Roman Empire, Globality and Locality in Pausanias’ Periegesis

Abstract

The following paper seeks to explore the relationship between globality and locality in Greece in the second century AD. In order to achieve that it is proposed a critical reading of Pausanias’ descriptions of his visits to three imperial Greek cities: Tegea, Patras, and Corinth. These three examples are considered as showing in a particularly clear way a disagreement between the author’s Hellenism, which is the universalist imaginary framework from which the local is visited and known in the Perigesis, and the memories, identities, and cult practices, which apparently are particularities of those local places. However, a deeper analysis allows us to notice that apparently particular phenomena are quite evident signs that the localities in which they are inserted are deeply traversed by the global phenomenon of the empire. It is sought here, then, to show how, although Pausanias wants discursively to erase from his work the imperial historical reality, this reality emerges in any case in his text because the empire itself has become a space of intense cultural exchange between global tendencies and local experiences.

Keywords

• pausanias
• globalidad
• localidad
• imperio romano