MEGARA AND CORINTH—THE GULF OF CORINTH
“Cities which were great aforetime now as a rule are mean, and
those formerly were small which in my day have become great.
Therefore, since I know that human prosperity never remains
stationary, of both alike I shall make mention.”
HERODOTUS.
On the neck of land that unites Attica to the Peloponnesus two Dorian
cities attained to prominence in the centuries intervening between
Homeric civilization and the rivalries of Sparta and Athens, those great
representatives of the Dorian and Ionian races who reduced all other
cities to the position of allies or satellites. Only before the middle
of the sixth century were Corinth and Megara powers of the first rank.
They are now stations on the way to Athens for those who enter Greece at
Patras. The railroad journey between these cities, along the coasts of
the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs, ought to be taken in one direction or
the other by every visitor to Greece, for scarcely any other displays to
better advantage the combination of mountain, plain, and sea, which are
the triad of Greek landscape. The waters of the Corinthian Gulf, in
swift response to sun, wind, and cloud, vary from pellucid blue to
vivid, foam-flecked emerald, marked by strange bands of deep wine red.
Along its northern coast the mountains pile up in restrained and
harmonious masses of blue or purple, crowned in winter or in spring with
snowy white. At times the west wind from the ocean sweeps up this long
narrow gulf as if through a cañon, beating the waves into fury and
filling the air with cold moisture, even while the sun or the moon
denies the presence of a storm. On the other side of the Isthmus the
Saronic Gulf pushes far asunder the coasts of Attica and the
Peloponnesus and skirts on the north the littoral of Megara. From its
placid evening surface the mountains of Ægina and Salamis rise in curves
and sharp peaks of cool violet and rose. Beyond the Bay of Eleusis the
eye that has not yet seen Athens turns inland in strained waiting for
the Acropolis. Rising out of a still distant plain and bearing upon its
crest the half-realized ruins of the Parthenon, the hill of the
pilgrim’s desires becomes a reality—“and from a dream, behold, it is a
waking vision.”
This journey, of scarcely eight hours, serves also to reveal a
surprising amount of Greek territory. Taking it in the reverse
direction, the train passes through Attica, Megara, the Isthmus and
Argolis, and follows the entire northern coast line of Achæa. The
mountains across the Corinthian Gulf include not only Helicon and
Cithæron of Bœotia, and Parnassus of Phocis, but also unfamiliar peaks,
barren of the Muses, belonging to Locris, Ætolia, and Acarnania. From
Patras can be seen the low coast of the Ætolian bay on which lies
Mesolonghi, the burial-place of Byron’s heart. Near it, although unseen
from Patras, is Calydon, the scene of Meleager’s boar hunt, celebrated
by Homer and Bacchylides, Euripides and Swinburne.
Patras, the western seaport of Greece and surpassed in commercial
importance only by Athens and Piræus, is in Achæa. The name of this
province evokes Homeric memories only because it was settled by Achæans
from Thessaly. Its chief contribution to Greek life lay in the “Achæan
League” against Rome which, as Pausanias says, rose on the ruins of
Greece “like a fresh shoot on a blasted and withered trunk.” Patras
itself was unimportant until the time of Augustus, and its most valuable
associations are with the early history of Christianity. In physical
beauty, however, it is thoroughly Greek—“beautiful Patras,” Lucian
called it, by way of contrast to the knavishness of one of its
inhabitants. The epithet doubtless included not only the adornments
added by the Roman emperors but also the natural charms of its
situation. The fruitful plain, the height of Mount Voïdia in the
background, the splendid waterfront facing the mountainous Ætolian coast
combine to give a suitable welcome to Greece. This entrance is never
fairer than in the hour when the silver gray of dawn is obliterated by
the clear bloom in the sky that heralds the rising sun. The morning
light reveals outlines in naked distinctness, and tinges all surfaces
with a colour so fresh and buoyant that an immediate conviction arises
of the joyous nobility of Greek scenery and of the youthfulness which a
race so nurtured might maintain.
The plain of Megara is separated from Attica by the Kerata and from the
Isthmus by Mount Geraneia, a massive range extending across the Megarian
territory from the Corinthian to the Saronic Gulf and interposing a
rough and lofty bulwark between Central Greece and the Peloponnesus.
