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
More famous than either of these difficulties is one which occurs in
Pausanias’s account of Athens. Here in the middle of describing the
market-place, which lay to the north-west of the Acropolis, he suddenly
without a word of warning transports the reader to the Enneacrunus
fountain, which lay in the bed of the Ilissus, not far from the
Olympieum, at the opposite extremity of the city; then, having
despatched the fountain and some buildings in its neighbourhood, he
whirls the reader back to the market-place, and proceeds with his
description of it as if nothing had happened. Of the many attempts to
clear up this mystery, as by supposing either a dislocation of the text
or a confusion in the author’s notes or the existence of another
fountain near the market-place which may have been shown to him as the
Enneacrunus, none is free from serious difficulties. That he fell into
error through copying blindly and unintelligently from a book is
possible but very improbable. As it is practically certain that he
visited Athens and saw both the market-place and the Olympieum, the
chances that he should not have seen the Enneacrunus and should
therefore have been driven to borrow his description of it from a book
are so small that they may be neglected.
[Sidenote: Law-courts
at Athens
and altars
at Olympia.]
Other passages which Pausanias may perhaps have taken either wholly or
in part from books are his account of the Athenian law-courts and his
list of the altars at Olympia. Neither of these passages, it is true, is
demonstrably infected by error or confusion, though there is some ground
for suspecting the existence of confusion in the enumeration of the
altars. But in both of them the author departs from the topographical
order of description, which is so characteristic of his method, and
arranges the monuments together simply on the ground of their belonging
to the same class. These departures from his usual principle of order
suggest that in both cases Pausanias may have borrowed from written
documents in which the monuments were grouped together according to kind
rather than in topographical order. Another set of monuments which
Pausanias links together by a chain other than the topographical are the
buildings erected by Hadrian in Athens. It is possible that he may have
taken his list of them from the inscription in the Athenian Pantheon
which recorded them all.
These are perhaps the most notable passages in Pausanias, which might be
thought to bear traces of having been derived either wholly or in part
from written documents rather than from personal observation. In none of
them are the indications so clear as to amount to a proof of borrowing.
At most they raise a probability of it, nothing more.
[Sidenote: Predecessors
of
Pausanias.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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