These are perhaps the most notable passages in Pausanias, which might be thought to bear traces of having been derived either wholly or in part from written documents rather than from personal observation. In none of them are the indications so clear as to amount to a proof of borrowing. At most they raise a probability of it, nothing more.
It would be neither surprising nor unnatural if in writing his _Description of Greece_ Pausanias not only consulted, as we know he did, but borrowed from the works of previous writers on the same subject. Any one who undertakes to write a guide-book to a country may legitimately borrow from his predecessors, provided he has taken the trouble to ascertain for himself that their descriptions are still applicable to the country at the time he is writing. Pausanias in his character of the Camden of ancient Greece had many predecessors whose writings he may and indeed ought to have consulted. But of their works only the titles and a few fragments have come down to us, and these contain nothing to show that Pausanias copied or had even read them. The most considerable of the fragments—those which pass under the name of Dicaearchus the Messenian—have been already examined, and we have seen how different in scope and style was the work to which they belonged from that which Pausanias has left us. No one would dream of maintaining that Pausanias copied his description of Greece from the pseudo-Dicaearchus. The most famous of the antiquaries who preceded Pausanias seem to have been Diodorus, Polemo, and Heliodorus, all of whom earned by their writings the title of _The Periegete_ or _Cicerone_. [Sidenote: Diodorus.] Of these the earliest was Diodorus, who is not to be confounded with the Sicilian historian of that name. He published works on the tombs and townships of Attica, of which a few fragments survive. [Sidenote: Heliodorus.] They seem to have been composed before 308 B.C. Heliodorus lived in the reign of Ptolemy Epiphanes and wrote a work on the Acropolis of Athens in no less than fifteen books, of which only a few brief fragments have come down to us. There is some reason to think that Pausanias cannot have consulted it. [Sidenote: Polemo.] Polemo of Ilium flourished in the first part of the second century B.C., and was the author of many special treatises on the monuments of Greece. Amongst them were works on the Acropolis of Athens, on the eponymous heroes of the Attic townships and tribes, on the Sacred Way, on the Painted Colonnade at Sicyon, on the votive offerings at Lacedaemon, on the founding of the cities of Phocis, on the treasuries at Delphi, and many more. More than a hundred extracts from or references to his works have come down to us; and if we may judge from them, from the number and variety of the treatises he published, and from the praise of Plutarch we shall be inclined to pronounce Polemo the most learned of all Greek antiquaries. His acquaintance both with the monuments and with the literature seems to have been extensive and profound. The attention which he bestowed on inscriptions earned for him the nickname of the ‘monument-tapper.’ His works were certainly extant later than the time of Pausanias, since they are freely quoted by Athenaeus. It would, therefore, be strange if Pausanias did not study them, dealing as many of them did with the same subjects on which he touched in his _Description of Greece_. Yet the existing fragments of Polemo hardly justify us in supposing that Pausanias was acquainted with the writings of his learned predecessor. Certainly they lend no countenance to the view that he borrowed descriptions of places and monuments from them. This will appear from an examination of those fragments of Polemo which deal with subjects falling within the scope of Pausanias’s work. We shall look, first, at the things mentioned by both writers, and, second, at the things mentioned by Polemo alone. The fragments are numbered as in the editions of L. Preller and Ch. Müller, to which the reader is referred for the Greek text.