Pausanias’ Periegesis and Apollonius’ Argonautica both feature travelling formats and date to periods with high value attributed to Greek education. Thus, the successive integration of noteworthy curiosities and special knowledge are as unsurprising as the use of similar embedding strategies. However, a closer look reveals that Pausanias and Apollonius organise knowledge in their own way: While Apollonius focuses primarily on his literary goals and the plot, Pausanias has an emphatically distanced and factual style that is free from any creation of suspense, provides numerous lists with interspersed explanations, and chooses a content-oriented depiction with formal mises en relief along with explicit references to meaning. Only the implicit thematic framing testifies to the authors’ common aim of placing knowledge in context and points to a comparable awareness of didactics. These findings correspond to the much stronger orientation of the Periegesis as a factual text and stress the importance of applying appropriate criteria when evaluating the achievements of Pausanias and Apollonius as knowledge compilators.