The self-conscious crafting of a unique voice that recalls the style of ancient masters associates Pausanias with the mainstream of Second Sophistic literature, although the particular choices that he makes in doing so are somewhat idiosyncratic. This is particularly the case if it is true that Hegesias is among his models, since the Asianism associated with Hegesias was considered the antithesis of the preferred Attic canon. Regardless of his relation to Hegesias, Pausanias’s stance on Atticism is interesting in itself (Hutton 2005, 181–190). Pausanias’s lexicon is for the most part indistinguishable from that of a classical Attic prose author. In the realm of orthography, however, Pausanias eschews more than most authors of the period the distinctive classical Attic spellings of words like θάλασσα (Attic θάλαττα, “sea”) and ναός (Attic νεώς, “temple”). Many scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, themselves weaned largely on Attic and Atticizing prose, considered Pausanias’s style bizarre and clumsy. Frazer, for instance, concludes his comparison of Herodotus and Pausanias as follows, “The sound of one is like the chiming of a silver bell; that of the other like the creaking of a corn-crake” (1898, 1:lxix). Yet whatever one thinks of Pausanias’s style, he maintains it with remarkable consistency throughout the work. Most of the features that modern readers have found unpleasant are surely there by design—however unorthodox that design may be—rather than by error or incompetence (Strid 1976, 103).
Pausanias’s choice of Herodotus as a model is not without ambiguities as well. Herodotus, while admired for his mellifluous style, was also frequently criticized by authors of the period as a teller of tall tales, as in Lucian’s True Stories, where he is among those authors consigned to the Isle of the Damned for their deliberate falsehoods (2.31), or in Plutarch’s On the Malice of Herodotus, where mendacity is but one of many Herodotean faults that come under attack. Emulation of a model with the ambiguous reputation for accuracy of a Herodotus—and literary role-playing in general—may seem inappropriate for a work that appears to have the delivery of accurate information as one of its goals, but there are some illuminative parallels from Pausanias’s own lifetime. Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess and Arrian’s Indika are both written in Herodotean Ionic and both, particularly the latter, seem intended at least in part to purvey genuine information. Another work of Arrian’s, his Periplous of the Black Sea, provides, along with echoes of Xenophon’s Anabasis, a topographical description of the seacoast cast in the format of an epistle to Hadrian from Arrian in his role as proconsul. Also worth mentioning in this regard is the Dionysius’s hexameter periegesis, which, despite its obvious poetic stylizations, served as a textbook of geography for centuries, Like Pausanias, all of these texts do the work of topography, geography, ethnography, and history, but pursue these sober topics with a learned literary mannerism typical of the age.
In sum, while it may be difficult to see Pausanias as a wholly typical representative of the intellectual and literary trends commonly associated with the term “Second Sophistic,” there are a number of aspects of his work that make it difficult to imagine him operating in any other period. All attempts at describing Pausanias’s personality should be taken with several grains of salt, but it is tempting to see in him someone whose investment in the contemporary ethos of archaism, religion, and literary antiquarianism was so strong that it led him to devote many years of travel and study in search of the realities behind Hellenism, and what he discovered ended up giving him a viewpoint on these and other subjects that was distinct from those of his contemporaries who knew of Greece only from books.2
FURTHER READING
The most authoritative edition of the Greek text is the Teubner edition of Rocha-Pereira (1989–1990), which takes account of the seminal work on the manuscripts by Diller (1957). The most accessible English translation of the Periegesis is the Penguin edition by Peter Levi, which is generally readable, but takes numerous liberties with the text. More reliable, if less jaunty, are the translations of W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod in the Loeb Classical Library, which are also available online through the Perseus Digital Library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu). The best up-to-date introduction to Pausanias in English is Pretzler 2007, and still fundamental is the Pauly-Wissowa article (in German) by Regenbogen (1956). The only complete commentary in English remains that of Frazer (1898), which is monumental but outdated in many respects. More recently teams of scholars writing in Italian (Musti, Beschi, Maddoli, Moggi, Torelli, et al. 1983–2003) and French (Casevitz, Auberger, Jacquemin, Jost, Pouilloux, et al. 1992–2005), have produced commentaries for most (but not all) of the books. The recent renaissance in Pausanias studies began in the 1980s, when Habicht (1998) made Pausanias the subject of his Sather Lectures at Berkeley and Veyne (1988) devoted a chapter to Pausanias in his book Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? In addition to numerous individual articles, subsequent decades have seen the publication of three important essay collections, one on Pausanias as historian (Bingen 1996), one by scholars involved in the French and Italian commentary projects (Knoepfler and Piérart 2001), and one including a number of scholars from other fields, attesting to the potential of fruitful dialogue between Pausanias and other areas of inquiry (Alcock, Cherry, and Elsner 2001). Recent monographs include Arafat 1996, on Pausanias’s treatment of artworks; Hutton 2005 on matters of structure and style; Akujärvi 2005, who presents a thorough narratological analysis; Zizza 2006 on Pausanias’s use of inscriptions; Pirenne-Delforge 2008 on Pausanias and religion; Frateantonio 2009 on Pausanias’s response to contemporary rivalry among Greek city-states; and Juul 2010 on oracular tales in the text. There is a special issue of the Classical Receptions Journal (2010: 2.2) devoted to reception studies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Alcock, S. E. 2001. “The Peculiar Book IV and the Problem of the Messenian Past.” In Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, 142–166. Oxford.
