Pausanias the Chronotopiarist

By Brady Kiesling

The text the Greek traveler Pausanias produced sometime in the 170s CE was not, in his own mind or ours, a work of fiction. It is, however, a rich and complex narrative. The narratological insights  derived from Bakhtin’s chronotope imagery have shaped to a significant degree the work of the Periegesis project.  This multi-year international effort is in the process of making available a densely annotated text of Pausanias’ 2nd century CE description of Greece. By simultaneously turning these ten books of text into a database of identified persons, places, events, and narrative components, we provide raw materials for the widest possible range of visualizations and analyses of the richest surviving manifestation of ancient Greek culture of the Roman period.

 Conventional efforts to place Pausanias’ so-called Periegesis, his “leading about”, within a literary genre are unsatisfactory. His is not a travel diary or travel handbook –neither the practical issues of travel nor the people he meets nor the adventures he had or did not have in months or years (he does not say) of voyaging through Greece seemed to him worth recording. Nor is the work geographical in any modern academic sense of analyzing the physical and economic landscape. 

Mapping for Pausanias betrays no input from the cartographers who, for six centuries already, had been drawing increasingly precise pictures of the ancient world. Not only does he make no reference to maps, but he pays no attention to geographers as well, apart from a nod to the “father of geography” himself. Pausanias disagrees politely with Hecataeus (ca. 500 BCE) on a fine point of mythic geography, still unresolved, the location of Oichalia, the mythic polis sacked by Herakles. 

Nor does the shape of the land to be derived from maps interest Pausanias. The geographer Strabo, intensely interested in the same region and writing a century before Pausanias was born, recognized that the Peloponnese is shaped like a plane-tree leaf. The question does not occur to Pausanias. His non-schematic approach is underscored by one lone pseudo-exception, a topographic statement vivid in its lameness. At Minoa (Monemvasia), “the bay has nothing to distinguish it from all the other inlets of the sea in Laconia, but the beach here contains pebbles of rather elegant shape in all kinds of colors.”

Pausanias moves from point to point, but his roads and buildings are abstract points and lines, without description, anchor points for excursus but not destinations. He has a mild interest in borders, to mark where one place name with its associations gives way to another. Though he offers chunks of historical narrative, often hanging them on some summary chronological hook, they are allusive and incomplete.  He lists art works and ancient religious artifacts, but as inventory record rather than aesthetic/mystic experience. Though a sturdy polytheist piety shines through, any strong emotion is held in check. To the extent he is reacting to what he sees and hears, it is in the measured voice of someone navigating a mildly moth-eaten landscape using Homer and a constellation of lost works by mostly forgotten poets.

In the context of modern narratology, therefore, it seems legitimate to assert that Pausanias was aspiring to create not a traditional narrative but instead an almost-modern meta-text, the first recognizable chronotope in western literature. His work is a four-dimensional word-based abstraction, mapped on papyrus using ancient Greek prepositions and conjunctions rather than in Azure Notebooks using vectors and icons. His purpose in writing was not to explicate any specific item in the ancient Greek corpus but rather to map out a constructed mytho-historic Greece, the existence of which, as a teachable abstraction underpinning a high-status ancient dialect (Attic Greek), served to elevate Rome’s Hellenic subjects to terms of (negotiable, situational) equality with their administrators. 

Pausanias, therefore, was at pains to vectorize, not the quiet university backwater Athens had become under Roman administration, nor the crumbling provincial towns through which he passed, but instead Hellas as a religious-historical continuum, a land “not unbecoming men who strove with Gods.” And in writing mytho-historic, one must be clear that the borders between history and mythology are not borders Pausanias would recognize. 

Pausanias was ruefully certain that no one was godlike in his own day, except emperors for purposes of flattery. But the divine, for him, was real and almost within reach.  Pausanias made respectful use of Homer and Hesiod, but wanted very much to believe that the verses of poets more ancient than they had survived. Poets like Olen, Orpheus, Linos, and Pamphos, Pausanias was confident, had intersected with mythic events and incurred the wrath or favor of gods who still manifested themselves to mortals. Therefore, their work offered uniquely valid insights into the gods and their mysteries. So too did a few ancient works of art.

