Pausanias: Description de la Grèce. Vol. 5: Livre 5: Élide (1) (review)

The fifth book of Pausanias (Elis 1) is the third volume to appear in the Budé collection, following Attica (vol. 1, 1991) and Arcadia (vol. 8, 1998). Textual notes are by Michel Casevitz; archaeological notes are by Anne Jacquemin.

The text is produced from a new recension of the manuscripts, based on the researches on Pausanias of Aubrey Diller, which were published in TAPA (67 [1936]: 232-39; 86 [1955]: 268-79; 87 [1956]: 84-97; 88 [1957]: 169-88). Diller showed that four manuscripts (V, F, P, Ma) were the only independent witnesses to the text of Pausanias, deriving from a lost exemplar of 1437 owned by Niccolò Niccoli and later in the Library of St. Mark in Florence. The Teubner edition of M. Rocha-Pereira (1973, 1977) was the first text produced on the basis of this recension. The Budé differs from it in various readings and in its excellent notes. Book 5, the first of Pausanias' books on Elis, contains the beginning of his description of Olympia. The notes take account of the German excavations of the site carried out since 1936, reports of which have appeared in the Jahrbücher des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts and the Olympia Berichten.

The collaboration of a philologist and an archaeologist as commentators is particularly fortunate, because of important developments in both areas since the extensive commentaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Frazer, Hitzig-Blümner). The wisdom accumulated in the earlier commentaries is not neglected, but in most cases the information has been brought up to date very well. For example, the comment on 10.2 (147), on the date of the Temple of Zeus, parallels that of Frazer in its dissociation of the building of the temple from the war between Elis and Pisa. There is a review of ancient texts, including Herodotus and Strabo and the Spartan dedication of a shield of the booty of Tanagra set atop the ridge of the roof, the inscription of which Pausanias quotes. A discussion follows of dedication bases set up nearby and the excavation levels at which they were found (the Praxiteles base, the dedication made by the sculptor Onatas of Aegina, the Mikythos dedications, etc.), suggesting that the temple was built in the general period 480-455. The Budé then takes note of a study by F. Krauss (Mélanges Bohringer, 1957) on the columns of the temple, suggesting that those of the east façade are the most beautiful examples of the Doric style of the temple.

The comment on the Altis in 10.1 (146) is equally instructive. Frazer simply comments on Pindar's statement (Ol. 10.55) that the area was called Altis, and the comment of Hitzig-Blümner is also brief. The Budé, on the other hand, considers the etymology of from and cites several references in Pausanias to show that the Altis had limits within the larger area of the grove.

The discussion of the dating of the cult statue of Zeus by Phidias (in the 420s) in comment on 5.11 (156-57) is also good and follows in the tradition of Frazer, but here the Budé editor can call attention to excavation of the workshop of Phidias in 1954-58 and the monograph of Mallwitz and Schiering, which shows, because of pottery and other finds, that work on the statue was going on in the 430s. Consequently, the old controversy on the priority of the Olympian Zeus and the Athena Parthenos is settled in favor of the Athena statue, completed in 438.

On 5.15.4, line 20: the reading of the manuscripts' which includes the...