The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Nevertheless, the Periegesis exhibits enough commonalities with the literature of the period that it is hard to maintain that Pausanias was alien to the general ethos of the Second Sophistic. One area in which Pausanias is often associated with his contemporaries is in his attitude toward the past. The pepaideumenoi of the Roman empire displayed little interest in recent history in their literature and oratory, favoring instead the distant glories of the Greece’s bygone heyday. Similarly, Pausanias’s choice of subject matter is slanted toward antiquity: he describes few structures, monuments, or historical events more recent than about 150 BCE. The image of Greece he provides is thus in many respects the Greece that the elite of his day were interested in (Bowie, 1996), and even if the Periegesis was not meant as a travel guide for the increasing numbers of educated tourists who were coming to Greece (Galli 2005), such as those we meet in Plutarch’s essay On the Delphic Oracle, one can easily imagine the work being read and appreciated by such travelers. The Periegesis may also have had a message for the people in the cities the text describes. Pointing to the contemporary prevalence of competition among the Greek city-states for prominence as lieux de memoire, Frateantonio (2009) has suggested that the text may have been designed as a contribution or response to such debates.

  At the same time, there are some ways in which Pausanias’s attitude toward the past is atypical. Auberger (2011) has recently noted that Pausanias does not seem as interested as some of his contemporaries in idealizing Greece’s classical period, and particularly the classical period of Athens. In Pausanias’s reckoning Athens is only one of several important places in Greece, and while he hardly ignores classical artifacts and histories, he spends as much if not more of his efforts on the preclassical and Hellenistic periods (Akujärvi 2005, 182–192). In part the attention Pausanias pays to less familiar periods seems to be precisely because they are less familiar; he avoids rehashing parts of Greek history that were well known from the texts of Herodotus and Thucydides, and instead pursues stories that were not common knowledge even to an educated readership. For instance, in his first book, before launching on a series of miniature biographies on Hellenistic kings, Pausanias claims that he is doing so because of the general ignorance of the period in his time (1.6.1). Regardless of whether this is a fair assessment of the historical knowledge of his contemporaries (Ameling 1996, 134; Bowie 1996, 211–213), it does suggest at least that Pausanias was aware of—and reacted to—ideologies about the past that were common in his era.

  Another way in which Pausanias displays a distinct historical perspective is in his insistence on portraying Greece’s monuments not as they were in their glory days, but as they actually were in his own time. Pausanias does nothing to disguise the fact that Greece had suffered much in the centuries that preceded his own. His itineraries visit many deserted towns and shrines, and he reports on many temples that had lost their roofs or cult statues to decay or depredation. One plausible suggestion is that Pausanias intended his work as a corrective to the idealization of Greece that was common in Greek oratory of the period (Akujärvi 2005, 296–306), but Porter (2001) has also noted that the quasi-mystical sense of communion with a glorious past that is imparted by Pausanias’s ruins bears a resemblance to the way the author of On the Sublime attempts to communicate the essence of sublimity through fragmentary quotations of classical masters.

  Pausanias’s onsite experience involves him with sources that few historiographers of the time seem to have bothered with, including oral sources (Pretzler 2005) and inscriptions. Pausanias quotes and refers to nearly 200 inscriptions, and in the handful of cases where we can check his readings against the surviving stones he seems to be generally accurate (Habicht 1998, 64–94; Zizza 2006). When it comes to the writing of narrative history, however, Pausanias is not always as careful. Like many in the period, Pausanias tends to employ historical accounts more as vehicles for moralistic rhetoric than as a means of communicating accurate information. His histories of Hellenistic kings, for instance, contain a number of inaccuracies and focus on the titillating topics of palace intrigue and sexual indiscretion (Hutton 2005, 275–295). Despite Pausanias’s claim to be introducing something new with this series of brief biographies, Hellenistic monarchs are put to much the same use by Lucian in Icaromenippus, where they serve as prime examples of the earthly corruption and decadence that Menippus gazes down on from the air (15).