Pausanias stuck his head inside every shrine the local hierarchs permitted, sniffing for those traces of an ancient moment where gods and humans interacted. The older an object or story, the greater a chance that it was touched by some divine element. For example, the early sculptor in wood Daedalus has some access to the divine (ἔνθεον, 2.4.5) .  The goddess Ortheia might still sometimes inhabit her rough-hewn wooden likeness (xoanon) at Sparta, and this image might well be the one Iphigeneia brought back from Tauris. He used logic where he could. One look at the bronze statue of Athena at Amphissa (10.38.5) told him it could not have been brought from Troy, because bronze-casting was invented by Rhoecus of Samos, and this Athena was clearly later than Rhoecus’s work on display at Ephesus. A few later sculptors created special beauty that had something to do with the god, but Pausanias was careful not to assert that artists of more recent times had the ability to make a god indwelling.  

Selecting from the cartographic categories nicely explicated by the Chronotopic Cartographies project, Pausanias would see his effort as a “correspondent cartography” of (sometimes) fictionalized/transplanted narratives on a real and mappable landscape. Pausanias regarded the Greece adumbrated by Homer as not fundamentally different from or less mappable than the world through which he himself strode (or was conveyed – he is not explicit). Ancient names, as he occasionally pointed out, might be borrowed by residents with a shaky claim, and some Homeric cities were already in ruins 500 years before Pausanias was born. 

Superficially, the task for mapping Pausanias’ narrative resembles that for a work of fiction. The Periegesis Project has annotated some 18000 place mentions, linking 13,900 of them to places with mappable coordinates derived from ToposText, the Pleiades Project, or Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire. Perhaps 3000 ancient temples, sanctuaries, altars, sacred groves, caves, public buildings, etc., are presumed to have vanished, but they can be mapped relative to findable locations. About 2000 place mentions have been tagged as occurring  in their logical place in Pausanias’ real or nominal itinerary. Those points are the basis for visualizing Pausanias’ narrative as a series of points and line-strings on the map. 

The dots reveal, indeed, a recurring pattern. At the beginning of each book, Pausanias enters a given region through a standard entry point, such as the Hermai, border markers sacred to Hermes, on the land route between Argos and Sparta. He then gives a thumbnail of the history of the new region, based primarily on genealogies of kings and heroes, before making a rapid traverse to the regional capital, the city of Sparta in this case. After a detailed transit from monument to monument of the central city, he then describes a series of routes, each radiating out from the capital toward a coast or border. His final route will lead to a new border crossing, a new book, and a new historical thumbnail. Where the road is particularly difficult, he makes brief coastal voyages, but his preference is for land routes and the sacred sites along them. 

Pausanias is a crucial source for modern students of Classical Greece, because he is the sole source for many things we think we know about Greek topography. This dependence lends itself to circular reasoning, alas; whenever archaeologists find a cluster of broken rooftiles of pre-Roman date, their immediate reaction is to announce it as the site of some ancient city mentioned by Pausanias (and Homer before him) as being in that region. Unless successfully challenged, that set of coordinates carves itself into the scientific record as a fixed point on Pausanias’ route. 

One goal of our annotations, therefore, is to open up more systematic use of modern mapping tools in order to judge the implications of such identifications more ruthlessly. In mapping each named place using the Recogito platform and our gazetteers, we use the relation tagging feature to state the relationship between places, and in particular the distance Pausanias records, a number of stades (ca. 6 per kilometer), with his hedging words to suggest accuracy, between two towns or sacred sites. By faithfully applying to the mapping each “next” or “beyond” or “going up a good 150 stades further,” impossible place identifications will tend to manifest themselves. 