Megara is now an unpretentious village with very white houses which
gleam from a distance among the encircling mountains. Its site is that
of the ancient city, on the double summit of a hill above the plain
filled with vineyards, olive orchards, and bright green fields of wheat,
rye and barley. A good road leads to the coast, little more than a mile
away, where once the harbour of Nisæa focused the large sea business of
Megara. The name of the harbour kept alive the memory of Nisus, son of
Athenian Pandion, the first king of Megara (the Ionians perhaps preceded
the Dorians in its occupation), as the “island of Minoa,”[23] now the
promontory of St. George, recalled the invasion by Minos of Crete. The
king’s daughter, out of love for his enemy, betrayed her father. The
chorus in the “Choëphoroi” of Æschylus uses the story as a warning to
Clytemnestra:—
“Another murd’rous maid is sung in story and calls forth our hate. Led
on by foeman lover, won by gifts of Minos, gold-wrought Cretan
necklaces, she slew a man beloved and sheared the lock immortal from
the head of Nisus while he breathed in unsuspecting sleep. But Hermes
overtook her!”
Footnote 23:
The frequent occurrence of Minoa as a place name in Greece both
indicates the widespread influences of Crete in prehistoric times and
is also one of the arguments for the adoption, at least tentatively,
of the technical term “Minoan” civilization.
The history of Megara was influenced now by Athens and now by Corinth.
At times neighbourhood quarrels with Corinth turned her toward Athens,
but in crises the bonds of race proved stronger. Her great epoch,
however, was in the eighth and seventh centuries, before the balance of
power had been shifted by the Athenian conquest of Salamis. During these
centuries Megara rivalled Corinth in colonial expansion, and from Nisæa
adventurers set sail to found Megara Hyblæa in Sicily, Heraclea on the
Euxine, and above all Byzantium on the Bosphorus, which long before its
christening as Constantinople had forgotten its mother city.
In arts and letters Megara’s achievements were slight, although
tradition assigned to her the creation of comedy. Only one of her poets,
Theognis, belongs to our canon of Greek literature. A contemporary of
Solon, he exhibited the same tendency to use poetry as a medium of
political discussion, but he was totally opposed to the democratic
influences which in his city, as elsewhere, were making headway against
the aristocracy. Oligarchy and tyranny had been succeeded by this larger
struggle. Although Theognis was in the thick of the fight, his wide
influence in later centuries was due rather to his sententious
utterances on ethics, which classed him with the “gnomic poets.”
Xenophon called the poetry of Theognis “a comprehensive treatment
concerning men,” and as such it was used with the works of Homer and
Hesiod in the educational system of fourth-century Athens. Moderns will
find in the extant fragments little of the power which saves a poet’s
politics and ethics from becoming in a later age either outworn or
commonplace. But in the public square of the village, the old hillside
market-place, we acquire a sympathy for his personal life and his love
of home. Here he stood and looked down upon the fields of his
confiscated estates, wasted in the riotous living of new masters. The
shrill cry of a bird, announcing the autumnal harvests, reminded him
that no longer for him were mules drawing the curved plough through the
furrows. The sea, lying at the door of Megara, bore him into exile, and
with Alcæus and Plato (and their Roman and modern imitators) he likened
the State to a ship in danger, sailed by an evil crew, threatened by
leaping waves.
In the Persian wars Megara made a brave show, sinking all animosity
toward Athens in the great need of Hellas. But fifty years later a
bitter quarrel with Athens became one of the precipitating causes of the
Peloponnesian War. The Athenians had passed a decree excluding the
Megarians from their markets and from all the harbours in their
dominions. The Spartans demanded its revocation, and the Athenians,
influenced by Pericles, refused. Opinions differed as to his
disinterestedness. In the judgment of Thucydides he was moved solely by
reasons of state. The more popular opinion that he was involved by
Aspasia in a scandalous affair affecting both cities appears in
Aristophanes, who also does not fail to see the comic side of a
situation which forced the impoverished Megarians to work their way
secretly into the Athenian markets bringing cucumbers and sucking pigs
and garlic under their cloaks. The later comic poets made a butt of the
Megarians, and the Megarian’s sneer about the Athenian figs and Propylæa
was doubtless only one of many retorts.
