Pausanias (flourished ca. A.D. 150 )
The author of one of the most famous and informative guidebooks of antiquity. Possibly hailing from Smyrna in Greek Ionia,Pausanias traveled widely, gathering information for his Description of Greece (or Guide to Greece). The work remains a valuable source of facts about the social customs, historical figures, myths, religious shrines, buildings, and art treasures of Olympia, Sparta, Arcadia, Boeotia, Athens,Delphi, and other pivotal Greek places.
Pausanias’ Description of Greece is in a geography work of ten books, on diffrent areas of Greece. His first greek destination is Attica, in which a great part is about Athens and it’s cultural, geographical, political landscape. The next books are describing Corinth, Laconia, Messenia, Elis, Achaia, Arcadia, Boetia, Phocis and Ozolian Locris. Pausanias, though, live unattended important location of Greece, such as Crete, for example.
His work is not much of a success during his times, and for a long period after, but now it is one of the treasures of travel literature.
