Travel through Ancient Greece with Pausanias, the first travel writer in history. A journey of ruins, myths and sacred memory.
Table of Contents
When Memory Becomes Travel
There was a Greek author who accompanied me through my university years. When my ancient history professor began to speak—without enthusiasm—about the monuments left behind for posterity, the wanderings of Pausanias kept coming back. I will try to make this journey much more enjoyable for you.
Imagine it. The day rises slowly over the sacred lands of Boeotia. The first rays of light caress the hills, slip through the leaves of century-old olive trees, and dance on the dust of the paths. A man walks, alone, his sandals softly tapping the red earth once trodden by so many heroes. At his belt, a scroll, yellowed with use. In his mind, a vast, living map, filled with gods, heroes, and forgotten statues. His name is Pausanias. He seeks neither glory nor conquest: he seeks to understand, to transmit, to bring back to life a world he already knows is fading.
We must imagine the incredible boldness of Pausanias, setting out almost alone to encounter a world in ruins. What he undertakes is not trivial: he tries to paint the portrait of a civilization through its places, its statues, its myths rooted in the earth. This is an unprecedented approach in Antiquity, as most authors preferred to focus on illustrious men or famous battles. He takes the opposite path: telling history through space, marble, and silence. He understands that landscapes themselves carry memory, that mountains hold the memory of gods, that fountains still whisper forgotten legends. This organic relationship between nature and the sacred, omnipresent in Greek religion, he captures with rare acuity. He teaches us that history is not only found in archives, but also in forms, in the layout of sanctuaries, in names half-erased on stelae. In this, Pausanias anticipates an archaeological and anthropological approach to culture. He sees Greece not as a series of dates, but as a constellation of places inhabited by stories. It is this intimate and profound map that he unrolls before our eyes.
A Roman World, a Greek Gaze
We are in the 2nd century AD. Greece has long lived under Roman domination. Its temples crack, its theaters empty, its oracles gradually fall silent. But this world that is slowly fading, Pausanias wants to capture it with his words.
Under Hadrian, a philhellenic emperor, Greece experiences a kind of cultural rebirth, though tinged with nostalgia. Greek cities have lost their political autonomy but retain their intellectual prestige. Pausanias writes in a world where Hellenism survives through education, religion, art, and rites. He is contemporary with a time when statues fall, but stories endure, passed from mouth to mouth. His writings reflect a bicultural world: Greece is Roman without ceasing to be Greek. The sanctuaries are often deserted but still revered, caught between ruins and renovations. In each city, he observes the tensions between Roman modernity and ancestral traditions. It is in this contrast that his work takes shape: as a thread connecting the worlds of before and after.
The 2nd century AD is a period of relative stability for the Roman Empire, often called the Pax Romana. Yet this apparent peace masks a slow transformation of local societies. In Greece, culture remains vibrant, notably thanks to patrons like Hadrian, who builds many monuments in Athens. The Greeks, though subjugated, continue to teach their language, philosophies, and art to Roman elites. Pausanias lives in this hybrid society, where citizens of Greek cities cultivate their past as a treasure—sometimes as a symbolic revenge. He observes the power dynamics between once-great cities and Roman colonies. He notes signs of Romanization, but also resistance—sometimes discreet—in cults or traditions. Greece is then a living museum admired by the Romans, yet transformed by them all the same. Pausanias seeks to grasp this tension. His work is both a celebration of eternal Greece and a melancholic record of its gradual fading. He writes from the margins of imperial history, in Greek, for educated readers, without ever flattering Rome.
Delphi: Sanctuary of Mysteries
In Delphi, a mysterious and sacred Greece reveals itself to him. The sanctuary, clinging to the slopes of Mount Parnassus, bathes in an almost solemn silence. The Sacred Way winds upward among the treasuries of Greek cities, statues and columns standing like petrified prayers. The air is pure, filled with the scent of laurels and incense. There, he contemplates the temple of Apollo—simple yet powerful—where pilgrims have come for centuries to hear the oracle. Pausanias does not merely describe the places: he listens to the stones. He conveys the rumors, the tales, the ancestral fears. He evokes the Pythia, a mysterious woman seated on the sacred tripod, exhaling the god’s words—often obscure, always feared. The sanctuary is still alive, but Pausanias already senses the weight of time. He notes what disappears, what survives, what memory keeps or rejects.
