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Edinburgh Leventis Studies 5
THE GODS
OF ANCIENT
GREECE
Identities and Transformations
Edited by Jan N. Bremmer and Andrew Erskine
EDINBURGH LEVENTIS STUDIES 5
THE GODS OF ANCIENT
GREECE
Identities and Transformations
Edited by
Jan N. Bremmer and
Andrew Erskine
Edinburgh University Press
© in this edition, Edinburgh University Press, 2010
© in the individual contributions is retained by the authors
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 11 on 13pt Times NR MT
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3798 0 (hardback)
The right of the contributors
to be identified as authors of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
19
READING PAUSANIAS: CULTS OF THE
GODS AND REPRESENTATION OF THE
DIVINE
Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge
Over the past couple of decades Pausanias has become the centre of a
minor academic industry, a point made recently by Glen Bowersock.
1
The growing scholarship in this area has taken Pausanias’ profile seri-
ously and his work at face value. One of the major trends has been
the appreciation of Pausanias’ work as a complex literary enterprise
and not just as a databank to be plundered without taking into con-
sideration the context of each piece of information, be it chronologi-
cal or narratological. Such a flourishing interest in Pausanias’ work
has also been inspired by the increasing interest in the Greek world
under Roman rule, the world to which Pausanias belonged, and the
related question of what it meant to be Greek when power was held
elsewhere.
2
Pausanias was a serious scholar and a tireless traveller. Maybe
he can also be considered as ‘dry, sober and pedantic’, as a German
I would like to thank Jan Bremmer warmly for his invitation to this prestigious
conference and Andrew Erskine for the wonderful hospitality of the University
of Edinburgh. The argument presented here in English depends on a larger
research project, which is published in French:
Retour à la source: Pausanias et
la religion grecque
=
Kernos,
Suppl. 20 (Liège: CIERGA, 2008). The translations
of Pausanias’ text are taken from the Loeb edition by W. H. S. Jones (London,
1918–35) and slightly adapted to be more literal.
1 G. Bowersock, ‘Artemidorus and the Second Sophistic’, in B. Borg (ed.),
Paideia:
The World of the Second Sophistic
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), pp. 53–63 at
53. Many monographs, collective books and individual articles in journals have
been published over the last twenty-five years, following Christian Habicht’s
Sather Classical Lectures,
Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece
(Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London: University of California Press, 19982), and the very useful
introduction to the Italian edition of Pausanias by Domenico Musti in D. Musti
and L. Beschi,
Pausania: Guida della Grecia. I: L’Attica
(Milan: Mondadori,
1982).
2 Cf. the well-balanced and lucid book of W. Hutton,
Describing Greece: Landscape
and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
376
vinciane pirenne- delforge
scholar described him in 1890.
3
Perhaps he is almost ‘one of us’, as
Snodgrass concluded in a wonderful paper on Pausanias and the Chest
of Kypselos in 2001.
4
However true these identifications may be – and
perhaps all are true – Pausanias had many problems to solve and many
choices to make in order to transpose his vision and understanding of
the material and cultural landscapes of Greece into a literary work.
The
Periegesis
is the result of these choices and not a photographic
image of what Greece was like at this time.
5
This is true for every piece
and type of information. It is even truer as far as religion is concerned,
especially since Pausanias still belongs to the system he describes. On
this level, he is
not
one of us. Therefore, reading Pausanias in order
to consider the question of Greek gods implies that we should take
into account his own position on the matter, on the one hand, and
the way he reports the many results of his visits on the spot, combin-
ing them with literary references, on the other hand. These points of
view are not completely independent, since Pausanias presents himself
as a pious man, who pays respect to the local religious traditions he
refers to. Such an attitude has been understood as a literary affectation
rooted in the intellectual praxis of the time.
6
I do not agree with such
a statement and I follow William Hutton when he says that ‘literary
effect is not necessarily the same as literary affectation’.
7
Regarding the gods and their local cults, Pausanias is an important
literary source that enables us to understand the so-called local Greek
pantheons, particularly when we are able to compare his testimony
with the epigraphic evidence.
8
In this case, one of the main problems
that needs to be thoroughly discussed is the chronological background
of so much information. On the other hand, as far as the very concept
of god in Greece is concerned, other questions – different from the
3 W. Gurlitt,
Über Pausanias: Untersuchungen
(Graz: Leuschner and Lubensky,
1890), p. 126 (‘mit den trockenen, nüchternen, pedantischen Pausanias’, tr.
Snodgrass [here below], p. 128).
4 A. M. Snodgrass, ‘Pausanias and the Chest of Kypselos’, in S. Alcock et al. (eds),
Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece
(Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), pp. 127–41.
5 The huge bibliography on this subject has been exhaustively treated in Pirenne-
Delforge,
Retour à la source.
6 J. F. Gaertner, ‘Die Kultepiklesen und Kultaitia in Pausanias’
Periegesis’, Hermes
134 (2006), pp. 471–87. A very different approach is that of J. Elsner, ‘Pausanias:
a Greek pilgrim in the Roman world’,
Past and Present
135 (1992), pp. 3–29, repr.
in R. Osborne (ed.),
Studies in Ancient Greek and Roman Society
(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 260–85, with a
postscript 2003,
and in
Alcock et al.,
Pausanias: Travel and Memory,
pp. 3–20.
7 Hutton,
Describing Greece,
p. 11.
8 See different papers on Pausanias in V. Pirenne-Delforge (ed.),
Les panthéons des
cités, des origines à la
Périégèse
de Pausanias
=
Kernos,
Suppl. 8 (Liège: CIERGA,
1998).

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