If a chronotope is mapped using the distinctive topoi listed by Bakhtin, then Pausanias’ Greek itineraries form a castle, a place of memory but not, like Bakhtin’s road, of encounter. There are no chance meetings on the road, no trusted guides or hosts whose name and cozy conversations Pausanias might attach to the local opinions expressed. And so his line-string is austere. Hundreds of tomb monuments, many springs, and a handful of ancient trees figure along his route basically as names with a throw-away mention of a nymph or hero. That said, Pausanias’ castle has its secret passages, its mysterious byways. From Delphi, a statue of Sardo the eponymous hero of Sardinia drills a long narrative tunnel under the Mediterranean, “because Sardinia is an island about which the Greeks are very ignorant.” Less irrelevant to his discourse is mystical knowledge of the Great Goddesses, which cannot be revealed to non-initiates. On this one point, a dream is his informant (1.14.3).

Rarely, Pausanias’ unnamed human informants have information passed down over many generations, υπομνήματα αρχαία (8.41.5). Most don’t. So Pausanias prefers documents, particularly archaic-sounding poems and oracular verse, to human informants. He labors conscientiously to incorporate the inscriptions on or below artwork in his picture of the divine. The famous classical painter Polygnotus, limning the fall of Troy and its aftermath in the Lesche of the Knidians at Delphi, labeled each character he painted. Pausanias weighs his testimony against that of the poets to determine which of those names is authentically grounded in inspired memory.

This logic leads to occasional eyebrow-raising situations. In recounting the myth of Narkissos, the young man of Thespiai seduced to destruction by his own beauty, Pausanias points out that his demise could not have been the origin of the narcissus flower. The poet Pamphos, Pausanias knows, lived many years before Narkissos. He described in his verses how Hades had seduced Kore/Persephone with narcissus flowers (9.31.9). But here, perhaps, some temporal recalibration is necessary. Pausanias cites Pamphos a total of 11 times. But no author of the Classical period, and no Attic lexicographer, refers to Pamphos at all. One economical conclusion to draw might be that Pausanias has been taken in by some Hellenistic conceit, presumably one of many commercial spinoffs from the mass-market Eleusinian Mysteries of Roman rule. 

Depicting time is the most knotty problem in our visualizations, as for Pausanias himself. Pausanias never uses the standard dating formulae of Roman imperial administration, neither consular dates, nor regnal years, nor years from the founding of Rome. When he chooses to become precise and formal in his dating for special occasions, it is through a classicizing chronological statement modeled on Xenophon and subsequent annalists: in the 3rd year of the nth Olympiad, when x won the footrace, and y was archon in Athens. He reserves those dates for a few well-known battles and a few monstrous events: the earthquake that sank Helike, a horrific massacre at Skotoussa, the burning of the famous temples at Delphi and Tegea. These dates usually but not always coincide with those of the major ancient historians, and archon names have no survived centuries of retranscription intact. More often his dates are approximate. Pausanias anchors us with the genealogy of heroes and kings, plus  wars and battles.

The simplest approach to temporal visualization is to regard Pausanias’ paragraphs as temporal units, and march through them mechanically. The results are poor, however, except for modeling the amount of prose generated in relation to a given stopping point on his itinerary. More interesting, normally, is the size and density of the web of distinct people and events Pausanias mentions in connection with a given location.

Our annotation strategy attempts to follow Pausanias’ own temporal strategies. By linking each personal name or event he mentions to an existing Wikidata item, we can harvest from the Wikipedia ecosystem standard chronological and genealogical information, often, we suspect, on a level of detail that would track well with the knowledge level of Pausanias’ ancient readers. Many paragraphs, therefore contain at least an indirect temporal anchor, the year of a battle or Olympiad, the century of a Spartan king. Where Wikidata fails us, we create a new item.

Pausanias recenters himself and his narrative in the present with two basic time markers,  ἐς ἐμὲ/ἐς ἡμᾶς – up until my/our time (69 instances) – and κατ’ ἐμέ/καθ’ ἡμᾶς – in my/our time (36). But his purpose in doing so is generally to record that the town is now deserted or the temple has lost its roof.  We tag such expressions temporally to the 150s-170s CE, but they seldom effect the timelessness of Pausanias’ chronotope.

