Pausanias 7.16.9-10

The chief evidence for the arrangements of Mummius and the senatorial commission of ten is a passage from the survey of Achaean history in Pausanias's description of Greek antiquities, which dates to the second

century A.D. Since so much of what follows begins from this text, it must be quoted in full:

Mummius destroyed the walls of the cities that had taken the opposing side in the war, disarming the inhabitants, even before the Romans sent out commissioners. When the men who were to advise him arrived, he thereupon set about putting down democracies and appointing the magistrates according to a criterion of wealth. Tribute was assessed upon Greece, and the wealthy were prevented from holding property outside their states. The leagues of each ethnic group—the Achaean, the Phocian, Boeotian, and those of other parts of Greece—had all equally been dissolved. But not many years thereafter the Romans took pity upon Greece: they restored the traditional ethnic leagues and the right to hold property abroad, and they remitted the fine that Mummius had imposed on some. (He had ordered the Boeotians to pay 100 talents to the Heracleans and Euboeans, and the Achaeans 200 to the Lacedaemonians.) The Greeks received these indulgences from the Romans, but a Roman commander has been sent out to them from that time down to the present. The Romans refer to him as the commander of Achaea rather than of Greece because they took hold of Greece by overcoming the Achaeans, who were at that time the leaders of the Hellenic world.^[2]

When giving historical background, Pausanias is more likely to be transmitting his own broad but unspecialized knowledge than reporting original research or faithfully paraphrasing a written source. The controversy as to whether his source for Achaean history was Polybius or some other historian will not, therefore, settle the question of the authority of the passage as a whole, since on any particular point Pausanias may be

introducing other material from memory—perhaps faultily.^[3] We have already noted that Pausanias is blatantly wrong about one thing: that Roman commanders were sent out regularly to Greece henceforth.^[4] This error compromises the entire passage, or rather warns us that each item must be judged on its own merits, by reference to what corroborating evidence may be available. Nor is it enough that the account Pausanias gives is broadly "credible"^[5] —what would be more "credible," did we not possess contrary evidence, than that Roman commanders were sent regularly to Greece after 146? In particular, since the misstep regarding the presence of Roman commanders shows that Pausanias supposed that Greece became a province at this time, we must be especially wary of any item that may be derived from the same line of thought.