Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History: Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,'Frazer, James George
History
Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History: Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,'
Frazer, James George
Greece -- Antiquities; Greece -- Description and travel
'Chalcis is a city of most worthy Greeks.'”
These passages, which I have perhaps quoted at too great length, may
suffice. I will spare the reader a long description of Mount Pelion, its
pine-woods, its wild flowers, and its simples, which seems to be a
fragment of the same work. Two points only in the description of the
mountain may be mentioned. The writer tells us that the knowledge of
certain simples was hereditary in a single family, who kept it a
profound secret, though they refused to accept any money from the sick
people whom they tended, deeming it would be impious to do so. These
herbalists claimed to be descended from the centaur Chiron. Again, we
learn from the writer how in the greatest heat of summer, when the Dog
Star rose, a procession of men of good birth and in the prime of life,
all chosen by the priest and all clad in sheepskins, ascended through
the pine-woods to the cave of Chiron and a sanctuary of Zeus on the top
of the mountain. He mentions the sheepskins as a proof of the great
height of Mount Pelion, as if without them the men would have shivered
on the mountain even while the plains below were sweltering and baking
in the heat. But it is more probable that the sheepskins had some
religious significance.
[Sidenote: The
pseudo-Dicaearchus
and
Pausanias
compared.]
This account of the procession of skin-clad men to the cave and
sanctuary on the top of the high mountain reads not unlike a passage in
Pausanias. But how different is almost all the rest of this writer’s
description of Greece from that of Pausanias! Instead of a dull patient
enumeration of monuments, arranged in topographical order and seldom
enlivened even by a descriptive epithet, we have slight highly-coloured
sketches of the general appearance of the towns—the white city of
Tanagra on the hill with the pretty painted porches of the houses;
Chalcis with its handsome buildings, its shady trees, its flowing
springs, its spacious market beside the narrows where the tide runs fast
and the porters are busy unlading the ships in the harbour; Thebes in
summer with its fine new streets, its verdure, its fruit and flowers,
and the balmy freshness of the perfumed air blowing over gardens; Thebes
in winter, swept by bitter cutting winds, the streets deep in mud and
whitened by the falling snow; Athens with its old narrow lanes and mean
houses, and now and then a glimpse between them of the resplendent
Parthenon, like a sun-burst, high up against the sky. Then again as to
the people, what a contrast between the grave Pausanias, who hardly
allows us to see them except at their devotions, and the sparkling
writer who so often lifts the veil of the past and lets us catch a
glimpse of the bustling motley crowd and hear the hum of their
voices—the crowd that ceased to bustle and the voices that fell silent
so long ago. We see the hungry populace at Athens forgetting their empty
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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