DESCRIBING GREECE

The Periegesis Hellados (Description of Greece) by Pausanias is the most important example of non-fictional travel literature in ancient Greek. With this work Professor Hutton provides the first book-length literary study of the Periegesis Hellados in nearly a hundred years. He examines Pausanias’ arrangement and expression of his material and evaluates his authorial choices in light of the contemporary literary currents of the day and the cultural milieu of the Roman Empire in the time of Hadrian and the Antonines. The descriptions offered in the Periegesis Hellados are also examined in the context of the archaeo- logical evidence available for the places Pausanias visited. This study reveals Pausanias to be a surprisingly sophisticated literary craftsman and a unique witness to Greek identity at a time when that identity was never more conflicted.

WILLIAM HUTTON is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

GREEK CULTURE IN THE ROMAN WORLD

Editors
SUSAN E. ALCOCK, University of Michigan
JAS ELSNER, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
SIMON GOLDHILL, University of Cambridge

The Greek culture of the Roman Empire offers a rich field of study. Extraordinary insights can be gained into processes of multicultural contact and exchange, political and ideological conflict, and the creativity of a changing, polyglot empire. During this period, many fundamental elements of Western society were being set in place: from the rise of Christianity, to an influential system of education, to long-lived artistic canons. This series is the first to focus on the response of Greek culture to its Roman imperial setting as a significant phenomenon in its own right. To this end, it will publish original and innovative research in the art, archaeology, epigraphy, history, philosophy, religion, and literature of the empire, with an emphasis on Greek material.

Titles in series:

Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire
Jason König

Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias
William Hutton

Reading the Self in the Ancient Greek Novel
Tim Whitmarsh

Image, Place and Power in the Roman Empire: Visual Replication and Urban Elites
Jennifer Trimble

The Making of Roman India
Grant Parker

DESCRIBING GREECE

Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias

BY
WILLIAM HUTTON

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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© Cambridge University Press 2005

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no reproduction of any part may take place without
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First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 521 84720 6 hardback
ISBN-13 978 0 521 84720 9 hardback

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for Martha

Contents

Figures

Tables

Preface

When I was a graduate student I was once invited, along with a number of other students, to dine with a famous classicist who was visiting the campus. The dinner conversation eventually came around to dissertation topics, and I admitted that I was thinking about working on Pausanias. This elicited a scornful hmmph! from our eminent guest. “Well, I realize he’s not Herodotos or Thucydides . . .” I stammered diffidently, and the visitor replied, “Hmmph! He’s not even Aelius Aristeides!”

   This experience, of course, only confirmed me in my path, and the present volume is the ultimate result. In the years since that conversation, work on Aelius Aristeides has continued to languish while the study of Pausanias has blossomed, a development that neither I nor my distinguished dinner companion had any means of foreseeing at the time. This was before Karim Arafat’s monograph on Pausanias appeared; before Jaś Elsner began publishing his groundbreaking articles on Pausanias as traveler, observer, and pilgrim; before the work of such scholars as Susan Alcock began shedding new light on the little-known period of Greek civilization to which Pausanias belonged; before the teams of Italian and French scholars producing the new series of commentaries on Pausanias had progressed very far in their work; even before the efforts of Christian Habicht and Paul Veyne on Pausanias had come to be fully appreciated. It is these scholars, and many others I haven’t named, whom I wish to thank first for laying the foundation upon which this book rests, along with the many archaeologists who continue the painstaking and indispensable work of uncovering the realities of the Greece that Pausanias saw. Thanks to them, Pausanias is currently, with the possible exception of Plutarch and the authors of the New Testament, the most talked-about and written-about Greek author of the Roman period. I can only hope that in these circumstances my own work can make some small contribution to what my pioneering predecessors have already accomplished.

