Again, old habit getting the better of him, the sight of a ruined camp of King Philip in a secluded Arcadian valley sets him off rambling on the divine retribution that overtook that wicked monarch and his descendants and the murderers of his descendants and _their_ descendants after them, till, his conscience smiting him, he suddenly returns to business with the half apology, “But this has been a digression.” That Pausanias had the fear of the critics before his eyes is stated by himself in the plainest language. He had made, he tells us, careful researches into the vexed subject of the dates of Homer and Hesiod, but refrained from stating the result of his labours, because he knew very well the carping disposition of the professors of poetry of his own day. Little did he foresee the disposition of certain other professors who were to sit in judgment on him some seventeen hundred years later. Had he done so he might well have been tempted to suppress the _Description of Greece_ altogether, and we might have had to lament the loss of one of the most curious and valuable records bequeathed to us by antiquity. [Sidenote: Birthplace of Pausanias.] The birthplace of Pausanias is less certain than his date, but there are good grounds for believing that he was a Lydian. For after saying that in his country traces were still to be seen of the abode of Pelops and Tantalus, he mentions some monuments and natural features associated with the names of these ancient princes on and near Mount Sipylus. This is nearly a direct affirmation that the region about Mount Sipylus in Lydia was his native land. The same thing appears, though less directly, from the minute acquaintance he displays with the district and from the evident fondness with which he recurs again and again to its scenery and legends. He had seen the white eagles wheeling above the lonely tarn of Tantalus in the heart of the hills; he had beheld the stately tomb of the same hero on Mount Sipylus, the ruined city at the bottom of the clear lake, the rock-hewn throne of Pelops crowning the dizzy peak that overhangs the cañon, and the dripping rock which popular fancy took for the bereaved Niobe weeping for her children. He speaks of the clouds of locusts which he had thrice seen vanish from Mount Sipylus, of the wild dance of the peasantry, and of the shrine of Mother Plastene, whose rude image, carved out of the native rock, may still be seen in its niche at the foot of the mountain. From all this it is fair to surmise that Pausanias was born and bred not far from the mountains which he seems to have known and loved so well. Their inmost recesses he may have explored on foot in boyhood and have drunk in their old romantic legends from the lips of woodmen and hunters. Whether, as some conjecture, he was born at Magnesia, the city at the northern foot of Mount Sipylus, we cannot say, but the vicinity of the city to the mountain speaks in favour of the conjecture.