Delphi was not only a sanctuary: it was a spiritual capital. City-states sent ambassadors and offerings there to gain the favor of Apollo. As Pausanias walks among the votive treasures, he is actually retracing the geopolitics of the Greek world: each offering tells of a victory, an alliance, divine gratitude. He especially observes ex-votos left after battles against the Persians or during inter-Greek rivalries. He also describes monuments commemorating athletic exploits or artistic contests celebrated during the Pythian Games. This abundance of objects—many now lost—has come down to us partly thanks to his pen. He understands that religion is also political: city-states present themselves at Delphi as in a sacred competition. Sometimes he marvels at the luxury, even the excess, of certain offerings. But he also perceives the intimacy of a small altar or an anonymous pillar. With him, every object becomes the trace of a silent voice, and every detail is inscribed in a collective memory.
Olympia: Soul of Sport and Sacred
Further south, in the hot plain of Elis, Pausanias discovers Olympia, the beating heart of ancient Greece, where both body and spirit were celebrated. Here, the Olympic Games, even in their Roman version, retain a sacred aura. He walks along alleys lined with statues, temples crushed by sunlight, altars blackened by the flames of sacrifices. But what strikes him is the statue of Zeus—monumental, made of gold and ivory, the work of the great Phidias. The god sits enthroned in majesty, his gaze lost in eternity. This image, described with almost mystical detail, crosses the centuries thanks to him. Around the sanctuary, the remains speak of feats and disciplines: the stadium, the hippodrome, the gymnasium. Pausanias is as interested in the athletes’ gestures as in the discreet cults performed in the sacred groves. In every stone, he sees an echo; in every race, a memory.
At Olympia, Pausanias enters a universe where sport, religion, and politics form an inseparable whole. He lingers on the temples, especially that of Hera, even older than Zeus’s, reminding us of the fundamental role of goddesses in the archaic pantheon. He details the sacrificial altar, fed by the ashes of generations of ceremonies. In the porticoes, he contemplates statues of champions, often idealized, embodying Greek aretê—that ideal of moral and physical perfection. He is moved by the ruins of ancient gymnasiums—places of bodily training but also intellectual transmission. Pausanias is not naïve: he mentions the excesses, the cheating, the exclusions—particularly of women and non-Greeks. He perceives the ambiguity of a space that glorifies beauty while ignoring otherness. He even speaks of cursed champions, whose statues were torn down. Through Olympia, he reflects on the meaning of merit and the trace the body leaves in history. Sport, for him, is never trivial: it reflects a society and its values.
Corinth: Sensuality, Trade and Contrasts
Upon arriving in Corinth, he enters a city that blends grandeur and abandonment. Its streets are wide, its colonnades still imposing, but the prestige has faded. Yet the city fascinates. Perched on its isthmus, it connects the two seas—a crossroads of trade, cultures, and beliefs. Pausanias climbs the Acrocorinth, the immense citadel overlooking the surroundings, and describes the temple of Aphrodite, center of a powerful and sensual cult. He notes the presence of the hierodules, those sacred priestesses devoted to pleasure—remnants of a world where the divine and the flesh were one. At every crossroads, the city offers contrasts: elegant temples and lively taverns, mythical tales and trivial realities. Once again, he does not judge. He describes with that tender, almost modest precision that makes his gaze so human.