Where the narrative leaves the remote past and its brushes with the gods, Pausanias favors in his narrative a Panhellenic past — that of Herodotus and the earlier statues he sees. Most of the wars he describes – the Messenian Wars, the Sacred Wars, the Peloponnesian War, the Corinthian War, the Lamian War, are wars of Greek on Greek, and Pausanias delicately refers to the contribution of that disunity to Greece’s less than free status. At a certain point, he concludes,  “Greece ceased to bear good men. For Miltiades, the son of Cimon, overcame in battle the foreign invaders who had landed at Marathon, stayed the advance of the Persian army, and so became the first benefactor of all Greece, just as Philopoemen, the son of Craugis, was the last” (8.52.1). Thus the last Greek Pausanias found worthy of detailed mention was indeed Philopoemen, who died circa 183 BCE, three centuries before Pausanias’ own time.

There are gaps in the surviving text of Pausanias, a few words or a paragraph, one hopes. That his text continued beyond its current end point, an anecdote about Asklepios in Naupaktos on the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth, is made clear from an unfulfilled promise (9.23.7) to take up a topic in his discourse on Opuntian Locris. How much else is missing we cannot guess…

That GIS Button

By O. Cenk Demiroglu

Have you noticed the GIS button on our main page? It will lead you to gis.periegesis.org – our very own ArcGIS Hub Site. 

“An ArcGIS what?” or “a what Hub Site?”, I can almost hear some of you say! Let me clarify…

Hub Site is a platform to share the content that we have created through ArcGIS, the leading collection of various GIS software and applications. On our Hub, we currently provide a StoryMap application of our progress with spatial, temporal and social digitalization and visualizations of Pausanias’s Periegesis Hellados. The StoryMap describes our journey starting from the semantic analyses in Recogito to post-Recogito outputs created on ArcGIS and other different platforms such as Gephi, Google, DARIAH Geobrowser and Palladio. Additionally, the 2D and the 3D ArcGIS Web App prototypes embedded in the StoryMap are presented separately on the Hub. 

In the near future, we will add more of our new and updated contents on the Hub, including but not limited to our custom symbologies and the quest for integrating Intelligence tools into seamless spatiotemporal-social visualizations as well as an Augmented Reality application. We will also keep on discovering the complementary and competing uses in other platforms such as knight lab and QGIS. Keep an eye on our updates by clicking the GIS button!

Delos as a hyper-connected hub

As covered in last week’s post, annotating Pausanias’ references on Delos in Recogito enables us to visualize the many places with which the sanctuary-island was connected. But our digital venture doesn’t stop there. Beyond linking every place mentioned in the ancient text with a static point on a map, we are now also marking the relations between places, and between people who are used as proxy for places.

Through the tagging of relations, our digital map is coming to life with a human dimension, one of movement and exchanges. Those relations are what make our project truly original.

A place like Delos is an excellent example to better understand how our digital mapping comes to life. Indeed, while only mentioned in few passages of Pausanias’ complete works, Delos quickly appeared as one of the richest places to explore when it comes to relations with other places. Our annotations revealed that this tiny floating rock in the middle of the Aegean was an extremely busy hub, as it functioned as a sanctuary but also as a market. While a few settled there, most people present on the island at any point are visitors, pilgrims who come to worship Apollo, merchants who visited the market or travelers who are transiting through the sanctuary on their way between the mainland and exotic destinations, as Theseus did on his way back from Crete.

In most of the Periegesis, the tags “contains” and “proximity” are most recurrent, and they serve to indicate how the monuments are set in relation to one another, but the Delian dynamic is different: here, “transit” and “analogic” are the predominant relation tags. Indeed, the island functions as a meeting place for the Greeks, and therefore many of the sanctuary’s elements are imported from the various people who constitute the social fabric of the place. 

