Again, it has been argued that Pausanias copied his description of Arcadia from much older writers because, it is said, he pictures the country as in a flourishing state, whereas Strabo says that most of the famous cities of Arcadia had either ceased to exist or had left hardly a trace of themselves behind. How little the testimony of Strabo is worth when he speaks of the interior of Greece is shown by his famous statement that not a vestige of Mycenae remained. Contrast this statement with the brief but accurate description which Pausanias gives of the walls and the lion-gate of Mycenae as they were in his day and as they remain down to this; then say whether the testimony of Strabo is to outweigh that of Pausanias on questions of Greek topography. In fact it is generally recognised that Strabo had visited very few parts of Greece, perhaps none but Corinth. We may therefore well hesitate to confide in his vague sweeping assertion as to the desolation of Arcadia. A simple fact suffices to upset it. Coins of the Roman period prove that seven out of the eleven cities, which he says had ceased to exist or had left hardly a trace behind, were still inhabited and doing business long after the agreeable, but not too scrupulously accurate, geographer had been gathered to his fathers. Nor, again, is it true to say that Pausanias describes Arcadia as if it were in a prosperous state. On the contrary, the long array of ruined or shrunken cities, deserted villages, and roofless shrines, which he has not failed to chronicle, leave on the reader, as they left on the writer himself, a melancholy impression of desolation and decay. The only two cities which from his description we should gather to have been in a tolerably thriving condition are Tegea and Mantinea. As to the former we have the precious testimony of Strabo himself that “it kept pretty well together.” As to Mantinea, if we cannot trust the evidence of Pausanias, we can surely trust the architectural and inscriptional evidence which proves that in the Roman period the theatre was rebuilt, and that not many years before Pausanias was born Roman merchants resided in the city, great reconstructions were carried out in the market-place, a marble colonnade added to it, banqueting-halls and treasuries built, a bazaar surrounded with workshops erected, and a semicircular hall reared which, in the words of an inscription referring to it, “would by itself be an ornament of the city.” The remains of these buildings, together with the ancient walls and gates of the city almost in their entire extent though not to their full height, were visible down to the year 1890 A.D. at least.[5] All this in a city which, if we were to believe Strabo, had vanished from the earth before his time leaving little or no traces of it behind. So much for the comparative value of the testimony of Strabo and Pausanias with regard to Arcadia. ----- Footnote 5: