Greg Nagy
Last updated at
July 8, 2020, 2:45 p.m.
{"blocks":[{"key":"2f11l","text":"This detail in Pausanias 1.1.2 is of special interest to me. I find it intriguing that Pausanias, visiting Athens in the second century CE, is foregrounding here a detail about Themistocles that could easily be ignored by professional Classicists who study only the testimony of the Classical period of the fifth and the fourth centuries BCE. It is as if he were saying to such professionals: here is something that I bet you did not know—or had ignored… Themistocles was rehabilitated by the Athenians, despite his having defected to the Persian Empire after his political successes in Athens had gone sour. And the visible sign of his rehabilitation is his tomb. The tomb of Themistocles, as a visible reminder, reconnects the memories about Themistocles with the present. Here the medium of Pausanias, which is a visual journey that reconnects with the history of the past, shows its power to reshape or even restore history as he sees it. I see a comparable gesture of rehabilitation in my comment on a later passage, Pausanias 1.23.9. [[GN 2014.04.13.]]","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{}}