Pausanias can therefore draw parallels between these elements and those found in various other Greek sanctuaries. For instance, when Pausanias considers the most ancient sacred trees,  the olive-tree in Delos the olive tree in the Acropolis in Athens, as well as the withy of the Heraion of Samos, the oak in Dodona and a bay-tree in Syria.

caption 1: Tagging analogies between the olive-tree in Delos and other prominent old sanctuary-trees.


The “transit” tag can give us a very lively image of movements between the various points of our digital map. For example, Pausanias tells us of the comings and goings of the sybil Herophile, neochoros of the temple of Apollo Smitheos, who, although she resided most of her life in Samos, visited several famous Apollonian sanctuaries: Delos, but also Delphi and Claros. Visualizing her points of transit brings us closer to imagining her physical but also spiritual journey.

Caption 2: The peregrinations of Herophile, sybil of Apollo.

Annotating relations is therefore an essential dimension of our digital map: it enables us to give life and colour to our annotation of Delos, revealing the island as an intricate social hub. We are looking forward to discovering the complete network of relations at play in Pausanias’ Periegesis… stay tuned for more!

Delos as a Mediterranean network?

Mapping historical cultures dates before the term digital humanities became established, most notably through the method of cartography, the practice of drawing and studying maps. Traditional print cartography for research and educational purposes is currently being transformed by digital multi-layered, ‘deep’ maps.  The application of digital cartography has further expanded historical understandings of place, culture, and society as geographical networks. While traditional print cartography can only visualize place as static geometries on a map, digital platforms provide a capacity for updates, different mapping tiles and interactivity. Digital maps can therefore display the dynamics of space and time within texts and other data sources.

Within the Digital Periegesis project we took a small case- study, everything that Pausanias refers to when it comes to Delos, a small island in the middle of the Aegean, right below Mykonos.

Caption 1: Google maps,  displaying Delos

We have visited the island upon acquiring the project grant to see how its cultural heritage monuments is represented. The island is not inhabited, but is indeed an archaeological site, with excavations and guide tours conducted by the Greek government and the French Archaeological School in Athens.

Upon arrival, we were handed a paper guide that served as a map of the site.

Captions 2 and 3: A digital scan copy of the map that was created as a catalogue of the island in Delos by the Greek ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Overall, the map guide concentrates on what is on the island of Delos visually, while using a narrative analysis of the relation of delos to other places.

After annotating all Pausanias’s references in Delos in Recogito, following a simple annotation scheme that concentrates on place and people as place (proxies) we were able to see the relation of the island to other places in the Mediterranean. Using QGIS, we were able to visualize all the other places that Delos is connected to as static points on a map.


Caption 4: A QGIS rendering of Delos and associated places.

We had to make some creative adjustments, for example, we mapped the mythical Hyperborians by analogy somewhere up north… above Britain in the ‘Hyperborean Ocean’

Also note that a lot of our relations have to do with war and conflict but also with religion, as Delos is the island that during the classical times was connected to Apollo’s cult, alongside Delphi and Didyma, but also connected to Kalaureia, Poros, which according to Pausanias used to be a cult site for Apollo as Delos was Poseidon’s in the mythical past.

Caption 5: a simple recogito visualization of our tags of Delos.

Next, we will annotate the relations of those places to Delos, using Gephi, a social visualization network- more anon!

Curtains for Zeus: Mapping a multi-media offering

Annotating the surviving text of the intrepid 2nd century traveler Pausanias is a delicate task: weighing 223,000-odd words in ancient Greek and tagging people, places, events, and their relationships. The overarching goal is using the new and improved Recogito tool to generate from Pausanias a pile of open-access data that any user can use to pry loose fresh insights into ancient Greek society, religion, history, and culture. The fun part, however, is mapping Pausanias’ travels in southern and central Greece as he described them. A temple of Zeus is easy, a dot on the map (soon to be a polygon). Tag it “Paus” to say Pausanias was present at this part of his narration. String those dots together in the right way and we have Pausanias’ travels. But not every place name is a location we should map as if Pausanias were necessarily ever there. The statue of the god is made of stone from Paros or Mt. Pentele, the columns of stone from Phrygia or Libya or the quarries at Krokeai south of Sparta. Or simple “local” (ἐπιχώριον) stone, every instance of the term a different blur on the map. A statue can be, Pausanias opines, of Aiginetan workmanship (ἐργασία), whatever that means. A tune is in the Lydian mode. And let’s leave out for now the question whether a mythical but rapidly moving and dangerous Calydonian boar is usefully represented via the dot on the map our Pleiades/DARE-based gazetteer calls ancient Calydon.

