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Hellados periēgēsis (Description of Greece), by Pausanias. Printed in Frankfurt by the heirs of Andreas Wechel, 1583. Lower Library, M.7.5

Many are the sights to be seen in Greece, and many are the wonders to be heard; but on nothing does Heaven bestow more care than on the Eleusinian rites and the Olympic games.¹

Pausanias (c. 115 CE – c. 180 CE) has survived through history as the author of a ten-book work known as the Periegesis Hellados or Description of Greece. Beyond this work, he is a figure about whom little is known. Dates for his birth and death are speculative, based upon references to events within his writing. His place of birth is likely, but not certainly, near Mount Sipylus in Lydia, Asia Minor.² Even his name only survives to us through the work of one author, Stephanus of Byzantium.³ His work, however, provides invaluable insight into the Greece of the second century CE, as well as historical details about early Greece which do not survive elsewhere.

The Description of Greece is one of the earliest surviving examples of a travel guide. Over ten books, Pausanias describes the geography and sights of Greece. Much simplified, his method is to describe a key city within a geographic area, and then cover all the main roads you might travel along when leaving that city, although he frequently deviates from this pattern.⁴ He appears to place a specific focus on religious centres, and some have argued that his guide was actually aimed at potential pilgrims to these sites.⁵

In book five he focuses on the city of Olympia, the site of the original Olympic Games. These began, Pausanias tells us, with Heracles of Ida. (This Heracles is not the same as the demi-god of the same name, who is now perhaps better known by his Roman name, Hercules). Heracles of Ida proposed a running race with his brothers, in which the winner would receive a crown made of an olive branch. There were five brothers and so the races were held every five years, as the Greeks counted them: the fifth year of one Olympiad being also the first of the next.⁶

After describing the origin of the games, Pausanias goes on to give a detailed account of how the games changed over the years, and names several of the victors. He explains how, after those early games in which the gods and demi-gods raced, the tradition was broken for a number of years. In 776 BCE, the games were reinstated by Iphitos, and consisted only of foot races.⁷ At the eighteenth Olympics the Greeks added the pentathlon and wrestling, at the twenty-third boxing, and at the twenty-fifth chariot-racing.⁸ It is worth noting that whilst Pausanias states all these as fact, he was visiting Olympia some 900 years or more after the first games in 776 BCE, and some scholars debate the accuracy of his dating.

Pausanias also gives us an insight into opportunities for women to take part in sport. He explicitly names Kyniska as the first woman to achieve Olympic victory, and also the first woman to breed horses.⁹ Although Pausanias tells us she was eager to achieve Olympic victory, women were forbidden from watching or participating in the Olympics.¹⁰ However, victories in chariot racing were awarded to the owner of the team, so she employed a male charioteer to drive the horses she had trained, and was thus able to win despite rules about women competing. She erected a statue to her victory, with an inscription which read ‘I alone I say of the women of all of Greece take this crown’.¹¹

The Olympics were not the only games to occur at Olympia. The Heraean games were held every four years in honour of the goddess Hera. These consisted of foot-races and were only run by maidens: a contrast to the (usually) male-only Olympics. Perhaps surprisingly, these races took place in the Olympic stadium, although the track was shortened slightly from that the men ran. Victors were crowned with olive branches as in the Olympics. They were even allowed to dedicate statues with their names inscribed, although none of these statues survive.¹²

The edition of Pausanias’ text displayed in our exhibition was printed in 1583 in two volumes, the first containing the original Greek, and the second a Latin translation. Our copy was donated to the Library by William Branthwaite, who was master of Gonville and Caius from 1607 until his death in 1619. On his death, he left over a thousand books to the College Library.

Owed to the winner << Roads to victory >> Gymnastics reborn

1. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 5.10.1. Translation from Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1960), 429.
2. Christian Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 13.
3. Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide, 9.
4. William Hutton, Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 83–84.
5. Ian Rutherford, ‘Tourism and the Sacred: Pausanias and the Traditions of Greek Pilgrimage,’ in Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, eds. S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 40.
6. Pausanias, Description, 5.7.6–10.
7. Pausanias, Description, 5.4.5-6; 5.8.5.
8. Pausanias, Description, 5.8.7.
9. Pausanias, Description, 3.8.1.
10. Donald G. Kyle, Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World (Newark: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 267.
11. IG V¹ 1564a. Translation from Eva Carrara, ‘Creating and Contesting Kyniska: The Reception of the First Female Olympic Victor,’ Antichthon 57 (2023): 25.
12. M. Dillon, Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion (London: Routledge, 2002), 131.