Pausanias and the Mysteries of Hellas

Instead of being an amorphous collection of useful facts for travelers, Pausanias's Description of Greece offers a carefully structured meditation on the state of Greece in the Roman period. By mustering certain narrative themes and techniques around the pivot-point of his description of Olympia, Pausanias compares and contrasts the Roman conquest of Greece with the Spartan conquest of Messenia and offers his own text as an affirmatory parallel to a sacred document that was restored to the Messenians at the time of their liberation. Appreciation of the author's ambitious program of structural and thematic patterns explains many aspects of the text that previous scholars have found perplexing, including its abrupt and enigmatic ending.