An annotator’s existential crisis of the evening: At the great temple of Zeus at Olympia there is a curtain (object, parapetasma) decorated with Assyrian weaving (ὑφάσμασιν Ἀσσυρίοις) and dyed with Phoenician purple (βαφῇ πορφύρας τῆς Φοινίκων). This curtain, an offering to Zeus by King Antiochos, was (when Pausanias saw it anyway) an object with a location, even vaguely mappable at the front of the temple. Do we map it as three dots: at the temple in Olympia, but also in Assyria (presumably a high-flown Romanism for Syria) and Phoenicia?

We huddled and decided it was time to deploy a new semantic tag, “material,” and Recogito’s relationship annotator that we are all still secretly afraid of.

Thus, four distinct annotations:

                1. The Temple of Zeus: built, naos, Olympian Zeus, Paus, Place: Zeus temple (Olympia)

                2. the curtain itself: object, parapetasma, Olympian Zeus, Paus, Place: ungazetteered;

                3. the weaving: material, ufasma, Place:Syria;

                4. the dye: material, bafê, Place:Phoinike

Then, three relationship annotations:

                2 to 1 “contains”

                3 to 2 “provenance”

                4 to 2 “provenance”

These annotations will result in a relationship tree that shows the temple of Zeus, with the curtain one of its long list of offerings, and Syria and Phoenicia as two of the regions included in Olympia’s religious universe. We are cautiously accumulating enough semantic concepts to do justice to Pausanias’ complex world but not so many as to paralyze our annotation process with delicate ontological/theological distinctions.

Relational annotation in Recogito showing the relationships of materials to a monument

A typology for annotating the Periegesis

As we have set out in our previous posts, our aim in the Digital Periegesis is to identify and explore the spatial form of, and the forms of space within, Pausanias’s narrative. The challenge of analyzing spatial representation in the Description of Greece—and the reason why we were attracted to the text in the first place—is the “thickness” of that description, whether Pausanias is taking the reader on a tour of a temple precinct, stopping off along a road to take note of a statue, or recalling the mythical stories associated with a simple looking rock.

In order to capture sufficient information about those places (or objects in space), it is first helpful to establish a set of concepts and categories when annotating them in Recogito: i.e., how they function within his narrative, and, in turn, how his narrative is constructed through spatial description. With a view to building a method that can help us annotate in a systematic and uniform manner, we have so far developed the following semantic annotation typology based on the entity and tagging feature in Recogito:

1. Entities

Recogito provides three choices of entity: place, people, event. Our primary concern is place: when we identify a place in the text, we mark it and align it to an appropriate gazetteer place entry (if we can find one). However, it is also important to identify people in the text, especially for their role in certain places (or even as proxies for place): for this we use the “people” entity (and both the “place” and “people” entity if considered to be representing a place).

Figure 1: annotating a “place” in Pausanias, by identifying the character string as an entity and then aligning it to a global authority record (the gazetteer DARE or Pleiades).

2. Tags

Recogito also provides a “free” tagging features, which enables users to provide more information about those entities and construct their own schema for labelling them. For instance, for places, we want to identify: is the place human, physical, regional, or mythical; and what type of place is it? (e.g. human place might be a settlement, temple, assembly.) For people: are they mythical or historical; divine or mortal; male or female; Greek or other? Or are they a proxy for a place?

Figure 2: Annotating a “person” in Recogito, by first identifying the character string as an entity and then using tags to further define it.

