Pausanias’ Haptic Geography: Bodies and Landscapes in the <i>Periegesis</i>

Pausanias has often been represented, by the standards of modern travel writing, as an author who is reticent about describing his personal experiences. There have been some important attempts to reassert the experiential nature of his account, but there is still a tendency to understate the importance of bodies and bodiliness for his text. Repeatedly Pausanias offers us images of mythical and historical bodies immersed in the landscapes he passes through. Every so often, interspersed with those passages, we come across moments where the land is equated with a human body. My aim is to explore the function of those passages within Pausanias’ text. I argue that they imply a conception of antiquarian travel as a surprisingly corporeal enterprise, in the sense that Pausanias appeals repeatedly to the reader’s haptic imagination. I further argue that these passages play an important role in articulating Pausanias’ distinctive vision of the continuing but always elusive presence of the past in the landscapes of Roman Greece. Pausanias has a powerful sense of the permeability between human bodies and the environment and, intertwined with that theme, often articulated through it, an awareness of the permeability between the past and the present.