[Sidenote: His religious opinions. Belief in the gods.]
In religion as in morals Pausanias seems to have occupied a position not unlike that of his contemporaries. That it did not occur to him to doubt the existence of the gods and heroes of Greek mythology is clear from the tenour of his work as well as from many observations which he lets fall. Thus for example, he tells us that to see the gods in bodily shape was perilous; that Pan possessed, equally with the greatest of the gods, the power of answering prayer and requiting the wicked; and that down to his own time there was preserved at a city on the Euphrates the very rope, plaited of vine and ivy branches, with which Dionysus had spanned the river on his march to India. Even the criticisms which he sometimes offers on myths and legends prove that in the act of rejecting them wholly or in part he does not dream of questioning the reality of the divine or heroic personages of whom they were told. Thus, to give instances, while he examines and rejects the claims set up on behalf of various objects to be works of Hephaestus, he admits the genuineness of one of the objects, thereby clearly taking for granted the existence of the smith-god himself. Again, observing an image of Aphrodite with fetters on her feet he tells how, according to one tradition, Tyndareus had put this indignity on the goddess to punish her for bringing his daughters to shame. “This explanation,” declares Pausanias with decision, “I cannot accept for a moment It would have been too silly to imagine that by making a cedar-wood doll and dubbing it Aphrodite he could punish the goddess.” Obviously our author, if he has small reverence for the image and none at all for the tradition of its origin, cherishes an unfaltering faith in the reality of the goddess. Again, he denies that Semele was ever, as Greek tradition would have it, rescued from hell by Dionysus, and the reason he gives for his incredulity is that Semele was the wife of Zeus and therefore could not die. Yet again, after telling the legend of Eurypylus and the wonderful chest in which he kept a portable god, he mentions only to reject the tradition that Eurypylus received the chest from Hercules. “Sure am I,” says he, “that Hercules knew all about the chest, if it really was such a wonderful chest, and I do not believe that knowing about it he would ever have given it away to a comrade in arms.” Once more, Pausanias cannot bring himself to believe that Hercules ever carried his anger at a friend’s daughter so far as to condemn her to remain a spinster for the rest of her days and to serve him in that capacity as his priestess. He opines that while Hercules was still among men, “punishing other people for presumption and especially for impiety, it is not likely that he would have established a temple with a priestess all for himself, just as if he were a god.”