Sparta’s Most Colorful Traitor Gets a Bland Biography

‘Pausanias of Sparta: From Victor to Traitor‘By Daniel OgdenYale University Press, 208 pagesThe story of Pausanias, Daniel Ogden writes in an appendix, has “something for everyone: a great story arc, impossible military triumph, ambition, cunning, intrigue, stunning reversal of fortune, captivating anecdote, gothic horror, and sex (of both the main kinds).” Talk about burying the lead. Nowhere in the biography itself, do we get a narrative that builds on such a sentence.Unlike “The Odyssey,” you are probably not familiar with Pausanias, victor in the Battle of Plataea, beating back a seemingly invincible force of Persians after the death of his uncle Leonidas in the annihilation of the Greek army at Thermopylae (480 BCE). This is attributable to several factors, including what Mr. Ogden calls the “Pausanias problem.” In Herodotus he is a hero; in Thucydides he is a villain, a traitor betraying the Spartans, allying himself with the sensuous Persians so that he could reign as a king.If only Plutarch had included Pausanias in his “Parallel Lives,” Mr. Odgen laments, then perhaps Pausanias would have received the star treatment. Maybe. In Mr Ogden’s account, Pausanias never comes into focus. To be sure, not only is the source material contradictory, much of what the biographer would like to know is simply not available.So what is a biographer to do? In Mr. Ogden’s case, he carefully analyzes his sources, showing what probably happened, including a rape scene that in several versions has Pausanias inadvertently murdering the woman he desires and then, as in a Gothic novel, he is haunted by her ghost.Don’t be too quick to discount the ghost story, the biographer cautions, because such tales tell much about a culture in which Pausanias may well have turned against his own better nature after his triumph at Palataea. Still in his twenties, he seems to have been susceptible to visions of glory not so different, Mr. Ogden supposes, from Alexander the Great’s belief in his invincibility.In the background of Pausanias’s biography is the dreary militarized world of Sparta, where mothers expected their sons to return from war victorious or at least carried home dead on their shields. The Spartans punished Pausanias’s perfidy by starving him to death.Mr. Ogden suggests there might just be a way to reconcile the conflicting versions of Herodotus and Thucydides — if the negative portrayal of Pausanias, of his unsavory traits, is regarded as a projection backward into his early character. Without that projection, he can be viewed as a hero as a young man and a villain as an older one.In many cases the lack of crucial information about a historic figure is an invitation to historical novelists, playwrights, and poets, as Mr. Ogden shows in his lengthy maladroit appendix, which mainly consists of plot summaries of the fictional and dramatic presentations of Pausanias’s story, most of which have been forgotten.Bulwer Lytton had the best shot at portraying a fully realized Pausanias, but the novelist died before completing his three volume work. Even so, the account of Lytton’s effort on the first volume is tantalizing — so much so that his treatment might well have been an organizing principle of “Pausanias of Sparta.”At those points where the biographer’s evidence fails him, the option to turn to fiction may be advisable, as a renowned classical scholar, Mary Beard, suggested in a public lecture. After all, a perceptive novelist can provide scenes in a historical context which may at least flesh out the choices open to a self-defeating character with a tendency to be tyrannical and indispensable during a war to save a civilization.What was it about Sparta that led to Pausanias’s treachery? That is a question Mr. Ogden does not ask, and it is apparently not a question posed by his sources, which tend to portray Pausanias’s character — not the conditions in which he had to operate. Pausanias may well have been exposed to a Persian way of life that seduced him. Mr. Ogden does raise that possibility, although it gets somewhat lost in his discussion of his sources and how reliable they might be. Taking some of that material of his appendix and applying it to a reading of his subject’s character and his milieu might have made for a more probing and exciting, if more speculative biography. Mr. Rollyson is author of the forthcoming book: “Sappho’s Fire: Kindling the Modern World.”

Sparta’s Most Colorful Traitor Gets a Bland Biography

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