So much for the sources of historical and traditionary lore on which Pausanias drew. That he always used them correctly cannot be maintained. We can show that he sometimes mistook the purport of inscriptions and blundered as to historical events and personages, but these mistakes are not more numerous than can be reasonably allowed for in a work embracing so great and multifarious a collection of facts. [Sidenote: Did Pausanias describe Greece from books or from personal observation?] Coming now to the descriptive or topographical part, which forms the staple of Pausanias’s work, we have to ask, Whence did he derive his knowledge of the places and and monuments he describes? from observation? or from books? or from both? To these questions Pausanias himself gives no full and direct answer. He neither professes to have seen everything that he describes nor does he acknowledge to have borrowed any of his descriptions from previous writers, whom he barely alludes to and never mentions by name. On the other hand he sometimes affirms in the most unambiguous language that he saw the things which he describes, and as there is no [Sidenote: He affirms that he saw many things which he describes.] reason to doubt his word we may accept these affirmations unconditionally, and believe that he describes some things at least as an eye-witness. But such assertions of personal knowledge are only incidental, and the total number of them is exceedingly small in comparison with the number of places and things which he describes without saying whether he saw them or not. Thus in regard to the vast majority of Pausanias’s descriptions we have still to ask, Are they based on personal observation or taken from books? In endeavouring to answer this question we must first of all bear in mind that if Pausanias saw all that he professes to have seen it is inevitable that he should have seen a great deal more. For example, he could not have seen, as he professes to have done, certain statues on the Acropolis of Athens without also seeing the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, and the Propylaea, which he does not expressly say that he saw. He could not have seen, as he says he did, the statue of Anaximenes and the Sicyonian treasury at Olympia without also seeing the temples of Zeus and Hera and a multitude of buildings and statues besides. In short, in all the places which he appears on his own showing to have visited, we may and must assume that he saw much more than he claims in so many words to have seen. Further, since he was not transported from one place to another by magic, he must have travelled over the roads which joined the various places that he visited. Thus by plotting out on the map the places which he saw and joining them by the routes he describes, we can form some general notion of the extent of Pausanias’s travels in Greece. Yet the notion thus