Editorial

Pausanias. Description of Greece. Book II

03 may, 2022≈ 2 min read

Author

Maria de Fátima Silva

Synopsis

Pausanias is our only testimony to periegetic literature and the author of a precious account of Greece under Roman occupation (2nd century AD). His description is that of someone who has travelled and synthetizes what he 'saw', with a gaze that is not only that of a curious tourist, but of an intellectual who has a solid cultural background and extensive information, as a result of a careful collection of all kinds of sources, oral and written.

We owe an enormous debt to Pausanias: that of having saved a ballast of monuments, historical events, figures and traditions which, without him, would have been definitively erased from the memory of mankind.