The literary style of Pausanias is no exception to the rule that the style of a writer reflects the character of the man. Pausanias was neither a great man nor a great writer. He was an honest, laborious, plodding man of plain good sense, without either genius or imagination, and his style is a faithful mirror of his character. It is plain and unadorned, yet heavy and laboured, as if the writer had had to cast about for the proper words and then fit them painfully together like the pieces in a Chinese puzzle. There is a sense of strain and effort about it. The sentences are devoid of rhythm and harmony. They do not march, but hobble and shamble and shuffle along. At the end of one of them the reader is not let down easily by a graceful cadence, a dying fall; he is tripped up suddenly and left sprawling, till he can pull himself together, take breath, and grapple with the next. It is a loose, clumsy, ill-jointed, ill-compacted, rickety, ramshackle style, without ease or grace or elegance of any sort. Yet Pausanias had studied good models. He knew Thucydides and his writings abound with echoes of Herodotus. But a style that has less of the unruffled flow, the limpid clearness, the exquisite grace, the sweet simplicity of the Herodotean prose it might be hard to discover. The sound of the one is like the chiming of a silver bell; that of the other like the creaking of a corn-crake. With all its defects, however, the style of Pausanias is not careless and slovenly. The author bestrides his high horse; he bobs up and down and clumps about on it with great solemnity; it is not his fault if his Pegasus is a wooden hobby-horse instead of a winged charger.
[Sidenote: He perhaps modelled his style on that of Hegesias.]
This union of seemingly opposite faults, this plainness without simplicity, this elaboration without richness, may perhaps be best explained by Boeckh’s hypothesis, that he modelled his style on that of his countryman Hegesias of Magnesia, a leader of the Asiatic school of rhetoric, who, aping the unadorned simplicity of Lysias’s manner, fell into an abrupt and jerky, yet affected and mincing style, laboriously chopping and dislocating his sentences so that they never ran smooth, never by any chance slid into a rounded period with an easy cadence. Dionysius of Halicarnassus declares peevishly that in all the voluminous works of Hegesias there was not a single well-written page, and that the man must have gone wrong not from stupidity but of set purpose and malice prepense, otherwise he could not have helped writing a good sentence now and then by accident. Frigid conceits and a puerile play upon words were mistaken by this perverse writer for literary beauties, and in the effort to stud his pages with these false jewels he sacrificed both pathos and truth. In this respect, indeed, Pausanias happily did not follow the bad example of his predecessor. His writings are entirely free from paltry conceits and verbal quibbles. The thought is always manly and direct, however tortuous may be the sentence in which he seeks to express it. If he imitated Hegesias, it was apparently in the arrangement of the words and sentences alone.