Structural Analysis of the Description of Messenian Wars in Book IV of Pausanias’ “Description of Greece”

The literary reflection of Messenian wars constitutes the central theme of the survey of the history of Messenia presented by Pausanias in Book IV of his "Description o f Greece". The author of the work, making use of smaller and bigger narrative parts, i.e., logoi, shows the intensification of the Lacedemonian-Messenian conflict (4,2-5,9): he shows exhaustively the course of the first war (5,9-13,7) and the second war (15,1-23,4), and very superficially the third one (24,5-7). The stylistic analysis of the logos parts dealing with the history of these wars reveals a highly rhetorical character o f Pausantas’ relation. His description is characterized by parallelism, picturesqueness, poetic colour, and its dramatization after the pattern of other, well known rhetorical schemes of presenting battles. The rhetorical character of the narrative of the history of the first Messaenian war, close parallelism between, the descriptions of the first two wars and their nearly identical size, seem to suggest that Pausanias, regardless of the sources (Myron, Rianas) , composed both descriptions himself, disregarding the relations to which he refers in his work. The description of the Messenian wars analyzed in the paper constitutes an example of the rhetorical prose of the period based on minor literatury form which is constituted by the particular more or less rhetorical logoi evolving towards various literary kinds and genres but joined together by the common label of literary peregrination