3. Relations

Fundamentally, we are interested in capturing the ways in which Pausanias constructs his description of Greece. There are various different kinds of spatial relationships that can be defined in the text, as Pausanias moves through both space and time. So far we have determined the following:

  • Topographic: a place in space, as Pausanias moves through the landscape,
  • Chronotopic: a place in time, as Pausanias moves through the history of a particular place/building/statue, or
  • Analogic: places compared, as Pausanias relates one place to another in a different part of the world.

We use the “event” entity to highlight the sections of the text in which either or these three descriptive modes take place, and use the tagging feature to then specify the mode (topographic, chronotopic, or analogic). We then use an additional relational tagging feature, which is part of the Recogito UI, to further define those relations: e.g. are the topographic relations being described synoptic (a bird’s eye view) or hodologic (movement through space)? A further tag can be used to define focalisation–whether the description is from the narrator’s viewpoint or the perspective of another.

Figure 3: annotating relations in Recogito, using the “event” entity to mark the entire clause of the upper-level spatial category (topographic, chronotopic, or analogic), and then the “relational tagging” feature to mark the individual entities and their precise relationship to each other.

This represents our methodology for annotating the Periegesis at the moment. But, as we have already found, we are modifying and nuancing this typology as we move through Pausanias’s “thick” description. You may also have your thoughts about what to capture and how: we welcome your feedback!

For our latest methodological account, see: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1drDtRMdXTjLkwkDB5SYsxZQmTig8z1dN2YCE1Q-E5L4/edit?usp=sharing

The Digital Periegesis’s technical environment

Usability and reach are the determining factors behind our choice of how to produce a digital Periegesis, though other important factors like efficiency, sustainability, collaboration and transparency have also played a role. Too often new digital initiatives devote time and money to building bespoke new applications that tend to “reinvent the wheel” or at least duplicate on-going efforts, which also lead to the unwelcome further stratification of resources. We have taken a contrary approach that puts the emphasis on the reuse and extension of data and tools that have already been produced and that have a community around them. Not only does this mean working closely with other groups; the Digital Periegesis will, we believe, greatly benefit from being located within a landscape of like-minded resources, as well as enabling us to concentrate on meeting the aims of our project.

There are three key background elements to our digital exploration of Pausanias. First, we use the text of the Periegesis from the Perseus Classical Library (specifically from their newly-launched Scaife viewer, recently reviewed for the Society of Classical Studies here). We use two forms of the text: its plaintext format for the English translation, and the TEI text for the Greek. While the translation of Pausanias is out-dated and not entirely satisfactory, both of these texts are openly licensed (in CC-BY) for reuse. For us, the benefits of being able to take the text and (re)use it as the basis for digital analysis far outweighs other considerations (such as of accuracy of contemporary English idiom), particularly when we are focused on analysing specific features within it, i.e. the category of place and other spatial concepts. (For similar comments on using the Perseus text of Herodotus, see Barker et al. 2010.)

The second key element is the platform in and with which we explore the text itself, the open-source Web-based platform Recogito developed by Pelagios. Recogito enables the user to easily upload texts (as well as images and tables), which can then be marked up with additional information, primarily about the places mentioned. Using a global network of gazetteers such as Pleiades (which covers the ancient world), Recogito enables the user to not only identify a character string such as “A-t-h-e-n-s” as a place, but also then to align that reference to an appropriate authority file, so that one, for example, can disambiguate between the “Athens” of Pausanias’s period and “Athens, Georgia” the hometown of the band REM. This is done by using what are known as Uniform Resource Identifiers, or URIs, essentially “social security numbers” for places, which allow them to be disambiguated from each other. The URI for classical Athens, for example, is 579885, or, giving the full web address: https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885.