  Of Pausanias’s two longest historical narratives, his account of the Achaean War is replete with moralistic scorn for the corrupt Achaean leaders who brought the wrath of Rome down on Greece, and it also seems to have been composed with only a moderate concern for accuracy (Gruen 1976). For his account of the Messenian Wars in book 4, he names as his sources Douris of Samos and the epic poet Rhianos (4.6.6). This source citation recalls, and is perhaps modeled on, Arrian’s citation of Ptolemy and Aristoboulus in the prologue of the Anabasis, but the particular sources named betray a higher level of historiographical naiveté or playfulness. The narrative itself is a rollicking mixture of Thucydidean battle-orders, epic heroism, divine epiphanies, and even a bit of novelistic adventure and romance (Auberger 1992; Hutton 2010). One gets the sense upon reading it that Pausanias is less concerned with the facts of the matter than he is with constructing an entertaining tour-de-force to compensate for the relative dearth of noteworthy monuments to talk about in Messenia (Alcock 2001). Despite that, the Messenian narrative is not merely random entertainment. Pausanias’s account of the Messenians’ honorable loss and subsequent recovery of freedom also provides stark counterpoise to the Greeks’ dishonorable (and unredeemed) loss of freedom following the Achaean War, as narrated in book 7. The fact that Pausanias’s two longest historical narratives are linked thematically, and are placed on opposite sides of the central books devoted to the preeminently pan-Hellenic site of Olympia (books 5 and 6) suggests that the author has more of a flair for the rhetorical and the dramatic than he is normally given credit for (Hutton 2010).

  In addition to his predilection for antiquity, Pausanias also exhibits a distinct preference for religious monuments and artifacts, but what particularly attracts his notice are elements of the traditional religions of the Greeks that existed in pre-Roman times (Pirenne-Delforge 2008). This becomes clear, for example, in his description of Corinth when he notes, with evident disapproval, that the current-day Roman colonists in Corinth do not conduct cult ceremonies for Medea’s children in the traditional manner (2.3.7). Pausanias’s religious interests are inseparable from his archaism; religion for him was one thing that gave the golden-age Greeks their distinctive identity. In this and other areas, it is clear that his notion of what “all things Greek” consists of is not homogeneous. He records the often discordant local traditions and cult practices in the places he visits (Jost 2006), and on more than one occasion he criticizes local informants when they present him with a commonly known version of a myth in place of what he feels to be the genuine local tradition (e.g., 2.20.5). The Periegesis exhibits what seems to be a desire on the author’s part to resist the homogenization of Greek traditions that accompanied the integration of Hellenism within the cosmopolitan culture of the empire.

  In addition to describing shrines, temples, and cult statues, Pausanias portrays himself as a participant in some of the cults that he visits. He frequently refuses to write about a topic in deference to religious taboos (Foccardi 1987), and he presents the travels he undertakes as a sort of rite de passage that brings him to a deeper understanding of Greek religious traditions (Veyne 1988, 95–102). Nearly three-quarters of the way through the Periegesis, he makes the following statement after recounting a local Arcadian tradition about the birth of Poseidon (8.8.3):

  When I began my account I tended to attribute these stories of the Greeks to simple-mindedness, but when I came to Arcadian matters I started adopting the following attitude toward them: Those of the Greeks who were considered wise said what they had to say not directly but through riddles, and I supposed the
things said about Kronos to be some kind of Greek wisdom. When it comes to things pertaining to the gods I will employ what is said.

  The personal religious devotion that Pausanias attests to and the attitudinal transformation he claims as a result of his travels have led some to compare the Periegesis to pilgrimage literature (Elsner 1992; Rutherford 2001). Others have objected to this characterization (Arafat 1996, 10; Swain 1996, 342), but the argument hinges more on the definition of “pilgrimage” than it does on particular phenomena in Pausanias’s text.

  A work that reflects the personal religious experience of the author is by no means out of place in the Second Sophistic. What is distinctive about Pausanias is the resolute conservatism and archaism of his religious persona. As is typical of the age he professes a particular reverence for mystery religions, but among mysteries his devotions are mostly confined to those of Demeter and related figures from the traditional Greek pantheon (Pirenne-Delforge 2008, 291–346). He occasionally acknowledges the existence of newer cults such as those of Isis and Serapis, but by and large imported cults of postclassical vintage are poorly represented in his text: the Isis shrine of Kenchreai that features in the last book of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, for instance, merits only the briefest of acknowledgments in Pausanias’s description of the port (2.2.3). One innovation in the religious life of Greece toward which Pausanias exhibits not just disregard but disdain is the worship of deified Roman emperors, which falls afoul not only of Pausanias’s preference for the genuinely ancient but also of the moralizing sentiment he expresses (8.2.5) that in his own age the gap between divine and human had grown too great to be bridged (Pirenne-Delforge 2008, 148–171). In general, to judge by the frequent listing of imperial-cult priesthoods in their epitaphs and honorary inscriptions, the elite of the Sophistic era viewed participation in the cult as a means of acquiring social capital, While few preserved authors of the period make mention of their own advancement in this sphere, no author, apart from the occasional Christian polemicist, expresses as openly hostile an attitude toward the cult as Pausanias does. This is only one of many instances in which Pausanias takes a distinctive stand on the interactions between Roman and Greek culture. Passages such as his glowing praises of Hadrian (1.5.5) and the Antonines (8.43.3–6) make it difficult to cast him as subversive or “anti-Roman,” but there are times when he seems distinctly less interested than many of his contemporaries in embracing an amalgamation of the two cultures (Swain 1996, 330–356).

