Yale (2026) h/b 194pp £20 (ISBN 9780300284768)
Professor Daniel Ogden (University of Exeter) is an astonishingly prolific author of books: seventeen including this latest one since 1996, plus a Sourcebook. He is also a both fluent and economical author, not a common combination, and he digs deep into all the relevant ancient sources and most of the relevant modern literature—and some more.
A certain fondness—or weakness—for ghosts and necromancy has led to some considerable padding here. But overall the author’s aim and hope ‘to have conveyed both the significance of Pausanias’s life and the brilliant drama of it’ (129) have been amply fulfilled. This is an excellent addition to James Romm’s ‘Ancient Lives’ series (full listing, not included in the book, of the sixteen to date: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/search-results/?series=yle174-ancient-lives)…; It is also the first book-length anglophone ‘biography’ of Pausanias the Regent.
We biographers (and series editors) of prominent ancient figures always have to contend with two main obstacles: lack of the sort of evidence (diaries, letters) that would enable us to write an inner as well as a public-facing ‘political’ life; and, second, the biases—whether positive or negative—of those sources that one trusts enough to use to form one’s own reconstruction of a significant life and estimate of a career’s quality. One glaring ancient lack in this instance is of a Life by Plutarch, who published five ‘Lives of Spartans’ but for whatever reason none of Pausanias.
He is featured in the extant Lives of Athenians Aristeides and Cimon, but he is credited with no apophthegm in the curated Plutarchan collection Sayings of Kings and Commanders. Yet the Regent’s career peripeteia—‘from victor to traitor’ in Ogden’s laconic subtitle—would certainly have provided just the sort of subject-matter that Plutarch the moralizing biographer favoured. Perhaps it was because he already had Alcibiades lined up as his parallel to (Caius Marcius) Coriolanus, or Themistocles as parallel to (Marcus Furius) Camillus, that Pausanias was simply surplus to requirements.
As it is, much weight must therefore be placed on the testimony of Herodotus and Simonides (for the victor) and Thucydides (for the traitor), which has led Ogden to claim for (his) ruthless and dynamic Pausanias the title of ‘the greatest of the Greeks’ (p.2, as ‘the’ victor of the Battle of Plataea, when only about 25) and to seek to mitigate or explain away or play down the charge of medizing traitor—and traitor in another sense too, as accused by the then Spartan authorities of conspiring somehow with certain Helots to the detriment of the established Spartan kosmos. Those headline judgements are justifiable, perhaps, but also challengeable. They are reached via fourteen, short (the longest 11 pages) chapters, topped and tailed by an Introduction and a Conclusion.
Three of the fourteen (29/30 pages out of 128 main-text pages) are devoted chiefly or exclusively to ghosts. Happily, they do not significantly unbalance the whole. The mainline chapters on the Plataea battle and its aftermath (including monumental commemoration via the Serpent Column), and on his hero’s two post-Plataea visits to Byzantium, are first-rate. They corroborate the main text’s final sentence and paragraph: ‘With his paradoxically—but also characteristically—heroic end, Pausanias fully deserves his place in the company of the Dioscuri and Menelaus, with whom we first found him riding in Simonides’ Plataean elegy’ (p.128). Bricked up to near-death starvation within Sparta’s principal, poliadic temple, Pausanias was let out only so as not to be allowed to expire on sanctified ground: a classic instance of the state-sponsored Spartan religiosity that Herodotus had memorably commented upon twice (5.63,9.7).
Somewhat unexpectedly but very agreeably, there follows a long (pp.129-50) Appendix detailing and discussing what Ogden considers the five most significant instances of modern reception (from 1696 to 1886, the year the British School at Athens was founded), all of them relating to the post-Plataea Pausanias. These comprise very varied works or part-works by respectively playwright Richard Norton, Byron (Manfred), Jacques-Louis David, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and anthologist (‘Golden Treasury’) Francis Turner Palgrave. Then follow a short Chronology, a Genealogy (making clear just what strain the Agiad royal line was under in 480 and 479 BC), sixteen pages of endnotes, and Bibliography (pp. 171-84).
The latter is not quite complete. Nor is the main text entirely error-free. I was surprised to find Thebes’s Sacred Band antedated by about a century (p. 36), and Herodotus’s clearly incredible numbers for the Persian side at Plataea seemingly accepted at face-value (pp. 7, 22-3, 36, and table on p. 25). But in the grand scheme of things these flaws are nugatory. Professor Ogden’s book will stand or fall ultimately on its non-moralizing historical judgement of Pausanias’s quite extraordinary career between the ages of about 25, his zenith, and his memorably fatal nadir at about 37.
Paul Cartledge