The second volume of the time-honored travel book about Greece, written 2,000 years ago Written by a Greek traveller in the second century ad for a principally Roman audience, Pausanias' Guide to Greece is a comprehensive, extraordinarily literate and well-informed guidebook for tourists of the age. Concentrating on buildings, tombs and statues, it also describes in detail the myths, religious beliefs and historical background behind the monuments considered. In doing so, it preserves Greek legends, quotes classical literature and poetry that would otherwise have been lost, and offers a fascinating depiction of the glory of classical Greece immediately before its third-century decline. This, the second of two volumes, explores Southern Greece including Sparta, Arkadia, Bassae and the games at Olympia. An inspiration to travellers and writers across the ages, including Byron and Shelley, it remains one of the most influential of all travel books. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A Greek who lived in Asia Minor during the second century A.D., Pausanias traveled through Greece and wrote an invaluable description of its classical sites that is a treasure trove of information on archaeology, religion, history, and art. Although ignored during his own time, Pausanias is increasingly important in ours—to historians, tourists, and archaeologists. Christian Habicht offers a wide-ranging study of Pausanias' work and personality. He investigates his background, chronology, and methods, and also discusses Pausanias' value as a guide for modern scholars and travellers, his attitude toward the Roman world he lived in, and his reception among critics in modern times. A new preface summarizes the most recent scholarship.

In this book, Maria Pretzler combines a thorough introduction to Pausanias with exciting new perspectives. She considers the process and influences that shaped the "Periegesis", and maps out its literary and cultural context. Pausanias' text records contemporary interpretations of monuments and traditions, and is concerned with the identity and history of Greece, issues that were crucial concerns for Greeks under Roman rule. Parallels with various texts of the period offer insights into Pausanias' attitudes as well as illustrating important aspects of Second Sophistic culture. A discussion of Greek texts that deal with fictional or actual travel experiences provides a background for a detailed study of the Periegesis as travel literature. Pausanias' treatment of geography and his descriptions of landscapes, cities and artworks are considered in detail, and there is also a study of his methods as a historian. The final chapters deal with Pausanias' impact on modern approaches to Greece and ancient Greek culture.

Pausanias, the Greek historian and traveler, lived and wrote around the second century AD, during the period when Greece had fallen peacefully to the Roman Empire. While fragments from this period abound, Pausanias' Periegesis ("description") of Greece is the only fully preserved text of travel writing to have survived. This collection uses Pausanias as a multifaceted lens yielding indispensable information about the cultural world of Roman Greece.