  Another area in which Pausanias both resembles and diverges from his contemporaries is in his penchant for description. Rhetorical training of the period included exercises in ekphrasis, which could include descriptions of visible objects like the buildings and artworks that occupy much of Pausanias’s text, and a number of works of the period, such as the Imagines of Lucian and Philostratus, clearly show the effects of that training. Yet despite the sheer mass of things that Pausanias describes, there is relatively little in his text that can be compared to the sort of rhetorical and emotionally effusive ekphrasis that these works engage in (Snodgrass 2001). Pausanias’s descriptions of artworks generally focus on objective features such as the pose of a statue (e.g., standing or seated) and the identity of the artist. Even when Pausanias describes a work of art in great detail, as with the paintings of Polygnotus at Delphi (10.25.1–10.31.12), his comments are confined largely to the identification of the figures depicted. Only rarely does Pausanias record his own subjective response to an artwork or monument.

  Rather than as sources of aesthetic sensations or as springboards for rhetorical showmanship, Pausanias seems to value monuments as tangible points of contact between the physical world and the world of mythical and historical narrative. Given Pausanias’s affinity for Herodotus (see below), it would not be too much of a stretch to suggest that the Periegesis was Pausanias’s attempt to recreate on a Greece-wide scale the effect that Herodotus achieves when he corroborates his narratives of Gyges and Croesus by describing the exact appearance and position of the kings’ offerings that were still on display at Delphi in his time (1.14.1–3; 1.50–51). There are numerous works of the period that express a kindred sensibility. For instance, many of Philostratus’s biographies of the sophists are rounded out with a description of the location of the sophists’ tombs and other relevant monuments (e.g., VS 518, 526), and two of the most Pausanias-like passages in the surviving literature come at the beginnings of novels of the era: in Daphnis and Chloe, the narrator casts himself as a visitor to Lesbos who seeks out local interpreters to explain a painting he sees in a shrine of the nymphs; and in Leucippe and Cleitophon the author-narrator begins by describing a painting of the abduction of Europa he sees while touring the shrines of Sidon. In the two examples from the novels, there is much more of the evocative detail and affective response of canonical ekphrasis than one normally finds in Pausanias, but the use of physical monuments as means of access to the universe of logos and mythos is a distinctive similarity.

  If we look to the style and language of Pausanias’s work, we find some of the most tantalizing connections to his contemporaries and to his predecessors. No surviving work from antiquity is quite like Pausanias’s. We know of a number of other works entitled periegesis, but these exhibit such a wide variety of forms that the amount of light they shed on Pausanias’s generic affinities is limited. For instance, one of the extant examples from Pausanias’s own era is the Periegesis of the known world by Dionysius “the Periegete,” a poem consisting of over 1100 hexameters with information largely derived from previous geographical texts. A number of fragmentary prose texts, dating mostly to the Hellenistic period, seem more similar to Pausanias’s, such as those of Polemon of Ilion and Heliodorus of Athens (Bischoff 1938). These share a number of characteristics with Pausanias, including a focus on visible antiquities, an antiquarian rather than an aesthetic interest in artworks, and a fondness for associating logoi with monuments. Pausanias differs from these predecessors in several ways: first, there is no evidence that any of these authors attempted to cover an area as large as “Greece” in a single work. Second there is no evidence that they anticipated Pausanias’s characteristic method for organizing his copious data along sequential itineraries, a tactic that seems more akin to the coastal catalogs typical of periplous (“circumnavigation”) texts. Finally, while the earlier periegetes do attach historical and mythical narrative to the monuments they describe, there is no evidence that any of them went to the lengths that Pausanias does in even some of his shorter narratives, to say nothing of his lengthy accounts of the Messenian and Achaean wars (Hutton 2005, 247–265). One plausible explanation for the shaping of Pausanias’s text is that he took the idea of the Hellenistic periegesis, lent it some of the territorial ambition of geographies such as Strabo’s, and crafted an organizational principle based partly on a desire to replicate the experience an actual traveler. If this scenario is anything like the truth, we can see Pausanias as an active participant in one element of the literary ethos of the period of the Second Sophistic: the deliberate and creative manipulation of the boundaries of established genres (Whitmarsh 2001, 71–87).

