Almost everything known about Pausanias comes from inference rather than direct testimony, since his own ten book Description of Greece says little about its author beyond what his interests and itinerary imply. Internal references place his working life in the middle of the second century CE, under the emperors Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, and his familiarity with sites in Lydia, in Asia Minor, has led most historians to place his origin somewhere in that region rather than in mainland Greece itself. He appears to have traveled widely before settling to write, describing not only Greece but sites in Italy, at Rome, and across the eastern Mediterranean, a range that argues for a writer of some independent means and long practice at travel.
The Description proceeds region by region rather than by theme, walking a reader through Attica, Corinth, Laconia, Messenia, Elis and Olympia, Achaea, Arcadia, Boeotia, Phocis and Delphi, book by book, recording the temples, cult statues, altars, tombs, festivals and local traditions he found at each stop. He reports what priests and local guides told him, names the myths attached to particular objects and places, and periodically registers his own skepticism about a claim without withholding it from the record, a method that treats local religious memory as evidence worth preserving even where he doubts it himself.