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47-421: Description of Greece ( Ancient Greek : Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις , romanized :  Helládos Periḗgēsis ) is the only surviving work by the ancient "geographer" or tourist Pausanias (c. 110 – c. 180). Pausanias' Description of Greece comprises ten books, each of them dedicated to some part of mainland Greece. He is essentially describing his own travels, and large parts of Greece are not covered, including

94-537: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

141-731: A collector of manuscripts from antiquity, had this archetype in Florence around 1418. After his death in 1437, it was sent to the library of San Marco, Florence , ultimately disappearing after 1500. The first printed edition ( editio princeps ) was printed in 1516 in Venice , by the firm of Aldus Manutius (who had died the previous year). The editor was Marcus Musurus ( Greek : Μάρκος Μουσοῦρος Markos Mousouros ; Italian : Marco Musuro ; c. 1470 – 1517) from Venetian Crete who had made his career in Italy, and already edited many classic Greek authors. It

188-467: A credible work of scholarship to readers of Pausanias today. [REDACTED] Media related to Pausanias's Description of Greece at Wikimedia Commons Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into

235-472: A lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and

282-419: A lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in

329-543: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

376-671: A separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek , and Koine may be classified as Ancient Greek in a wider sense. There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek

423-609: A standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as

470-418: A story about a Greek author, thought to be Anyte of Tegea , who has a divine dream. In the dream, she is told to present the text of Description of Greece to a wider Greek audience in order to open their eyes to "all things Greek". Description of Greece left only faint traces in the known Greek corpus. "It was not read", Habicht relates, "there is not a single quotation from it, not even a single mention of

517-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

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564-556: Is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of

611-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

658-644: Is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to

705-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

752-584: Is the cultural geography of ancient Greece, especially its religious sites, in which Pausanias not only described architectural and artistic objects, but also reviewed the historical and mythological underpinnings of the culture that created them. Recent decades, during which archaeology has confirmed various of his descriptions, have increased his credibility as a witness among scholars. In the 19th century his accounts were often regarded as unreliable. We know nothing about Pausanias except what can be deduced from his book. There are no ancient mentions of either until

799-518: The Euripus Strait , opposite of the island of Euboea , at modern Mikro Vathy /Ag. Nikolaos. Livy states that Aulis was 3 miles (4.8 km) from Chalcis . Aulis never developed into a fully independent polis , but belonged to ancient Thebes (378 BC) and Tanagra respectively. According to Homer 's epic The Iliad , the Greek fleet gathered in Aulis to set off for Troy . However,

846-698: The Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as the Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

893-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

940-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

987-562: The 6th century AD, and the book seems to have survived to the Middle Ages in a single manuscript, itself now lost. However, it attracted great interest in the Renaissance, and was copied in manuscript several times, before being first printed in 1516. Pausanias was motivated by his interest in religion, mythology, and the local legends around religious sites. His work has been regarded as some kind of "journey into identity", referring to that of

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1034-490: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

1081-546: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs,   Aulis (ancient Greece) Aulis ( Ancient Greek : Αὐλίς ) was a Greek port town, located in ancient Boeotia in central Greece, at

1128-424: The Greek beliefs and heritage. Pausanias describes the religious art and sacred architecture of many famous sites such as Olympia and Delphi . Although as a critic of art and architecture he is usually vague and frustratingly brief, his few words are often or usually the only surviving literary source from antiquity, and of great interest to historians and archaeologists. Even in the most remote Greek regions, he

1175-479: The Spartan king Agesilaus II , imitating Agamemnon , chose Aulis as the departure point for sailing to Asia with his army. On the eve of sailing Thebans intervened and drove Agesilaus out of Boeotia. This event has been seen as the origin of Agesilaus' personal hatred towards Thebes , which greatly influenced the relationship between Sparta and Thebes over the next 25 years until the decisive Battle of Leuctra . In

1222-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

1269-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

1316-449: The author, not a whisper before the sixth century ( Stephanus Byzantius ), and only three or two references to it throughout the Middle Ages ." Eighteen surviving manuscripts of Pausanias were known in the 1830s, copies from the fifteenth or sixteenth century, with three perhaps older than the rest. They are full of lacunae and errors, and all appear to depend on a single manuscript, now missing, that managed to be copied. Niccolò Niccoli ,

