On the state of the roads he is still more reticent than on that of the country. The dreadful Scironian road—the _Via Mala_ of Greece—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 [Sidenote: His descriptions of the 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 people whom 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