Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias

William Hutton provides the first exhaustive literary study of the Periegesis Hellados, the most important example of non-fictional travel literature in ancient Greek, to appear in nearly one hundred years. He examines Pausanias' arrangement and expression of his material and evaluates his authorial choices in light of the contemporary literary currents of the day and the cultural milieu of the Roman empire in the time of Hadrian and the Antonines. The descriptions offered in the Periegesis...