After the Peloponnesian War we have a happier picture of Megara as the
home of philosophy. Plato in his first grief over the death of his
master went there to visit Eucleides, who had been wont to creep into
Athens by night, in defiance of the decree, to talk with Socrates. And
from the vivid opening scene of the “Theætetus,” a severely metaphysical
dialogue written a few years later, we know that Eucleides and his
philosophical friends used to meet each other in the market-place (where
now the peasant women dance at Easter) or go to the harbour to greet a
friend _en route_ from Corinth to Athens, or gather at home for readings
and conversations. Isocrates praised in Megara a domestic prosperity
finer than the lust for empire which had ruined Athens and Sparta.
The Megarians shared the Greek lot at Chæronea. The later fate of the
city is summed up in the reflections of the Roman governor, Sulpicius,
who, coming from Ægina, gazed at its ruins from his vessel’s prow and
argued from them the brevity of human glory.
In antiquity travellers by land made their way from Megara to Corinth
either over the difficult heights of Geraneia or close along the shore
of the Saronic Gulf. The railroad follows the direction of this coast
route, and from a high bridge the old road can be seen below, skirting
the foot of the precipices in which the spurs of Geraneia end. These
precipices crowd so close to the sea that the space for the road is
exceedingly narrow, and the resulting dangers gave to the pass in modern
days the name of Kake Skala. Even in the nineteenth century robbers made
use of the natural difficulties of the site as they did in Roman times.
Hadrian thought it important to widen the road as much as possible. To
the ancients the steep precipices were known as the Scironian Cliffs,
and the Athenian story ran that a robber, Sciron, dwelt beside them and
hurled every wayfarer into the sea, where a huge tortoise devoured him.
Theseus killed the villain and threw him down to his old ally. The sea
that surged below the road took its own toll of travellers. Among the
unfortunates in the fifth century one was either rich or distinguished
enough to have an inscription by Simonides upon his cenotaph:—
“Geraneia, cruel scar,
Where the mist of morning creeps,
Would that thou on Ister far
Ward wert keeping, or where sweeps
Scythian stream of Tanaïs.
Wert not here where snow-storms’ scourges
Fill Moluriad’s rocky gorges;
Wert not here above the surges
On Scironian rocks that hiss.
As it is, his corpse the Ocean
Death-chilled swings in restless motion;
Mocks his voyage a bitter laugh
Echoing from his cenotaph.”
This spot of frequent shipwrecks had also its sea deities. The Moluriad
Rock, a part of the Scironian Cliffs, was the scene of Ino’s payment of
her share in the curse laid upon her father, Cadmus of Thebes. Chased by
an angry husband down the mountain ridges, she plunged into the sea with
her infant son Melicertes, or, as Euripides said, in comparing her to
Medea, with two children in her arms:—
“One woman only have I known
Of all before us, one alone,
Lay hand upon her children dear:
God-maddened Ino, from her home
By Zeus’s wife sent forth to roam,
With impious murder to the mere,
Ah wretched one! from headland springing
Her children twain and self out-flinging,
She perished with them in the foam.”
Ino became Leucothea, the kindly goddess of Odysseus’s journey, and
Melicertes became Palæmon, the Greek representative of the Phœnician
Melkart, worshipped on the Isthmus. To them, in the Anthology, sailors
prayed on their way to the “sweet shore of Piræus” and fishermen
dedicated strange sea creatures that came up in their nets or were found
upon the shore.
The train keeps on its way by the Saronic Gulf, crosses the canal on a
bridge and reaches New Corinth on the Corinthian Gulf.
The destiny of Corinth was so peculiarly the result of its situation
that to describe the one is to foreshadow the other. Aristotle might
have illustrated by this city the physical qualities which he considered
desirable. It had “a native abundance of streams and fountains” to
promote health, and its acropolis was one of the strongest in Greece.
Most of all, it was “well situated in regard both to sea and land.” Thus
it was “a strategic centre for protecting the whole district,” and was
“convenient for receiving the crops and also for the bringing in of
timber and any other natural products.” Corinth commanded two ports, one
on either side of the Isthmus, and stood also at the entrance to the
Peloponnesus. As “god-built portal of the bright island of Pelops” she
controlled the land routes for the exports and imports of southern
Greece, and as a city “of two seas” she was mistress of the trade of the
far east and the far west. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War she
urged the Dorian allies to remember that if they did not protect her
seaboard they would find it difficult to carry their produce to the sea
or to barter in return for the goods which the sea gives to the land.
