Laudator Temporis Acti

Thanks very much to David K. for sending me volume 3 of the Loeb Classical Library (LCL) edition of Pausanias as a gift. It's surprising that anyone, other than relatives and close friends, bothers to read this blog. It's also gratifying and touching to realize that someone appreciates it enough to send a gift, as occasionally happens.

When I was at university, one of the professors invited some students to read Pausanias with him over the summer. I didn't stay with the group long, alas, but I've recently been reading Pausanias systematically, book by book. Pausanias says little about himself—in the first half of his work a few nuggets of homely wisdom attracted my notice (translations from the LCL edition, mostly by W.H.S. Jones).

1.3.3:

But there are many false beliefs current among the mass of mankind, since they are ignorant of historical science and consider trustworthy whatever they have heard from childhood in choruses and tragedies.

1.5.4:

But there is no way for a mortal to overstep what the deity sees fit to send.

1.10.3:

Love is wont to bring many calamities upon men.

2.1.5 (of attempts to dig a canal through the isthmus of Corinth):

So difficult it is for man to alter by violence what Heaven has made.

2.8.6:

But no man finds all of his plans turn out according to his liking.

2.23.6:

It is not easy to make the multitude change their views.

3.23.3:

For to a man whose object is gain what is sacred is of less account than what is profitable.

4.2.3:

Most matters of Greek history have come to be disputed.

4.4.3:

These are the accounts given by the two sides; one may believe them according to one's feelings towards either side.

4.4.7:

For among the many inducements to be found in humans which drive us to wrongdoing the love of gain exercises the greatest power.

4.9.6:

But human affairs and human purpose above all are obscured by fate, just as the mud of a river hides a pebble.

4.11.6:

Men are apt to be most annoyed by what they regard as beneath them.

4.28.8:

Indeed Homer's ideas have proved useful to men in every matter.

5.10.1:

Many are the sights to be seen in Greece, and many are the wonders to be heard; but on nothing does Heaven bestow more care than on the Eleusinian rites and the Olympic games.

5.25.3:

The benevolence of the gods makes all things easy.

Peter Levi, in his Penguin Classics translation, praised Pausanias as follows:

The work of which this is a translation was conceived in an age of dictatorship and false enlightenment, but is impregnated with that sense of a persistent religion, of the inevitable victories of reason, and of the godlike resurrections of liberty and democracy in Greece which make Greek stones noble.

David Konstan once gave an essay the title "The Joys of Pausanias". I've found joy and pleasure in reading the first five books of Pausanias, and I look forward to reading the rest.