Inspiration and Aspiration: Date, Genre, and Readership

Abstract

Abstract I begin by considering some questions concerning Pausanias’s date. The indications offered by passages in his work leave little room for doubt about the rough dates of its composition, and point chiefly to the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Book I, on Attica, had been finished, Pausanias tells us explicitly (7.20.6), before Herodes Atticus’s construction of his Odeion in Athens to commemorate his dead wife, Regilla. Regilla died very late in the 150s or in A.D. 160 or 161. We need not suppose the Odeion to have been begun, far less completed, immediately after her death, even if the poems commissioned by Herodes for Regilla’s monument on the via Appia should fall soon after 160 (given that the career of their poet, Marcellus of Side, was chiefly under Hadrian and Pius). A date of ca. A.D. 165 for the Odeion and as a terminus ante quern for the completion of Book I fits our other evidence. Book II (2.27.6) reths to building at Epidaurus by a senator Antoninus, undoubtedly Sextus Iulius Maior Antoninus Pythodorus, who was active in the 160s, and not the emperor Antoninus Pius.

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