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This chapter analyses the ways that the different histories of four places shaped the stories that Pausanias attaches to them in the Imperial period. It describes how different relationships to canonical literature, and different experiences of destruction, rebuilding, and decline shaped the epichoric storytelling of Thebes, Corinth, Mycenae, and Messenia. It argues that Thebes’ experience of destruction, rebuilding and depopulation meant that its physical landscape was closely tied to a safely canonical expression of myth. Pausanias’ comments about Roman Corinth’s divergence from the traditional myths of the place points in fact to the creativity of storytelling there. Mycenae presents the most extended description of a ruined city that we have in the Periegesis and yet the hallmarks of ruination still affect the stories told on site. Messenia, finally, offers a case-study in the opportunistic creation of civic myths within existing strictures.

This chapter begins from the premise that reading Pausanias is an experience, one that is shaped by what a reader might have before her eyes, and already hold in her head. It comprises two case studies: an examination of Pausanias’ Thebes that seeks to understand how topographical description and spatial awareness function within the Periegesis; and a survey of Heracles’ appearances which tests the relationship between required and acquired mythic knowledge. It argues that the experiential facets of Pausanias’ work create almost infinite possibilities for idiosyncratic interpretation while simultaneously instilling in the reader a set of normative habits for approaching both travel and travel literature.

This chapter introduces Pausanias as a compiler, narrator, and critic of Greek myth. It surveys some different approaches to Pausanias as a mythographer over the past 130 years. It places him in his literary and cultural context by considering the significance of Greek myth in the Roman empire and determines the particular characteristics of his approach to geographical description. Using the case study of Boreas and Oreithyia at Athens, it argues in particular that the relationship between place and stories was intricate, complex, and inextricable and that the influence of earlier canonical literature was ever-present.

This chapter explores the various ways in which landmarks relate—and relate to—the spatium mythicum (period of myth). It begins with a survey of the strong conceptual associations of toponyms absent their physical instantiations (‘Replicas’) then considers the specific experience of encountering objects left behind by the heroes still surviving in the present (‘Relics’). ‘Residues’ describes those immaterial connections to the world of myth, and the impact of spoliation on the Greek conception of the mythic past. The final section considers the very different mythic networks that persist in cities fallen into ruins and builds up a concept of storytelling infrastructures: on- and off-site phenomena that scaffold the ability of a place to continue to proclaim its mythic importance. Without a community of resident-storytellers—the most significant of the on-site storytelling infrastructures—the myths of those places changes.

This chapter offers some concluding considerations of Pausanias as a source for Greek myth. It argues that Pausanias’ value comes not from his explicit comments on the nature of myth, but through what he shows us of the tradition in action.

As an expert observer Seneca avows the decline of declamation, and we are all too ready to believe him. Many imperial practitioners and theorists of eloquentia (‘skilled speech’) appeal to decline as they engage in projects of considerable sophistication. Yet why resort to a proposition that seems to undermine the authority and value of their literary creations? This chapter examines the topos of decline in discussions of Roman imperial rhetoric, with a specific emphasis on Seneca’s first preface, proposing that, despite its paradoxical surface, decline is of a piece with the programmatic introduction to the collection. This chapter begins by briefly surveying how first- and second-century authors rework this theme as part of a larger literary project to justify the continued role of rhetoric in Roman culture. Discussion of decline is a rhetorical strategy that situates an author in relation to contemporaries and to the Roman past, creating a sense of cultural identity and continuity. If Seneca did not invent the topos, he is our first full witness of its workings in the rhetorical tradition, to which the chapter then turns. Seneca’s encyclopedic emphasis naturally falls on memoria, one of the canonical rhetorical departments, which is contrasted with biological metaphors describing cultural growth and decay. By drawing these parallels, Seneca compares memoria—a product of natura—with senectus, thus both recalling his youth and giving new life to the world of declamation.

The introduction establishes the historical, cultural and theoretical contexts and frameworks that guide the monograph. While the aim of this study is to engage with and entertain the illuminating possibilities of Casement’s notoriously amorphous legacy, rather than attempt to assert any definitive biographical narrative, tracing the contours of Casement’s extraordinary life is necessary if we are to fully appreciate the complex contradictions that shaped Casement’s existence. To this end, a concise but thorough overview of Casement’s life is offered in the first part of the introduction in order to lay important foundations for the project’s literary discussion and analysis.

This chapter examines two exponents of satiric literature written under the politically fraught conditions of the Roman Principate, Phaedrus and Juvenal. It is unclear who (or what) both were; their names, shorthands for de-authored texts rather than stand-ins for historical individuals. The literal self-effacement at work here creates a paradoxical authority: the words on the page, loosened from a definite first-person speaker identity, slip and slide easily from person to person, yet the concealment wreaks havoc with the readerly desire to know the source behind the words, generating an energetic ‘erotics’ of the weaker voice. This chapter analyses their shared yet distinctive strategies of authorial self-erasure, arguing that both not only render key markers of Roman elite male identity—name, body, and autobiography—ineffective, but that, in doing so, they also foreground and relish the particular potential of literature as the written word in its supposed inferiority to author-bound speech.

This chapter turns from the way Pausanias provokes formative experiences to consider his work as an object in its own right. It describes how stories fit within the Periegesis’ textual architecture by introducing the analytical framework of ‘mythographic topography’. This is the idea that form and content are inextricably bound up in each other when each passage of text (topos) is also a place on the map (topos). There are three studies in this chapter: an analysis of the function of cross-references in sorting content hierarchically and establishing authenticity; a survey of the ways Pausanias deals with heroes with more than one tomb; and a reading of the story of Hyrnetho’s death which illustrates the lure of local perspectives in this mythographic archive.

The relationship between Casement and Conrad has long fascinated many, with W.G. Sebald fictionalising their meeting in The Rings of Saturn (1998) as part of the text’s engagement with Conrad’s novella and archival trail. For Sebald, Casement galvanises a set of interlinked preoccupations: the catastrophes of modernity, state-sponsored violence, the fragility of memory and the unavoidable spectre of history. Tracing the dialogue between these two works - embodied by Casement’s ghost - enables us to read the metamodernist aesthetics of Sebald as a form of ghostly intertextual memory, indicative of the post-imperial debris that continues to haunt our contemporary moment. Reading Heart of Darkness through The Rings of Saturn opens up both texts in enabling, fruitful ways; just as reading Casement through Conrad’s archive provides us with novel ways of reading the two men and Conrad’s work.

The chapter explores Casement’s Black Diaries, and their reception, through a discussion of three novels: Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2010). In a move that embodies the homophobia that has so often plagued Casement’s posthumous life, Vargas Llosa depicts Casement’s Diaries as little more than the fantasies of someone deeply ashamed of their sexual taste. In The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst is able to stage the uneven power dynamics that defined Casement’s sexual encounters while also illustrating the erotic thrill offered by racial difference, contextualised through a genealogy of queer desire. Finally, the chapter concludes by engaging the Black Diaries alongside Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which features settings and a character inspired by Casement, and explicating the novella’s insistence on the erotic quality of racial difference while also highlighting the underlying queer energy inherent to the imperial romance of the Boy’s Book.