Perieget
A Perieget ( Greek περιηγητής "around guide") was an author of travel manuals in ancient Greece , in which the peculiarities, especially the architectural and art monuments, of individual cities and landscapes were listed and described. The literary genre of the Periegesis was derived from the Periegetes, who originally functioned simply as tour guides .
The periegese aimed to guide the reader through cities, countries and areas in prose or poetry. The Periegetes attached importance to explanations of important art and cultural sites, which were supplemented by historical, mythological, geographical, art-historical and ethnographic excursions. Due to the diverse possibilities of periegesis, it is difficult to distinguish it from related genres such as the travel report or the geographical (specialist) treatise.
The most important representatives of Periegese, which was practiced especially in the Hellenistic period , were Polemon of Ilion (around 200 BC) and the Athenian Heliodorus , whose writings have been lost except for small fragments. We have larger fragments of the travelogue of Herakleides Pontikos and of the work of Callixenos of Rhodes (around 215 BC) about Alexandria . Of the writings of this type, only the description of Greece by Pausanias (around 170 AD), the description of Hawaras by an anonymous author and the statements of another author who is referred to in research as pseudo-Skymnos are preserved. In addition, the actually geographical writers, z. B. Dionysios , called Periegetes. The remains of Periegetic literature are collected in Karl Theodor Müller's Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum (Paris 1841–1870, 5 vols.).
literature
- Heinrich Bischoff : Perieget. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume XIX, 1, Stuttgart 1937, Col. 725-742.
- Eckart Olshausen : Periegetes, Perihegetes. In: The New Pauly (DNP). Volume 9, Metzler, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-476-01479-7 , Sp. 566.