362 PTOLEMY AND LATER GEOGRAPHERS. [CHAP.
himself to the ridicule of his contemporaries by taking his ma-
terials wholesale from writers who were familiar at that period, or
by describing a well-known city like Athens as it existed some
centuries before—and nothing less than this is implied. More-
over, it is the reverse of an easy task to make descriptions
obtained at second hand from other writers pass muster as if they
were derived from personal observation. The mere difficulty of
determining the relative position of buildings and other objects
within a certain area without ocular inspection is so great, that it
seems impossible that a writer should have grouped them so accu-
rately in his narrative as to have furnished again and again the
clue to their identification by modern explorers; and this is what
Pausanias has done. Good service has also been rendered in his
defence by an enumeration of the passages in the Itinerary which
imply autopsy on his part. By this it is shewn that there are
fifty-five instances, in which the words used, if they are not un-
qualified falsehoods, are direct statements of personal observation;
and the same thing is indirectly implied in a hundred and eleven
others, in many of which it is further confirmed by other expres-
sions which occur in the same context. In some cases we even
find that 'Pausanias corrects the statements of an earlier authority
RccentTcsti- ^rom ^s own inspection. Certain it is, that the con-
monies in his fidence of modern archaeologists in the trustworthi-
ness of this writer has not been lessened by these
discussions. Thus Miss Harrison, in the Preface to her " Mytho-
logy and Monuments of Ancient Athens" (p. viL), says with
special reference to this subject, ' I feel bound to record my con-
viction that the narrative of Pausanias is no " Reise Romantik,"
but the careful, conscientious, and in some parts amusing and
quite original narrative of a bonafide traveller.' Prof. Gardner, in
his "New Chapters of Greek History" (p. 80), remarks, 'No part
of Pausanias' work bears more satisfactory evidence of autopsy than
does the book which treats of Mycenae.' And Mr G. C. Richards,
one of the British excavators of Megalopolis, assures us that the
* result of the discoveries at that place is 'to establish the substantial
accuracy of that author in one more instance.'1
1 Excavations at Megalopolis, p. 105: Supplementary Paper, No. i, of the
Hellenic Society. The leading works that have been written on the subject