Alcock, S. E., J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, eds. 2001. Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece. Oxford.
Ameling, W. 1996. “Pausanias und die hellenistischen Geschichte.” In Pausanias Historien, edited by J. Bingen, 117–160. Fondation Hardt Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 41. Geneva.
Arafat, K. 1996. Pausanias’ Greece: Ancient Artists and Roman Rulers. Cambridge.
Arafat, K. 2000. “The Recalcitrant Mass: Athenaeus and Pausanias.” In Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, edited by D. Braund and J. Wilkins, 191–202. Exeter.
Auberger, J. 1992. “Pausanias romancier? Le témoinage du livre IV.” DHA 18: 187–197.
Auberger, J. 2011. “Pausanias le Périégète et la Seconde Sophistique.” In Perceptions of the Second Sophistic and Its Times, edited by T. Schmidt and P. Fleury, 133–145. Toronto.
Bingen, J., ed. 1996. Pausanias Historien. Fondation Hardt Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 41. Geneva.
Bischoff, E. 1938. “Perieget.” In Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. 19: 725–742.
Boeckh, A. 1874, Gesammelte kleine Schriften. Leipzig.
Bowie, E. L. 1996. “Past and Present in Pausanias.” In Pausanias Historien, edited by J. Bingen, 207–230. Fondation Hardt Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 41. Geneva.
Bowie, E. L. 2001. “Inspiration and Aspiration: Date, Genre, and Readership.” In Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, 21–32. Oxford.
Casevitz, M., J. Auberger, A. Jacquemin, M. Jost, Y. Lafond, et al., eds. 1992–2005. Pausanias: Description de la Grèce. 6 vols. Paris.
Casson, L. 1974. Travel in the Ancient World. London.
Dickey, M. 1997. “Philostratus and Pindar’s Eighth Paean.” BASP 34: 11–20.
Diller, A. 1955. “The Authors Named Pausanias.” TAPA 86: 268–279.
Diller, A. 1956
. “Pausanias in the Middle Ages.” TAPA 87: 84–97.
Diller, A. 1957. “The Manuscripts of Pausanias.” TAPA 88: 169–188.
Elsner, J. 1992. “Pausanias: A Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World.” P&P 135: 3–29.
Elsner, J. 2010. “Picturesque and Sublime: Impacts of Pausanias in Late-Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Classical Receptions Journal 2: 219–253.
Foccardi, D. 1987. “Religious Silence and Reticence in Pausanias.” In The Regions of Silence. Studies in the Difficulty of Communicating, edited by M. Ciani, 67–113. Amsterdam.
Frateantonio, C. 2009. Religion und Städtekonkurrenz: Zum politischen und kulturellen Kontext von Pausanias’ Periegese. Berlin.
Frazer, J. 1898. Pausanias’s Description of Greece. 6 vols. London.
Galli, M. 2005. “Pilgrimage as Elite Habitus: Educated Pilgrims in Sacred Landscape during the Second Sophistic.” In Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods, edited by J. Elsner and I. Rutherford, 253–290. Oxford.
Gruen, E.S. 1976. “The Origin of the Achaean War.” JHS 96: 46-69.
Habicht, C. 1998. Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA.
Hanell, K. 1938. “Phaidryntes.” RE 19: 1559–1560.
Harloe, K. 2010. “Pausanias as Historian in Wincklemann’s History.” Classical Receptions Journal 2: 174–196.
