SOURCE: "Pausanias and His Description of Greece" in Pausanias and Other Greek Sketches, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900, pp. 1-159.

In the following essay, Frazer provides an overview of Pausanias and his Description of Greece, including Pausanias s background and peers, aim and method, beliefs and tastes, and accounts of his travels and digressions.

It may be reckoned a peculiar piece of good fortune that among the wreckage of classical literature the Description of Greece by Pausanias should have come down to us entire. In this work we possess a plain, unvarnished account by an eye-witness of the state of Greece in the second century of our era. Of no other part of the ancient world has a description at once so minute and so trustworthy survived, and if we had been free to single out one country in one age of which we should wish a record...