Pausania
Guida della Grecia
Guida della Grecia
[Guide to Greece]
Edited by Domenico Musti and Mario Torelli
Edited by Domenico Musti and Mario Torelli
Ten volumes
Lorenzo Valla Foundation / Mondadori, 1982-2017
Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro. Part One
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| Ruins of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia Source: Karta24 via Wikimedia Commons |
Go back to Part One
We are continuing with the transcription of the
text of the cover flaps of the single volumes of Pausanias’ Guide to Greece published by the Lorenzo Valla
Foundation.
Guide to Greece
Book V. Elis and Olympia
Edited by Gianfranco Maddoli and Vincenzo Saladino
Lorenzo Valla Foundation – Arnoldo Mondadori Publishing House, 1995
Text of the cover flap:
"Nothing is more moving than the religious
veneration that interrupted Pausanias’ style when he spoke of Olympia. «Many things among the Greeks are
miraculous, some when they are seen, others when they are told: but above all
there is a divine intervention when they celebrate the mysteries of Eleusis and
the games of Olympia.»
Everything was sacred, in Olympia. Sacred were the places: the rivers, the
sands, the olive trees «with
a beautiful crown»,
evoked with great sobriety. Sacred were the origins of the festivals, which
dated back to Zeus and to Heracles: to which Hermes and Ares took part; and
then, after a long forgetfulness, they were renewed in historical time, by men
assailed by memory. Sacred were the races, which often Pausanias narrated with
enchanting grace. Sacred were temples and statues, which Pausanias described
with scruple and attention, dwelling above all on the temple of Zeus and on the
statue of Phidias. A particular moved him. According to tradition, when the
statue had already been completed, Phidias begged the god to send him a sign of
confirmation whether the statue was to his liking; and immediately a
thunderbolt fell, as a testimony of divine favour.
Pausanias saw a lot in Olympia: official
exegetes also explained him a lot. But neither the exegetes nor he could understand
anymore several things; and we feel how much Pausanias was grieved by this dark
blanket spread out by time, which its intelligence and its culture could not
lift."
Guide to Greece
Book VI. Elis and Olympia
Edited by Gianfranco Maddoli, Massimo Nafissi and Vincenzo Saladino
Lorenzo Valla Foundation – Arnoldo Mondadori Publishing House, 1999
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| Ruins of the Temple of Hera at Olympia Source: Matěj Baťha via Wikimedia Commons |
Text of the cover flap:
"In October 1995, the Lorenzo Valla
Foundation published the Book V of Pausanias’ Guide to Greece, dedicated to Elys and Olimpia, and edited by
Gianfranco Maddoli and Vincenzo Saladino. Now, the same editors, together with
Massimo Nafissi, are publishing Book VI [n.d.t. always on Elis and Olympia], which Pausanias
consecrated to the dearest places he had in Greece. His was, first of all, a
catalogue: of athletes, of sculptors, of landscapes, of competitions, of gods,
of myths; like Homer, he wished to give a complete representation and
enumeration of reality. So we learned the names of great athletes and great
sculptors, like Phidias or Polykleitos: we saw stadiums and gyms: we saw horse
races, short or double or long runs, boxing, fight and pankration competitions.
We would not understand anything of Pausanias if we did not grasp the religious
aura that enveloped the sporting competitions for him. The athletes imitated
the demigods like Heracles or the heroes like Achilles: they were heroes
themselves: with heroes they shared disproportion and madness; and often they
received heroic or divine honours in their cities. Pausanias was very sensitive
to this legendary aura, and loved to tell myths, legends, stories of demons,
miracles, which formed a kind of fantastic sounding box around his scrupulous
catalogue. In the second part of the book, Pausanias left Olympia, and described
the landscapes and cities and monuments of the rest of the Elis. What
desolation and ruin. The left and terrifying hand of time had spread out on the
archaic and classical Greece, which Pausanias adored.
The rich commentary reconstructs the
historical, religious, geographical and artistic background of the text of
Pausanias, and is precious for any scholar of classical antiquity or for anyone
today who wishes to visit Olympia and the Peloponnese in the footsteps of the
ancient Greeks."
Guide to Greece
Book VII. Achaea
Edited by Mauro Moggi and Massimo Osanna
Lorenzo Valla Foundation – Arnoldo Mondadori Publishing House, 2000
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| Roman Theatre of Patras (before 160 a.C). Source: Carole Raddato via Wikimedia Commons |
Text of the cover flap:
"The
seventh volume of the Guide to Greece,
i.e. Achaea, published by the
Fondazione Valla and curated by Mauro Moggi and Massimo Osanna, is the most touching.