Pausanias devotes particular attention to Corinth, as the city embodies many paradoxes. He finds the remains of lavish urban planning, with its forums, theaters, and oversized temples. He marvels at the vibrancy of the local commerce, marked by the influx of goods from across the Empire. The ports of Lechaeum and Cenchreae, located on either side of the isthmus, make it a major hub of exchange. He is also interested in the city’s religious diversity: alongside the temple of Aphrodite are sanctuaries of Isis, Mithras, and other Eastern cults introduced by merchants. This diversity makes Corinth both cosmopolitan and fragmented. Pausanias observes the tensions between Greek traditions and exotic practices. He describes the hierodules without condemning them but questions the place of the sacred in the body. He also notes the survival of ancient chthonic cults on the margins of official temples. The city becomes, through his words, a stage where the conflict between glorious past and colorful present plays out. Corinth is Greece facing Roman globalization.
Athens: Thought Sculpted in Marble
Then comes Athens. Even weakened, the city shines. For Pausanias, as for us, it is a monumental city—a dream of stone and thought. He walks it at length, attentive to the smallest details. He describes the Agora, still vibrant, the statues of heroes, the porticoes of philosophers. But it is on the Acropolis that his heart lingers. The Parthenon dominates the horizon. Despite the ravages of time, the friezes still recount epic tales, the metopes show the struggles of the gods, the victory of Athena, the beauty of a civilization at the height of its art. The Erechtheion, with its famous Caryatids, seems, under his pen, to come alive with an ancient breath. He looks at this city as one contemplates a soul. Athens is no longer in power, but it remains eternal.
In Athens, Pausanias becomes almost a poet. He seems to walk in a waking dream, carried by the aura of the centuries. He lingers over the minor sanctuaries—those of Asclepius, Ares, Pandrosus—where a more intimate religiosity endures. He meticulously describes the inscriptions on funerary stelae, the reliefs of tombs, the bases of vanished statues. He marvels at the Stoic porticoes, the frescoes of the Stoa Poikile, the reliefs on the Parthenon frieze. But he also notes the absences: impoverished libraries, deserted schools, chipped walls. Athens is no longer the ruling city, but it remains a center of intellectual radiance. He crosses paths with philosophers in togas, rhetoricians, and students of the Academy. He senses that the city has chosen memory as its final weapon against decline. In the cracked marble, he still reads the great debates of humanity. And when he contemplates the Caryatids of the Erechtheion, he perceives, more than beauty, a tragic fidelity to what once was.
A Quest Against Oblivion
To travel like this—on foot or on horseback—is an ordeal in itself. Pausanias covers hundreds of kilometers on roads that are sometimes dangerous. He stays with locals, speaks with priests, listens to storytellers. He notes customs, local rituals, forgotten names of lesser deities. He bathes in sacred rivers, observes offerings on altars, pauses before an inscription faded by time. He is not a tourist, but a pilgrim of memory. He understands that what he sees today may disappear tomorrow. And he writes, so that it may remain. Yet he is not a neutral observer. He chooses, sorts, comments. He distrusts overly marvelous tales, sometimes allows himself irony. But it is this subjectivity that makes his work so precious. What Pausanias retains is not what official history seeks to transmit, but what the living still recount. He trusts popular stories, oral traditions, the murmurs of elders in sun-drenched squares. He gives voice to a people whose words, without him, might have vanished.
Pausanias’ work is at once geographical, historical, and spiritual. He invents nothing but selects with care what he reports, rejecting the exaggerations of storytellers and the silences of officials. He follows a personal logic that combines rigor and intuition. He loves myths, but never repeats them without perspective. He analyzes them, compares them, questions them like an investigator. He sometimes quotes ancient poets, such as Homer or Hesiod, to show the permanence of these tales. He also relies on oral traditions, sometimes contradictory, which he does not try to unify. This refusal to simplify makes him a rare witness. His text is not fixed—it vibrates with disparate voices, like an echo of the Greek people. Thanks to him, it is the stories of the humble, the elders, the obscure priests that find their place in history.
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The illustrations were generated using artificial intelligence to support the historical narrative and enhance immersion. They were created by the author and are the property of Echoes of Antiquity. Any reproduction requires prior authorization by email.
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