Description of Greece
Hellados Periegesis
Systematically walking the roads of mainland Greece and recording every temple, statue, tomb, and local legend along the way preserves, at a moment when much of it was already decaying under Roman rule, a physical and cultural record of Greek religious and civic life that would otherwise vanish entirely.
- a systematic regional travel guide to Greece
- preservation of monuments and local myth
- written under Roman provincial rule
- modern archaeological use for site identification
- antiquarian memory-preservation project
Pausanias's Description of Greece guides its reader region by region, Attica, Corinth, Laconia, Elis (with a detailed account of Olympia), Arcadia, Boeotia, describing monuments, artworks, and tombs he claims to have seen personally, along with local myths and cult practices attached to each site. Pausanias was probably a native of Lydia, likely Magnesia ad Sipylum, but he traveled continuously through Greece over decades gathering material, and no ancient source records where, if anywhere fixed, he actually composed the text. Written when Greece was a settled, provincial part of the Roman Empire and many classical monuments were already crumbling, Pausanias's project combines a travel guide's practicality with an antiquarian's determination to preserve fading cultural memory. Modern archaeologists have repeatedly used his descriptions to locate ancient ruins, including the sanctuary at Olympia.
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