Pausanias never revealed so deeply, as here, his love for Greece: for religion,
history, literature, language, art, landscape, stones, and for the daily life
of his ideal country. In the second century before Christ, Greece had lapsed:
Pausanias did not know whether by the will of the gods, or by betrayal and
cowardice of men. First the Macedonians and then the Romans possessed and
occupied Greece; and now that glorious body remained only as «a mutilated and mostly dry plant». Pausanias looked with despair at
this end: but he could not see any other light in the history of the world, and
with veneration he travelled through the sacred places, and he described with
precision and hidden passion landscapes and stones.
After the
first historical part, the rest of the seventh book was dedicated to the gods,
to the cities, to the trees, to the archaic statues, to the oracles of Achaea.
We know the oracle of Hermes. Who arrived in the square of Fare in the evening,
whispered a question to the statue of the god: then he stopped his ears and went
away: when he left the square, he took his hands off his ears; the first words
he heard revealed the response of Hermes. We know stories of love. A man fell
in love with a sea nymph, who abandoned him. He died of love: Aphrodite transformed
him in a river; but not even as running water could he forget the passion that bounded
him to the nymph. Then Aphrodite gave him the last and greatest of gifts: he made
him forget her. Then Aphrodite turned his waves into remedy and oblivion for
all the unhappy lovers who immerse their limbs."
Guide to Greece
Book VIII. Arcadia
Edited by Mauro Moggi and Massimo Osanna
Lorenzo Valla Foundation – Arnoldo Mondadori Publishing House, 2003
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| Guercino, Et in Arcadia Ego, about 1618, Rome, Palazzo Barberini Source: https://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/g/guercino/0/arcadia.html |
Text of the cover flap:
"The
eighth book of the Guide to Greece -
which Mauro Moggi and Massimo Osanna have edited for the Valla Foundation - is
dedicated to Arcadia. Pausanias travelled slowly through it: he paused and
described «everything
that is worthy of being seen». Arcadia was, for him, the most venerable region of Greece because it was
the oldest: the cradle of Hellenic civilization. The place closest to nature
and gods. For this reason, Pausanias represented, more than in the other books,
the aspects of nature: the oaks, the beeches, the cypresses, the olive trees,
the corks, the underground rivers. Then the gods, temples, cities, statues that
bore within themselves the sign of the archaic: the god Pan and the goddess
Demeter, with the head of a horse and snakes and proud on the head; the temple
of Athena Alea in Tegea; the wooden statues; and Lycosura, the city that «the
sun first saw». What attracted him was, always, the most secret part of the
temples, where the sacred lived. Contrary to in his youth, when he had thought
that mythology told frivolous things, he was now convinced that tales about
gods hid a deep enigmatic wisdom.
While
Pausanias wrote, the earth had decayed and decayed: wickedness spread
everywhere: Arcadia was a single desolation - destroyed temples, bases without
statues, shapeless ruins. Everywhere, Pausanias saw the signs of «destiny, which wishes to always
operate something new and changes things equally and leads them, with iron
necessity, as it disposes». «Human
events are precarious and extremely fragile». This is the fate of the universe: but especially
of Greece - an exhausted land, with no more of the beloved and revered temples,
no more valuable men, no larger books."
[Editor's
note: Salvatore Settis has reviewed the volume in the daily Repubblica on 3 March 2004 with an article entitled Little shepherds and snakes. The
descriptions of Pausanias in the Valla Foundation].