Third, and following on from this: semantic annotation in Recogito conforms to a Linked Open Data model for connecting online resources. The two-step process of annotation noted above—where one asserts that a character string in the document represents a place entity and then aligns that reference to the global authority gazetteer on that place—enables the creation of a data format known as RDF, which is one of the outputs that Recogito produces. This means that by working on Pausanias in Recogito we will be able to connect our Digital Periegesis to other resources that hold information about the places referenced in the text. So, for example, if we use the Pleiades URI for Athens for references to this place in Pausanias, we will then be able to link to other resources that do the same. (For a prototype application of what a linked data ecosystem might look like, see Pelagios’s Peripleo search tool and the report on its use by Chiara Palladino here.) This will, in turn, enable the comparison of Pausanias’s deep description of various sites (the Athenian Agora, or Corinth, for example) to the archaeological data found there and the plans of them produced in modern research.

As part of a growing community, Recogito currently has c.3,000 regular users, who have produced c.1.90 million annotations. Having uploaded our different versions of Pausanias’s ten books to Recogito to work on directly, we are currently creating semantic annotations to do with place which essentially treats the text itself as a database of information. If you would like to check on our progress, our documents are open to read, both the plaintext English version and the Greek TEI version. Better still, contact us and get involved!

Introducing the Digital Periegesis


Such in my opinion are the most famous legends (logoi) and sights (theorêmata) among the Athenians, and from the beginning my narrative has picked out of much material the things that deserve to be recorded.

Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.39.3

Sometime over the course of the 2nd century CE, a certain Pausanias of Magnesia set out to write a detailed account of a journey (or, better, journeys) through mainland Greece. The result is the Periegesis Hellados (Description of Greece), a ten-volume survey of the human footprint on that landscape, which presents a wealth of information about the towns, buildings, monuments and artefacts from Attica to Phocis, taking in a counter-clockwise route through the Peloponnese along the way. Ever since, Pausanias has been widely used as a guide for interpreting those sites, and, subsequently, for their archaeology. And yet, as recent scholars such as Will Hutton, Maria Pretzler and Greta Hawes have shown, Pausanias’s description of place does not map easily on to the archaeological record, as it is emerging through excavation. For one thing, as the passage quoted above suggests, Pausanias’s topographical narrative is shot through with past accounts (logoi) of the places through which he passes and the objects in space he sees.

The word Periegesis, which derives from the verb periēgeisthai, “to lead or show around”, has this double sense of description (of place) and movement (through space and time). In this project, funded for three years by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, we aim to identify, trace, map and explore the spatial form of, and the forms of space within, Pausanias’s narrative. That is to say, we are interested in two complementary ideas: the ways in which place and objects (and peoples) within space are described, and the spatial organisation of his narrative. (In her recent review of the edited volume on The Production of Space in Latin Literature, Carolyn MacDonald notes with approval the method of “simultaneously exploring both the literary construction of space and the spatial articulation of the literary”, which is essentially our aim too.) In particular, we want to analyse the ways in which Pausanias moves through and relates places to each other.

To investigate Pausanias’s production of a Greek space, we want to address the following questions:

  • Which locations are particularly “thick” in description, which are passed over with little or no comment, and what reasons can we deduce to account for these differences?
  • What is the relationship between Pausanias’s movement through space and time? Do particular spaces attract mythological / historical description? What mythological or historical figures or periods are particularly prominent or privileged, where, and with what effect?
  • What are the intersections between the various ways in which Pausanias relates places and spaces to each other—i.e. between topographical (movement through space), chronotopic (movement through time), and analogic (comparison of places)? How does Pausanias construct his journey(s), both at the macro and micro level? What picture emerges of a “Greece” from these networked relations, in contrast to our own cartographic representation of this space?

To conduct our analysis we are using the latest technology to help us work directly with and on a digital text of the Periegesis. Specifically, we are using a semantic annotation platform in order to capture spatial information in the text in ways that will enable us to visualise and analyse the spatial form of, and the forms of space within, Pausanias’s narrative. In our next blog post we will outline this technical environment in more detail.

We are already partnering with a number of related initiatives in this space. If you would like to get involved, please feel free to contact us via our Twitter account, @PeriegesisH, or by responding to this blog.