James George Frazer
Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History
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Table of contents
PREFACE
PAUSANIAS | AND OTHER GREEK SKETCHES
PREFACE
The Englishman in Greece who pays any heed to the remains of
classical antiquity is apt, if he be no scholar, to wonder who a
certain Pausanias was whose authority he finds often quoted on
questions of ancient buildings and sites. The first of the
following sketches may do something to satisfy his curiosity on
this head. It has already served as an introduction to a version of
Pausanias’s Description of Greece which I published with a
commentary two years ago. The account of Pericles was contributed
to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I desire to
thank Messrs. A. and C. Black for their courteous permission to
republish it. The other sketches are reprinted, with some small
changes and adjustments of detail, from my commentary on Pausanias.
References to authorities have been omitted as needless in a book
which is not specially addressed to the learned. Any one who wishes
to pursue the subject further will find my authorities amply cited
in the original volumes. Among works from which I have borrowed
both outlines and colours for some of my sketches of Greek
landscape I will here mention only two—the Erinnerungen und
Eindrücke aus Griechenland of the Swiss scholar W. Vischer, and the
Peloponnes of the German geologist Mr. A. Philippson. Slight and
fragmentary as these sketches are, I am not without hope that they
may convey to readers who have never seen Greece something of the
eternal charm of its scenery. To such as already know and love the
country they will yet be welcome, if here and there they revive
some beautiful or historic scene on those tablets of the mind from
which even the brightest hues so quickly fade.
PAUSANIAS | AND OTHER GREEK SKETCHES
Greece in
the second
century
A.D.
I. Pausanias and his Description of Greece.—It may be
reckoned a peculiar piece of good fortune that among the wreckage
of
classical literature the
Description of Greece by Pausanias
should have come down to us entire. In this work we possess a
plain,
unvarnished account by an eye-witness of the state of Greece in the
second century of our era. Of no other part of the ancient world
has
a description at once so minute and so trustworthy survived, and if
we had been free to single out one country in one age of which we
should wish a record to be preserved, our choice might well have
fallen on Greece in the age of the Antonines. No other people has
exerted so deep and abiding an influence on the course of modern
civilisation as the Greeks, and never could all the monuments of
their chequered but glorious history have been studied so fully as
in
the second century of our era. The great age of the nation, indeed,
had long been over, but in the sunshine of peace and imperial
favour
Greek art and literature had blossomed again. New temples had
sprung
up; new images had been carved; new theatres and baths and
aqueducts
ministered to the amusement and luxury of the people. Among the new
writers whose works the world will not willingly let die, it is
enough to mention the great names of Plutarch and Lucian.