Hutton, W. 2005. Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the “Periegesis” of Pausanias. Cambridge.
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CHAPTER 24
GALEN
SUSAN P. MATTERN
24.1 GALEN AND GREEK IDENTITY
LIFE. Like other Greeks of his and previous eras, Galen identified closely with his city, the great city of Pergamum. No matter that he lived in Rome for decades; the Roman province of Asia was still “our” (sc. “my”) land. Pergamum was at that time renowned not only for its spectacular public architecture and sculpture, and for its library (which had rivaled that of Alexandria until the century previously, when Antony, notoriously, donated its 200,000 scrolls to the Egyptian collection), but also for Asclepius, god of medicine, whose temple precinct underwent massive renovation in Galen’s youth and was heavily patronized by the great sophist Aelius Aristides.
Galen was born at Pergamum in September, around the equinox, in 129 CE, and received his early education there. Beginning in his late teens, after his father’s death, he left to study medicine at Smyrna and other cities around the eastern Mediterranean, finally spending four or more years at Alexandria, the most prestigious center of medical education ever since the legendary Herophilus and, probably, Erasistratus had performed human dissections and vivisections there. He returned to Pergamum in 157, where for four years he held the position of physician to the gladiators, under the supervision of the city’s chief priest (archiereus). In 161, he departed for Rome, where he lived for five years before returning to Pergamum at the outbreak of the cataclysm he calls the “Great Plague.” But the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus recalled him, and he spent the winter of 168–169 treating plague victims among the army gathered at Aquileia (near the Slovenian border today), before returning to Italy. He lived and practiced for the rest of his life mostly in the city of Rome, though he also owned property in Campania. A fire that broke out near the Temple of Peace in 192 destroyed some of his original works, his recipe collections, and much of his private collection of manuscripts. By the time he died, probably in 216 or 217 at the age of eighty-seven, he had authored about 370 treatises, of which about 125 survive in some form.
City and Country. Galen came from a professional family. His father, Nicon, and also his grandfather were architects. His great-grandfather was a geometer. But Galen’s family also owned land, and in middle age Galen’s father retired to his estate in the country, where he died; Galen inherited his property. His class identity as a landowner who did not need to work for money was important to him throughout his life.
His values were, however, among other qualities, profoundly urban. Galen did not, like some Roman authors or like his own father, who performed rudimentary biological experiments on crop seeds (De alim. facult. 1.37, 6.552–553K), style himself an expert on agriculture or romanticize life in the countryside. While he prided himself on his ability to talk to peasants and treat their illnesses even in the difficult and limited environment of the countryside, and on his knowledge of dialect and local dietary traditions among peasants, Galen identifies with the urban half of an urban-rural divide in which the countryside is an alien place. It is characterized by poverty, isolation, and lack of the resources and amenities of civilized life; the peasant’s life is one of sickle-wounds, snakebite, famine, and daily hard work, analog and also opposite to the urban resident’s program of exercise in the gymnasium.
The Gymnasium. This latter—gymnastic exercise, what Galen calls gymnasia—he considered an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. That is, his vision of the medically correct life is that of an urban male of the leisured class or, to a lesser extent, the male slaves in such a household. His treatise On Matters of Health instructs readers on the optimal way of life over the lifespan, from infancy to old age. Beginning at age fourteen, exercise in the gymnasium is a critical part of the hypothetical male subject’s routine, discussed at great length. Galen and other Greeks perceived wrestling as the gymnastic exercise par excellence. He describes patients injured while wrestling, and one severe wrestling injury (an acromio-clavicular joint displacement) he incurred himself at age thirty-four (In Hipp. Artic. comment. 1.61, 18a.401–404K). One of his lengthiest and most literary case histories is set partly in a “gymnasium,” possibly the Baths of Trajan or another of Rome’s great bathing com
plexes (De meth. med. 10.3, 10.671–678K). Galen calls the Baths of Trajan the “gymnasium of Trajan,” as he and other sources also called Nero’s baths the “gymnasium of Nero,” not unreasonably interpreting Roman imperial baths, with their palaestras, libraries, lecture-halls, gardens, and lavish decoration, as the equivalent of the Hellenic world’s most important civic and cultural institution.1 The gymnasium was the locus of the physical and intellectual education of upper-class male adolescents and of the controlled violence that (mostly) replaced military service in the Hellenistic period and was fundamental to the idea of masculinity for that class.
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