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
This union of seemingly opposite faults, this plainness without
simplicity, this elaboration without richness, may perhaps be best
explained by Boeckh’s hypothesis, that he modelled his style on that of
his countryman Hegesias of Magnesia, a leader of the Asiatic school of
rhetoric, who, aping the unadorned simplicity of Lysias’s manner, fell
into an abrupt and jerky, yet affected and mincing style, laboriously
chopping and dislocating his sentences so that they never ran smooth,
never by any chance slid into a rounded period with an easy cadence.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus declares peevishly that in all the voluminous
works of Hegesias there was not a single well-written page, and that the
man must have gone wrong not from stupidity but of set purpose and
malice prepense, otherwise he could not have helped writing a good
sentence now and then by accident. Frigid conceits and a puerile play
upon words were mistaken by this perverse writer for literary beauties,
and in the effort to stud his pages with these false jewels he
sacrificed both pathos and truth. In this respect, indeed, Pausanias
happily did not follow the bad example of his predecessor. His writings
are entirely free from paltry conceits and verbal quibbles. The thought
is always manly and direct, however tortuous may be the sentence in
which he seeks to express it. If he imitated Hegesias, it was apparently
in the arrangement of the words and sentences alone.
Whatever may be thought of this theory, the attention which Pausanias
obviously bestowed on literary style is in itself wholly laudable. Such
attention is a simple duty which every author owes to his readers.
Pausanias cannot be blamed for trying to write well; the pity is that
with all his pains he did not write better. He was anxious not to be
needlessly tedious, not to inflict on the reader mere bald lists of
monuments strung together on a topographical thread. He aimed at varying
the phraseology, at shunning the eternal repetition of the same words in
the same order. Yet he steered clear of one shoal only to run aground on
another. If to some extent he avoided monotony and attained variety of
expression, it was too often at the cost of simplicity and clearness.
The natural order of the words was sacrificed and a crabbed contorted
one substituted for it merely in order to vary the run of the sentences.
For the same reason a direct statement was often discarded in favour of
an indirect one, with the result that a reader who happens to be
unfamiliar with the author’s manner is sometimes at a loss as to his
meaning. For example, it has been questioned whether he means that there
was a statue of Aeschylus in the theatre at Athens and one of Oenobius
on the Acropolis. Yet any person conversant with his style must feel
sure that in both these cases Pausanias intends to intimate the
existence of the statue, and that if he does not affirm it in so many
words this is due to no other cause than a wish to turn the sentence in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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