“Antoninus the Second,” he tells us (viii. 43. 6), “inflicted punishment on the Germans, the most numerous and warlike barbarians in Europe.”
[Sidenote: His preference for the older over the later art.]
When we examine Pausanias’s choice of monuments we find that, like his account of the country and people, it was mainly determined by two leading principles, his antiquarian tastes and his religious curiosity. In the first place, the monuments described are generally ancient, not modern; in the second place, they are for the most part religious, not profane. His preference for old over modern art, for works of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. over those of the later period, was well founded and has been shared by the best judges both in ancient and modern times. Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Quintilian, and our author’s own contemporary, Lucian, perhaps the most refined critic of art in antiquity, mention no artist of later date than the fourth century B.C. The truth is, the subjugation of Greece by Macedonia struck a fatal blow at Greek art. No sculptor or painter of the first rank was born after the conquest. It seemed as if art were a flower that could only bloom in freedom; in the air of slavery it drooped and faded. Thus if Pausanias chose to chronicle the masterpieces of the great age of art rather than the feebler productions of the decadence, we can only applaud his taste. Yet we may surmise that his taste was here reinforced by his patriotism. For he was more than a mere antiquary and connoisseur. He was a patriot who warmly sympathised with the ancient glories of his country and deeply mourned its decline. He recognised Athens as the representative of all that was best in Greek life, and he can hardly find words strong enough to express his detestation of the men who by weakening her in the Peloponnesian war directly prepared for the conquest of Greece by Macedonia. The battle of Chaeronea he describes repeatedly as a disaster for the whole of Greece, and of the conqueror Philip himself he speaks in terms of the strongest reprobation. The men who had repelled the Persians, put down the military despotism of Sparta, fought against the Macedonians, and delayed, if they could not avert, the final subjugation of Greece by Rome were for him the benefactors of their country. He gives a list of them, beginning with Miltiades and ending with Philopoemen, after whom, he says, Greece ceased to be the mother of the brave. And as he mentions with pride and gratitude the men who had served the cause of freedom, so he expresses himself with disgust and abhorrence of the men who had worked for the enslavement of Greece to Persia, to Macedonia, and to Rome. His style, generally cold and colourless, grows warm and animated when he tells of a struggle for freedom, whether waged by the Messenians against the Spartans, or by the Greeks against the Gauls, or by the Achaeans against the Romans. And when he has recorded the final catastrophe, the conquest of Greece by Rome, he remarks as with a sigh that the nation had now reached its lowest depth of weakness, and that when Nero afterwards liberated it the boon came too late—the Greeks had forgotten what it was to be free.