[Rarebooks] FS: First English translation of Pausanias, 1796

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      PAUSANIAS.  The Description of Greece, by Pausanias.  Translated 
from the Greek, With Notes, In which much of the Mythology of the 
Greeks is unfolded from a Thoery which has been for many Ages unknown.  
And Illustrated with Maps andd Views Elegantly Engraved.  In Three 
Volumes.  London: for R. Faulder, 1794.
      First edition in English.  With two folding maps and five folding 
views after James "Athenian" Stuart.  Three 8vo volumes, bound in 
nineteenth-century plum morocco and marbled boards, gilt lettered in 
two panels of the spine.  xvii, 444; [ii], 383; [ii], 423, [1] pp., 
bound without the half-titles.  Some scuffing to the boards with 
sections of the marbled paper torn away from the board; minor foxing or 
dustiness to the title-pages and a few terminal leaves; overall about 
very good and generally very clean internally.
      Pausanias traveled the Peloponnese and part of northern Greece in 
the second century A.D.  James Frazer, in his excellent 1898 edition, 
describes him as "a man made of common stuff and cast in a common 
mould; his intelligence and abilities seem to have been little above 
the average, his opinions not very different from those of his 
contemporaries."  And though Frazer meant it as a criticism, it is 
perhaps fortunate for the modern world that he was so: he describes a 
range of subjects, including topography, history, religious art and 
architecture, battlefields, the wonders of nature, myths and legends 
(of which he was critical), sculpture and inscriptions, as seen through 
the eyes of the average observer, uncolored or embellished by pompous 
literary style or ambition.  The accuracy of his descriptions 
throughout Greece have been corroborated by the remains of the 
buildings he describes, and his careful description of Mycenae led to 
its discovery in the nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann.  Frazer 
acknowledges his worth when he said, "without him the ruins of Greece 
would for the most part be a labyrinth without a clue, a riddle without 
an answer."
      This first complete English edition was translated by Thomas 
Taylor, sometimes called "the Platonist" for his translation of that 
philosopher.  William Axon, in his "Thomas Taylor the Platonist" 
(1890), calles him "the most important disseminator of ancient 
philosophy in the history of English and American literature" (p. 11).  
Because of his philosophic polytheism he had many detractors in England 
and was more widely read in America, where he influenced the generation 
of the American literary renaissance; but he met with a "hearty 
welcome" from the dons when visiting Oxford in 1802

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Greg Powers
Powers Rare Books
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