To begin with the historical, in the widest sense of the word, we find that Pausanias drew his accounts of the mythical and heroic ages in large measure from the poets. Homer is his chief poetical authority, but he also makes use of the later epics such as the _Cypria_, the _Eoeae_, the _Little Iliad_, the _Minyad_, the _Naupactia_, the _Oedipodia_, the _Returns_ (_Nostoi_), the _Sack of Ilium_ by Lesches, the _Thebaid_, and the _Thesprotis_. Of these the _Thebaid_ was esteemed by him next to the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. On questions of genealogy he often cites the early poets Asius and Cinaethon. Among the works attributed to Hesiod he frequently refers to the _Theogony_ and the _Catalogue of Women_, and he once quotes the _Argonautica_ of Apollonius Rhodius. That he knew the Alexandrian poet Euphorion of Chalcis is shown by two references to his writings. The most ancient Greek hymns in his opinion were those of Olen; he cites several of them. Again, the testimony of Pamphos, author of the oldest Athenian hymns, is often appealed to by Pausanias. Among the lyric poets whose works he knew, such as Alcaeus, Alcman, Archilochus, Pindar, Sappho, and Stesichorus, he appears to have ranked Pindar first; at least he refers to his poems far oftener than to those of the others. Among the elegiac poets he quotes Tyrtaeus and Simonides. With the great tragic and comic poets he shows but little acquaintance; Aeschylus is the only one whose authority he appeals to repeatedly. He refers once to the testimony of Sophocles, but only to reject it; once to that of Aristophanes; never to that of Euripides. On the other hand, he seems to have devoted a good deal of attention to the critical study of the older poets. He had investigated the dates of Homer and Hesiod and the question of Homer’s native country. Nor did he neglect to enquire into the genuineness of many poems that passed under famous names. He tells admiringly how a contemporary of his own, Arrhiphon of Triconium, detected the spuriousness of certain verses attributed to an old Argive poet Philammon, by pointing out that the verses were in the Doric dialect which had not yet been introduced into Argolis in Philammon’s time. Among the works ascribed to Musaeus he held that nothing was genuine except the hymn to Demeter composed for the Lycomids; some of the verses which passed under the name of Musaeus he set down as forgeries of Onomacritus. The hymns of Orpheus were ranked by him next to those of Homer for poetical beauty, but he saw that some of the verses attributed to Orpheus were spurious. He had grave doubts as to the _Theogony_ being a genuine work of Hesiod; and he informs us that the reading of a poem fathered on Linus sufficed to convince him of its spuriousness. Of the works which circulated under the name of the early Corinthian poet Eumelus one only, he tells us, was held to be genuine. He could not believe that Anaximenes had written a certain epic on Alexander the Great. As to the epic called the _Thebaid_, which he admired, he reports the view of Callinus that the author was Homer, adding that “many respectable persons have shared his opinion.”