[Sidenote: Theory that Pausanias did not describe Greece as it was in his own time.]
On the other hand, the proposition that Pausanias described Greece not as it was in his own time, but as it had been in an earlier age, while it is of wider scope than the former is also more susceptible of verification. It could be established very simply by proving that he spoke of things as existing which from other sources are known to have ceased to exist before his time. It could not, of course, be established merely by showing that he mentions little or nothing of later date than say the age of Polemo, about 170 B.C., unless it could be further shown that the things he mentions had ceased to exist between that age and his own. For obviously all the things he notices might have existed in 170 B.C. and still be in existence when he wrote, and in describing them he would be as truly describing the Greece of his own time as a writer of the present day who, professing to record the most notable things in Athens at the end of the nineteenth century A.D., should choose to mention no building or statue later than the time of Pausanias, or even of Polemo himself. Thus all the attempts that have been made to invalidate the testimony of Pausanias as to the state of Greece in the second century A.D. by demonstrating merely that the things he describes were in existence in the second century B.C. must be dismissed as irrelevant. Even if the premises be admitted, the conclusion which it is sought to establish would not follow from them. It remains, therefore, to examine the evidence which has been thought to prove that some of the things mentioned by Pausanias as existing had ceased to exist before his time. If this were indeed proved, then the proposition that he did not describe Greece as it was in his own time would be proved also, and we should be sure that his descriptions were borrowed either wholly or in part from earlier writers, even if we could not hazard any guess as to who these writers were.
In the first place, then, it has been maintained that the description which Pausanias gives of the state of Piraeus did not apply to his own time. His account of the ship-sheds, the two market-places, the sanctuaries, the images, and so on, implies, it is said, that the port was in a fairly thriving state when he wrote about the middle of the second century A.D., and this cannot have been the case since Piraeus was burnt by Sulla in 86 B.C., and still lay in a forlorn condition when Strabo wrote in the age of Augustus. This remarkable criticism entirely overlooks the fact that between the destruction of Piraeus by Sulla and the time of Pausanias more than two hundred years had elapsed, during the greater part of which Greece had enjoyed profound peace and had been treated with special favour and indulgence by the Roman emperors. Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that during these two centuries the blackened ruins should have been cleared away? that new buildings should have sprung up, and population should have gathered once more around the harbour? Does the Palatinate, we may ask by analogy, remain to this day the wilderness to which it was reduced by the armies of Louis XIV. two centuries ago? But such questions need no answer. In the case of Piraeus, fortunately, we are not left merely to balance probabilities or improbabilities against each other. We have positive evidence of a great revival of the port after its destruction by Sulla. A single inscription of the first century B.C. or the second century A.D. testifies to the existence of the dockyards, the colonnades, the Exchange, the government buildings, the sanctuaries. Another, contemporary with Pausanias, proves that Roman merchants were then settled in the port. A third deals with the regulation of traffic in the market. Portraits of Roman emperors found on the spot speak of gratitude for imperial favour, and remains of Roman villas and Roman baths bear witness to the return not merely of prosperity but of wealth and luxury. In short, if Pausanias had described Piraeus as lying in ruins, as his critic thinks he should have done, he might have described it as it was in the early part of the first century B.C., but he certainly would not have described it as it was in his own time two hundred years later.
