Pausanias in the World of Greek Myth

Abstract

Pausanias gives us the clearest glimpse of Greek myth as a living, local tradition. He shows us how the physical world existed in myriad complex and shifting relationships with the world of storytelling, and what was at stake in claims to possess the past. He demonstrates how myths guided curious travellers to particular places, the kinds of responses they provoked, and the ways they could be tested or disputed. The Periegesis attests to a form of cultural tourism we would still recognize: it is animated by the desire to see for oneself distant places previously only read about. It shows us how travellers might map the literary landscapes that they imagined on to the reality, and how locals might ‘package’ their cities to meet the demands of travellers’ expectations. This book uses Pausanias’s text as a lens on the spatial dynamics of myth. It reveals the significance of local stories in an Empire connected by a shared literary paideia, and the unifying power of a tradition made up paradoxically of narratives that took diverse, conflicting forms on the ground. And it shows how storytelling and the physical infrastructures of the Greek mainland were intricately interwoven such that the decline or flourishing of the latter affected the archive of myth that Pausanias transmits.