A Source Historians Still Rely On

Pausanias's descriptions have been tested against the ground itself more than almost any other ancient text, because nineteenth and twentieth century archaeologists used his book as a guide while excavating the sites he named. His account of the sanctuary at Olympia helped identify the Temple of Zeus and the workshop where the sculptor Pheidias made the great gold and ivory cult statue of Zeus, and excavators at Delphi, Mycenae and the Athenian Acropolis have repeatedly found his descriptions of monuments, inscriptions and cult objects confirmed by what survives in the ground. Modern classicists treat him as a generally careful eyewitness reporter who sometimes repeats a local or priestly tradition without independently verifying it, rather than as either a naive collector of tales or a purely literary antiquarian.

His value extends past topography into myth itself, since he frequently preserves a local or regional variant of a story known elsewhere only in a different, later or more literary form. His account of Attis and Cybele records a distinctly Phrygian version, in which the hermaphroditic being Agdistis is castrated by the gods and an almond or pomegranate grown from the severed organs impregnates the nymph Nana, who then bears Attis, a chain of transformation that survives nowhere else intact and has no direct Roman equivalent in the surviving sources. Without Pausanias's habit of recording what he was told even when it varied from the version his readers likely already knew, this and many other local traditions from the Greek world would be lost entirely.