It’s More Than Ancient Rocks

Andrew as Pausanias

(Reis) Around Greece from Athens to Delphi, Delphi to Olympia, and Olympia to Nafplion, where we are now. Along the way, learning and having fun with our guide, Antony At all the places, we learned about the ancient monuments and how they would be in antiquity. The way all of this was found out and told by archeologists was the wealthy medical doctor, Posanius. Pausanias wanted to see the rest of Greece, so he went all around Greece learning and recording about the ancient monuments in the year 150 A.D. Back then the monuments were mostly all intact so Pausanias drew pictures, and wrote in excruciating detail, of the structures, so now the archeologists know what they would look like.  One of the quotes in his famous journal was “I don’t know if what I write is true, but that is what my guide said”. Here is some of the things our guide, Antony, told us about.

• The Trojan War. Started by a beauty contest between the goddesses. Greece beat Troy (see next post).
• Pythagoras’ Theories: Everything has patterns. Example? 10×10=100; 11×9=99; 12×8=96 with the differences being 1, 3, 5… and so on.
• Acropoli … Elevated look-out post. Villagers fled to it in case of a raid. All of the houses were built as close to the acropolis as possible. Every ancient town had one. The most famous is the Acropolis of Athens where the Parthenon of Athena was built.
• The Oracle of Delphi… The priestess was supposedly telling the future by channeling the word of the Gods. We learned about her, the rituals, the precessions and how the priests would interpret her raving hallucinations.
• Greek Mythology… Greek Gods… Mother Goddess… History and stories. So many details to the stories we had already heard. Statues and carvings to illustrate them. Magnificent marble temples built to them. Too much to explain in one post!
• Evolution of Sculpture from Blocky to Beautiful. Go to the Museum of Delphi and see a thousand years of artistic evolution that happened in just 200.

And that’s just a fraction!

Thank you, Antony.