   I first learned to love Pausanias as a student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, under the tutelage of John Camp, who was then Mellon Professor at the school. On two occasions, John invited me to accompany him and Alison Adams on research expeditions in Greece with Kendrick Pritchett, a man whose topographical and historical knowledge no ten scholars, such as they are now, could hope to equal. I fully expect that those trips will prove to be the most inspiring experiences of my entire academic life. None of my work on Pausanias would have been possible without the excellent facilities of the American School, both in Athens and in Corinth, where I was hospitably received at Hill House by Charles Williams and Nancy Bookidis, who were always generous with their knowledge and advice. Subsequently, other Corinthian archaeologists, including Guy Sanders, Benjamin Millis, and David Romano, have shared their time and their expertise in helping me understand the complexities of the site. In my years at the school I have benefitted from the companionship and counsel of many scholars and fellow-students. Among them, I particularly wish to thank Aileen Ajootian and Jennifer Tobin. Many librarians have provided invaluable assistance to my studies, including Camilla McKay and Phyllis Graham at the American School, and Ellen Ross and Erica Bainbridge at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington. I would also like to thank Michael Krumme of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens for his help with the illustrations and for trudging all the way up to Souidias Street in the middle of the Athens summer to bring them to me.

   This work has a distant genetic relationship with the dissertation I wrote for the University of Texas. For that dissertation I had the benefit of the most erudite, helpful, and encouraging committee one could hope for, including Michael Gagarin, Peter Green, Jack Kroll, Cynthia Shelmerdine, and the late Charles Edwards. My thanks to them, and particularly to my dissertation director, Paula Perlman, without whom neither the dissertation nor this descendant of it would have ever seen the light. In addition, many other people have read parts of my work on Pausanias and have saved me from many errors and omissions. These include Christian Habicht, Jaś Elsner, Martha Jones, Gregory Hutton, and the members of the Down Under Writing Group: Natalie Alexander, David Christiansen, Janet Davis, and Martha Rose.

   Pauline Hire was the first to suggest Cambridge University Press as a venue for publication of this work, and I have never regretted that advice. Michael Sharp, Pauline’s successor at the Press, and Sinead Moloney have been models of efficiency and encouragement in shepherding me through the process. I would also like to thank the series editors for their speedy agreement to include my work in their series, and the anonymous reader for the Press, particularly for not being too careful about maintaining his or her anonymity in the course of his or her detailed and constructive comments.

   The research and writing of this work was supported by two fellowships from the American School in Athens, by a University Fellowship from the University of Texas, and by two summer research grants from the College of William and Mary. I wish to express my gratitude to all of my extraordinarily collegial and accommodating colleagues in the Department of Classical Studies at William and Mary, and particularly to my old friends from Athens Linda Reilly, Barbette Spaeth, and John Oakley. To John Oakley I owe a particular debt of thanks; without his gentle but persistent encouragement I would probably still be dithering over footnotes.

   I have incurred many personal debts in the course of writing this book, including to those who provided me with accommodation as well as friendship in the course of my research: Greg, Joann, Rollie and Kirk Willis, Mary Malone, Greg, Andrew and Vera Kochanowsky Hutton, and Seth Carpenter and Mi Hillefors. I also thank Georgia Irby-Massie and Keith Massie for services far beyond the call of friendship. My parents, Sybil and Robert Hutton have never been anything but encouraging in their son’s unusual choice of careers, and they, along with my brothers Wilson and Greg, provided me with a love of learning and of language and a passion for looking at things differently. I have also been fortunate to have extremely supportive parents-in-law in William and Catherine Jones. Finally, my wife, Martha Taylor Jones, has been my constant supporter and companion in my life, my travels, and in the long and agonizing journey of book-writing. That only begins to express what I owe to her.

   In what follows, abbreviations of ancient authors and texts follow the standards of Liddell–Scott and the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3^rd edition). The titles of classical-studies journals are abbreviated as in L’Année philologique. Quotations of the Greek text of Pausanias follow the Teubner edition by F. Spiro, unless otherwise noted. Translations from Greek, Latin, German, French, and Italian are my own unless otherwise noted. On the subject of the transliteration of Greek names, my attitude is similar to that expressed by Jeffrey Hurwit in his book The Athenian Acropolis (Cambridge, 1999): “My transliteration of ancient Greek is admittedly inconsistent (using ‘c’ in ‘Acropolis’ but ‘k’ in ‘Perikles’, for instance): I have my reasons but they do not matter much.”