  On more solid ground is Pausanias’s energetic embrace of another important element of Second Sophistic discourse, the creative mimesis of canonical authors of the past. Chief among the models whom Pausanias pays homage to in his writing is Herodotus (Hutton 2005, 190–213; Strid 1976). Like Pausanias, Herodotus writes from firsthand knowledge about places to which he traveled, and combines historical accounts with detailed descriptions of monuments and social customs. Pausanias clues his readers in to this affinity with homages of various sorts. We have already noted the echo of Herodotus in Pausanias’s quasi-programmatic promise to “pursue all things Greek in like fashion.” (1.26.4; cf. Herodotus 1.5). In another such example, Pausanias adapts Herodotus’s description of his skeptical attitude toward his sources. After reporting what he feels to be dubious information about an Olympic athlete, Pausanias announces, “While i
t is my duty to say what is said by the Greeks, I have no further duty to believe it all” (6.3.8: ἐμοὶ μὲνοὖνλέγεινμὲντὰ ὑπὸ Ἑλλήνωνλεγόμενα ἀνάγκη, πείθεσθαιδὲ πᾶσινοὐκέτι ἀνάγκη). Compare Herodotus: “I am obliged to say what is said; I am not obliged to believe it at all (7.152: ἐγὼ δὲ ὀφείλωλέγειντὰ λεγόμενα, πείθεσθαί γεμὲνοὐ παντάπασιν ὀφείλω).

  Despite such echoes, however, Pausanias’s style in toto would never be mistaken for Herodotean. As Frazer trenchantly observed (1898, 1:lxix): “a style that has less of the unruffled flow, the limpid clearness, the exquisite grace, the sweet simplicity of the Herodotean prose it might be hard to discover.” Pausanias’s text is full of phrases and manners of expression that recall other authors, including Thucydides, whose almost anti-Herodotean opaqueness Pausanias frequently seems eager to emulate (Strid 1976, 30–33, etc.). One figure of speech that is not particularly common in Herodotus is hyperbaton, the splitting of sentence elements normally found together, of which multiple examples can usually be found in any given section of Pausanias’s text. For instance, at one point Pausanias comments (as he often does) on the mutability of human fortune, saying ἄνδραδὲ συμφορῶν ἀεὶ στάνταἐκτὸς ἢ τὰ πάνταοὐρίῳναῦνχρησαμένηνπνεύματιοὐκ ἔστιν ὅπωςδυνησόμεθα ἐξευρεῖν (8.24.14, with elements involved in hyperbaton underlined). It is very difficult to communicate the effect of hyperbaton in English, where more rigid rules of word order can make even slight deviations from the norm seem far more bizarre than their Greek counterparts, but this is something like saying, “there is no way we will be able to find a man always free from difficulties being [instead of ‘being free from difficulties’] or a ship a breeze in every case favorable enjoying [instead of ‘a ship enjoying a breeze that is favorable in every case’].” In the nineteenth century, Augustus Boeckh suggested, largely on the basis of the abundance of hyperbaton in both authors, that Pausanias was imitating the style of his countryman Hegesias of Magnesia, the notorious father of “Asianic” rhetoric (Boeckh 1874, 4:208–212). This theory is generally out of favor nowadays, since apart from hyperbaton none of the stylistic singularities Hegesias was known for feature prominently in Pausanias’s work (Strid 1976), but if Pausanias’s mimesis of Herodotus consisted of borrowing a few diagnostic features and statements rather than wholesale imitation, it is by no means out of the question that he might have similarly pursued a partial and allusive mimesis of his Magnesian predecessor. Adding something to his style that was pertinent to his own identity as a native of Magnesia would not have been an unusual move in the Second Sophistic.