of the fifth centuryB.C., and Endoeus in the last part of the sixth centuryB.C.The date of Laphaes is unknown, but as the two images by this artist were both made of wood and are expressly declared by Pausanias to be ancient, we can hardly suppose that the sculptor flourished later than the sixth centuryB.C.
His tastein architecture.
Of Pausanias’s taste in architecture we are much better able to judge, for many of the buildings described by him exist, and by a most fortunate coincidence amongst them are some of which he expressed his admiration in unusually strong language.|Walls ofTiryns.|To begin with the relics of the prehistoric age, the walls of Tiryns and the beehive tomb of Orchomenus, which he calls the Treasury of Minyas, raised his wonder to such a pitch that he compares them to the Egyptian pyramids and animadverts on the perversity of the Greeks, who admired and described only the marvels they saw abroad, while they entirely neglected the marvels no less great which they had at home. The walls of Tiryns he describes with amazement as “made of unwrought stones, each stone so large that a pair of mules could not even stir the smallest of them.” No modern reader who has|Beehivetomb atOrchomenus.|seen the walls of Tiryns as they still stand, built of enormous stones and resembling a work of giants rather than of men, will be likely to regard Pausanias’s admiration of them as misplaced, whatever may be thought of the comparison of them to the pyramids. Amongst the prehistoric remains of Greece they are certainly unmatched. The walls of Mycenae and of the great prehistoric fortress of Gla or Goulas in Boeotia surpass them, indeed, in extent, but fall far short of them in the size of the blocks of which they are composed. As to the beehive tomb at Orchomenus, of which Pausanias says that there was no greater marvel either in Greece or elsewhere, it is now sadly ruinous, but we can judge of its original effect by the great beehive tomb at Mycenae known as the Treasury of Atreus, which agrees with the tomb at Orchomenus very closely in dimensions and exists almost intact. To stand within the great circular chamber and look up at the domed roof, with its rings of regularly hewn stones diminishing one above the other till they are lost in the darkness overhead, is an impressive experience. Those who have enjoyed it will be disposed to think that Pausanias was right in regarding the similar edifice at Orchomenus as a very wonderful structure.
ThePropylaea.
To come down to buildings of the historical age, Pausanias admired the Propylaea or grand|Theatre atEpidaurus.|portal of the Acropolis at Athens, which “for the beauty and size of the blocks,” he says, “has never yet been matched.” It is probably not too much to say that even in its ruins this magnificent portal is still the highest triumph of the mason’s craft. The exquisite fitting of the massive cleanly-cut blocks of white marble is a pleasure to behold. Again, the sight of the theatre in the sanctuary of Aesculapius at Epidaurus moves the sober Pausanias to an extraordinary, almost unparalleled burst of admiration. “In the Epidaurian sanctuary,” he says, “there is a theatre which in my opinion is most especially worth seeing. It is true that in size the theatre at Megalopolis in Arcadia surpasses it, and that in splendour the Roman theatres far transcend all the theatres in the world; but for symmetry and beauty what architect could vie with Polyclitus? For it was Polyclitus who made this theatre.” Here again modern taste confirms the judgment of Pausanias. Neither the Dionysiac theatre at Athens, nor the great theatre at Megalopolis, nor the well-preserved theatre at Delphi, nor any other existing Greek theatre, so far at least as my experience goes, can vie for a moment in beauty and symmetry with the exquisite theatre at Epidaurus.
Temples atBassae andTegea.
Again, in regard to the temple of Apollo at Bassae our author says that “of all the templesin Peloponnese, next to the one at Tegea, this may be placed first for the beauty of the stone and the symmetry of its proportions,” and as to the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, to which he here refers, he says elsewhere, “The present temple far surpasses all other temples in Peloponnese both in size and style.” So far as the size of the temple at Tegea goes, Pausanias is wrong. The temple of Zeus at Olympia was nearly twice as large. But in regard to style modern taste merely echoes the opinion of Pausanias. The scanty remains of the temple at Tegea are now mostly buried underground, but the admirable design and workmanship of the architectural fragments, and the beauty of the shattered sculptures, justify the praise which Pausanias bestows on it as the finest temple in Peloponnese in respect of artistic style. No person of taste but will set the pathetic force and beauty of the two battered heads from this temple above all the coarse vigour of the Phigalian frieze and the ungraceful, almost repulsive hardness of the groups from the gables of the Olympian temple. And that in architectural style the temple at Bassae came next to the one at Tegea is an opinion that will hardly be disputed by any one who has seen the beautiful temple at Bassae with its long rows of grey columns standing solitary among the barren mountains. ThatPausanias was right in preferring it to the temple of Zeus at Olympia both for the beauty of the stone and the symmetry of its proportions is hardly open to question. The temple of Zeus must have been imposing from its size, but its proportions, so far as we can judge from the ruins, do not strike an observer as especially harmonious; and as to the materials, the rough conglomerate of Olympia cannot be compared for beauty with the fine hard limestone of Bassae.
Walls ofMessene.
Further, Pausanias describes the walls of Messene with their towers and battlements, and declares them to be stronger than the finest fortifications he had seen elsewhere. The remains of these superb fortifications bear him out. For the scale on which they are planned and for the solidity and perfection of the masonry they are without a rival in Greece. In other places, as at Asea in Arcadia, at Aegosthena in Megaris, and at Lilaea and Drymaea in Phocis, circuits of walls with their flanking towers exist in better preservation, but none of them can vie in style and splendour with the fortifications of Messene. Here again we must pronounce unhesitatingly that so far as our knowledge goes Pausanias was in the right.