1363-438: The center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West

1410-457: The date palms of ancient Aulis , the wild strawberries at Mount Helicon , the olive oil in Tithorea , as well as the "white blackbirds" of Mount Kyllini (Cyllene) and the tortoises of Arcadia. The end of Description of Greece remains mysterious: some believe that Pausanias died before finishing his work, and others believe his strange ending was intentional. He concludes his Periegesis with

1457-473: The departure for the Trojan War was prevented by Artemis , who stopped the wind to punish Agamemnon , who had killed a deer in a sacred grove and boasted he was the better hunter than she. The fleet was only able to sail off after Agamemnon had sacrificed his eldest daughter, Iphigenia . Strabo says that the harbour of Aulis could only hold fifty ships, and that therefore the Greek fleet must have assembled in

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1504-611: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

1551-516: The following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ), the Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been

1598-556: The historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from

1645-472: The historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to

1692-498: The islands. His tour begins in Attica ( Ἀττικά ) and continues with Athens, including its suburbs or demes . Then the work goes with Corinthia ( Κορινθιακά ), Laconia ( Λακωνικά ), Messenia ( Μεσσηνιακά ), Elis ( Ἠλιακά ), Achaea ( Ἀχαϊκά ), Arcadia ( Ἀρκαδικά ), Boeotia ( Βοιωτικά ), Phocis ( Φωκικά ), and Ozolian Locris ( Λοκρῶν Ὀζόλων ). The work is rather erratic on described topography ; its main interest

1739-447: The large port in the neighbourhood (Ancient Greek: Βαθὺς λιμὴν , romanized:  Bathỳs limḗn , lit.   'deep sea'). Aulis appears to have stood upon a rocky height, since it is called by Homer "rocky Aulis" (Ancient Greek: Αὐλὶς πετρήεσσα , romanized:  Aulìs petrḗessa ), and by Strabo a "stone village" (Ancient Greek: πετρῶδες χωρίον , romanized:  petrôdes chōríon ). In 396 BCE,

1786-499: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

1833-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

1880-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

1927-606: The text was translated by William Henry Samuel Jones and is available through the Loeb Classical Library . The translation as Guide to Greece by Peter Levi is popular among English speakers, but is often thought to be a loose translation of the original text: Levi took liberties with his translation that restructured Description of Greece to function like a general guidebook to mainland Greece. Sir James George Frazer also published six volumes of translation and commentary of Description of Greece ; his translation remains

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1974-447: The time of Pausanias , Aulis had only a few inhabitants, who were potters. Its temple of Artemis, which Agamemnon is said to have founded, was still standing when Pausanias visited the place. [REDACTED]  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain :  Smith, William , ed. (1854–1857). "Aulis". Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography . London: John Murray. This article about

2021-475: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

2068-563: Was fascinated by many kinds of holy relics, depictions of deities, and other mysterious and sacred things. For example, at Thebes , Pausanias views the ruins of the house of the poet Pindar , the shields of warriors who died at the famous Battle of Leuctra , the statues of Arion , Hesiod , Orpheus , and Thamyris . He also visited the grove of the Muses on Helicon and saw the portraits of Polybius and of Corinna at Tanagra in Arcadia . Pausanias

2115-476: Was mostly interested in relics of antiquity, rather than contemporary architecture or sacred spaces. As Christian Habicht , a modern day classicist who wrote a multitude of scholarly articles on Pausanias, says: "He definitely prefers the sacred to the profane and the old to the new, and there is much more about classical art of Greece than the about contemporary, more about gods, altars, and temples, than about statues of politicians or public buildings." Although he

2162-477: Was no naturalist, he often gives brief comments on the physical aspects of the ancient landscapes he passed through. Pausanias wrote about the pine trees located on the coast of Ancient Elis , the wild boars and the deer in the oak woods of Seliana (Phelloe), and the crows amid the oak trees in Alalcomenae . Towards the end of Description of Greece , Pausanias touches on the fruits of nature and products, such as

2209-540: Was translated into Latin by Romolo Amaseo  [ it ] , printed in Rome in 1547, with a combined Greek and Latin edition from Thomas Fritsch of Leipzig in 1696. An Italian translation followed in 1593 ( Mantua by Alfonso Bonacciuoli ). A French translation by Nicolas Gédoyn was published in 1731. It was again translated into Latin by Germans, published in 1896. Translations into English begin rather late, with Thomas Taylor (London, 1794). A widely known version of

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