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| Nicolas Poussin, Sheperds of Arcadia, about 1640, Paris, Louvre Museum Source: The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons |
Guide to Greece
Book IX. Boeotia
Edited by Mauro Moggi and Massimo Osanna
Lorenzo Valla Foundation – Arnoldo Mondadori Publishing House, 2010
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| Attic Kylix of the Painter of Oedipus, Oedispus listening to the riddle of the sphinx, about 470 b.C. circa, Città del Vaticano, Musei Vaticani Source: http://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/it/collezioni/musei/museo-gregoriano-etrusco/sala-xix--emiciclo-inferiore--collezione-dei-vasi--ceramica-atti/kylix-attica-del-pittore-di-edipo.html |
Text of the
cover flap:
"When, in the second century of our era,
Pausanias set about writing his description of Greece, the greatest splendour
of Hellenic civilization had already set, but its monuments still remained
alive and imposing, like ever more gigantic shadows than imagination: temples,
paintings, sculptures, myths: memory. In Book IX, dedicated to Boeotia, the
writer moved from Platea - where the battle of 479 BC, with the death of the
Persian commander Mardonius and the victory of the Hellenic league led by the
Spartan Pausanias, sanctioned the end of the Persian invasion of Greece - and
closed his journey with Chaeronea, the place where Philip of Macedonia
defeated, in 338, an army of Greek cities: they lost their independence
forever. However, Thebes dominated the book, with his tragic history of
fratricidal struggles, incestuous marriages, parricides, children shattered by
mothers, incurable hate: from the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony to Oedipus,
Creon, Eteocles and Polynices, from Amphion to Amphitryon, Pausanias traced the
events of the city here. But Boeotia was also the land of poetry, music,
oracles and mantic. It was the land of Glaucus, the fisherman who became a
deity of the sea and began to predict the future of men; of the eerie Tiresias,
the prophet of Odysseus, Oedipus and Narcissus. And above all of Mount Helicon,
covered with trees and bushes of wild strawberries, in the middle of the book. He
dedicated a specific treatment to the goddesses of this mountain, the Muses, as
well as to their origin and their iconography. On the slopes of Mount Helicon,
in their sanctuary, were the statues of poets, musicians and singers: Linos, Thamyris
Arion, Orpheus and Hesiod: the latest was born there, and the author recalled
his poetic investiture. The successor of Hesiod, then, was the Theban Pindar:
here were the remains of his house, the tomb, the honours granted to him by the
Pythia. And the story of his poetic initiation: «When he was a young man,» Pausanias said, «Pindar, going to Thebes in the hot
season, around noon was seized by the fatigue and the sleep that ensues;
therefore, he laid down a little, as it was, over the road; while he was
sleeping, bees began to fly over him and to shape a honeycomb on his lips»."
[Editor's
note: The volume has been reviewed by Pietro Citati in the daily Repubblica on December 31, 2010
(Pausania, walking among the ruins looking for Greece of the myth) and by
Giuseppe Zanetto in the Sunday edition of the daily Il Sole24Ore on February
27, 2011 (Black Boeotia, idea of Greekness)].
Guide to Greece
Book X. Delphi and Phocis
Edited by Umberto Bultrighini and Mario Torelli
Lorenzo Valla Foundation – Mondadori, 2017
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| Columns of the Temple of Apollo (Delphi) Source: Runner1928 via Wikimedia Commons |
Text of the
cover flap:
"We have
come to the end of the great Guide to
Greece, the periegesis that Pausania performed, in the second century after
Christ, in the age of the Antonines, gathering historical, artistic and
mythological information in the context of a geographic journey: in Book I, about Athens; in Books V and VI, at the centre of the work, about Olympia and the Elis;
in Book X, about Delphi. A tripolar structure, therefore, for the Guide, the work of a scholar with the -
largely realized - ambitions of being a historical emulator of Herodotus,
engaged above all in recovering (through his travels across places and
monuments of memory) the archaic, classical and proto-Hellenistic Greekness. Delphi
rightly occupied the final book, due to its characteristics of a
"summary" site of the Hellenicity. After the crossroads where Oedipus
killed his father, and where Laios' grave was still located, the great Schiste
road climbed up becoming «steeper and more difficult even for a man without baggage»: he climbed up the mountain on which Delphi stood, with its sanctuary, its temples, caves, rocks, sources,
inscriptions, statues, paintings. Pausanias noted and compared everything: he dug
into legends, brought back passages otherwise lost and precious for us, told
the story of the oracle, of the «general assembly of the Greeks» and of the
competitions, the Pythian Games, which gradually took hold there. We saw him
enter the sacred enclosure of Apollo, examine the ex-voto, stop in front of the
sculptures, contemplate the bronze horse donated by the Argives, «which is the famous wooden horse of
Troy, the work of Antifanes of Argos», the statues made with the tenth of the
enterprise of Marathon and performed by Phidias: Athena, Apollo, Miltiades,
Erechtheus. Going through Delphi, the one who reads actually went through the
very memory of Greece: the maxims of the wise, «know yourself» and «ban the excesses», a bronze Homer with the oracle given to him,
the throne of Pindar, the tomb of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles. We are at the
beginning of everything. In the great room built by the Cnidians, where
Pausanias dwelled for a long time with marvellous and protracted concentration,
Polygnotus’ paintings stood out: the destruction of Troy, and the descent into
the underworld - the world of Iliad, that of the Odyssey.
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