Pausanias Guide To Ancient Greece

A Greek who lived in Asia Minor during the second century A.D., Pausanias traveled through Greece and wrote an invaluable description of its classical sites that is a treasure trove of information on archaeology, religion, history, and art. Although ignored during his own time, Pausanias is increasingly important in ours—to historians, tourists, and archaeologists. Christian Habicht offers a wide-ranging study of Pausanias' work and personality. He investigates his background, chronology, and methods, and also discusses Pausanias' value as a guide for modern scholars and travellers, his attitude toward the Roman world he lived in, and his reception among critics in modern times. A new preface summarizes the most recent scholarship.

Christian Habicht offers a wide-ranging study of the work and identity of Pausanias, a Greek who lived in Asia Minor during the 2nd century A.D. Pausanias' account of his travels through Greece offers an invaluable description of Greek classical sites that is a treasure trove of information on archaeology, religion, history, and art of interest to modern scholars and travellers alike.

In this book, Maria Pretzler combines a thorough introduction to Pausanias with exciting new perspectives. She considers the process and influences that shaped the "Periegesis", and maps out its literary and cultural context. Pausanias' text records contemporary interpretations of monuments and traditions, and is concerned with the identity and history of Greece, issues that were crucial concerns for Greeks under Roman rule. Parallels with various texts of the period offer insights into Pausanias' attitudes as well as illustrating important aspects of Second Sophistic culture. A discussion of Greek texts that deal with fictional or actual travel experiences provides a background for a detailed study of the Periegesis as travel literature. Pausanias' treatment of geography and his descriptions of landscapes, cities and artworks are considered in detail, and there is also a study of his methods as a historian. The final chapters deal with Pausanias' impact on modern approaches to Greece and ancient Greek culture.

Written by a Greek traveller in the second century ad for a principally Roman audience, Pausanias' Guide to Greece is a comprehensive, extraordinarily literate and well-informed guidebook for tourists of the age. Concentrating on buildings, tombs and statues, it also describes in detail the myths, religious beliefs and historical background behind the monuments considered. In doing so, it preserves Greek legends, quotes classical literature and poetry that would otherwise have been lost, and offers a fascinating depiction of the glory of classical Greece immediately before its third-century decline. This, the second of two volumes, explores Southern Greece including Sparta, Arkadia, Bassae and the games at Olympia. An inspiration to travellers and writers across the ages, including Byron and Shelley, it remains one of the most influential of all travel books.

Written in the second century AD by a Greek traveller for a predominantly Roman audience, Pausanias' Guide to Greece is an extraordinarily literate and well-informed guidebook. A study of buildings, traditions and myth, it describes with precision and eloquence the glory of classical Greece shortly before its ultimate decline in the third century. This volume, the first of two, concerns the five provinces of central Greece, with an account of cities including Athens, Corinth and Thebes and a compelling depiction of the Oracle at Delphi. Along the way, Pausanias recounts Greek legends that are unknown from any other source and quotes a wealth of classical literature and poetry that would otherwise have been lost. An inspiration to Byron and Shelley, the Guide to Greece remains one of the most influential travel books ever written.

Pausanias, the Greek historian and traveler, lived and wrote around the second century AD, during the period when Greece had fallen peacefully to the Roman Empire. While fragments from this period abound, Pausanias' Periegesis ("description") of Greece is the only fully preserved text of travel writing to have survived. This collection uses Pausanias as a multifaceted lens yielding indispensable information about the cultural world of Roman Greece.

Pausanias's Guide to Greece has long been the key source for archaeologists and art historians researching the monuments and landscape of ancient Greece. These writings reveal its impact on modern ideas regarding ancient Greece.