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
From these and a few more hints we may draw some conclusions as to the
dates when the various books that make up the _Description of Greece_
were written. In the seventh book Pausanias tells us that his
description of Athens was finished before Herodes Atticus built the
Music Hall in memory of his wife Regilla. As Regilla appears to have
died in 160 or 161 A.D. and the Music Hall was probably built soon
afterwards, we may suppose that Pausanias had finished his first book by
160 or 161 A.D. at latest. There is, indeed, some ground for holding
that both the first and the second book were composed much earlier. For
in the second book Pausanias mentions a number of buildings which had
been erected in his own lifetime by a Roman senator Antoninus in the
sanctuary of Aesculapius at Epidaurus. If, as seems not improbable, the
Roman senator was no other than the Antoninus who afterwards reigned as
Antoninus Pius, we should naturally infer that the second book was
published in the reign of Hadrian, that is, not later than 138 A.D., the
year when Hadrian died and Antoninus succeeded him on the throne. With
this it would agree that no emperor later than Hadrian is mentioned in
the first or second book, or indeed in any book before the eighth.
Little weight, however, can be attached to this circumstance, for in the
fifth book Hadrian is the last emperor mentioned although that book was
written, as we have seen, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, thirty-six
years after Hadrian’s death. A much later date has been assigned to the
second book by Mr. W. Gurlitt in his valuable monograph on Pausanias. He
points out that when Pausanias wrote it the sanctuary of Aesculapius at
Smyrna had already been founded, and that if Masson’s chronology of the
life of the rhetorician Aristides is right the sanctuary was still
unfinished in 165 A.D. Hence Mr. Gurlitt concludes that the second book
of Pausanias was written after 165 A.D. Even the first book, according
to him, must be dated not earlier than 143 A.D. His reason is that when
Pausanias wrote this book the stadium at Athens had already been rebuilt
of white marble by Herodes Atticus, and that the reconstruction cannot,
if Professor C. Wachsmuth is right, have been begun before 143 A.D. or a
little earlier. With regard to the other books, the evidence, scanty as
it is, is less conflicting. The fifth book, as we have seen, was
composed in the year 174 A.D. The eighth book, in which mention is made
of the victory of Marcus Antoninus over the Germans, must have been
written after 166 A.D., the year when the German war broke out, and may
have been written in or after 176 A.D., the year in which the emperor
celebrated a triumph for his success. In the tenth book occurs the
reference to the inroad of the Costobocs; hence the book was written
between 166 and 180 A.D. Further, the references which Pausanias makes
both forwards and backwards to the several parts of his work show that
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