Already in Homer Corinth was “rich,” and her later history was one of
commerce, colonization, invention, and the arts and crafts rather than
of literature. For that reason the pathos of her present desolation is
unrelieved by thoughts of a rescued legacy.
New Corinth, lying close to the shore of the Gulf, several miles from
the ancient western harbour, is a town of hopeful energy and ambition,
its railroad station and steamboat quay indicating a potential capacity
for growth. Old Corinth, three and a half miles inland, consists of a
few poor houses unified into a certain village dignity by a great plane
tree that shadows the “public square.” These houses have gathered near
the spot to which tourists make their way on foot or by carriage from
the seashore town. Before the excavations of the American School were
begun in 1896, they came in order to ascend the massive rock of
Acrocorinth and to see the remaining monoliths of a Doric temple which
antedates the classical period of Greek architecture. The excavations
have added sites deserving of close attention, but without effect on the
general features of the landscape. Acrocorinth rules the Isthmian plain,
and its summit offers an outlook, from Strabo’s time the theme of many
panegyrics, over wide-flung country and sea to the mountain crests of
Delphi and Arcadia, of Attica and Bœotia. The plateau on the north and
east of this acropolis was the site of the ancient city. Apollo’s
columns, which saw its greatest power and have withstood its successive
blights, alone compete with the impressiveness of the citadel. Seated on
the steps of the temple and watching the mists break away from the
impatient heights of Acrocorinth, we may recount to ourselves the tale
“of Corinth blest, the vestibule of Isthmian Poseidon, nurse of manly
splendour.”
[Illustration:
CORINTH
Temple of Apollo, and Acrocorinth
]
The diversity of legends concerning the pre-Dorian origin of Corinth
illustrates the hospitality of the Greek mind toward incompatible
stories. Ephyre, daughter of Ocean, in Homer gave her name to the city.
Sisyphus, the son of Æolus, the son of Hellen, was introduced as founder
in the effort to trace historical development. The Corinthians
themselves set great store by an eponymous hero, Corinthus, the son of
Zeus. Their reiteration of this exasperating claim became proverbial
among the other Greeks. When the Aristophanic Dionysus arrives in Hades
and bids his servant take up the wraps again and carry them inside,
Xanthias exclaims:—
“Aye, pick ’em up! now there it goes again,
They’ve Zeus’s Corinth in ’em, that is plain!”
Sisyphus and his descendants owe a long debt to the poets, if posthumous
fame be a recompense for vicissitudes. Sisyphus was found by Odysseus in
Hades in “strong torment,” pushing a monstrous stone up the hill only to
have it roll back again. A great-great-grandson fought among the Lycians
on Priam’s side at Troy and, questioned by Diomede of his ancestry, made
the famous comparison which betrays the melancholy already lurking in
the youth of Hellas:—
“As with the leaves’ generations so it is with the passing of mortals.
Some of the leaves the wind strews on the ground while others the
trees of the forest, budding and blooming, put forth when the spring
cometh on in its season. Thus with the races of mortals, one blooms
and another one ceases.”
He also told the story of his grandfather, Bellerophon of Corinth: his
refusal of a queen’s love, his hard labours in punishment, his rise to
fame and power, and his ultimate failure to retain the favour of the
gods, so that he ended his life far from the paths of men, devouring his
own heart in desolate northern plains. Pindar took up the Homeric legend
and shifted the emphasis to the winged Pegasus, tamed by Bellerophon,
with Athena’s aid, at Peirene, the city fountain, and finally stabled in
the stalls of Olympus, after he had aided his master “from out the
desert bosom of the ether chill” to “smite and slay the woman brood of
archer Amazons, Chimæra breathing fire, and the Solymi.”
In the history of Corinth two periods are of special interest and might
serve as the bases for a study of important epochs in the larger history
of Greece. These periods, separated by more than four hundred years,
were dominated respectively by the “tyrants” and the Romans.
Although historians now avoid the restrictive term “age of the despots,”
it is true that from the eighth to the sixth centuries tyrannies arose
in Greek cities on the Asiatic coast, on the islands of the Ægean, and
in Greece proper, implying the same conditions of public life. The
tyranny of Corinth, beginning with Cypselus in the seventh century and
ending with his grandnephew, Psammetichus, in the sixth, was one of the
longest and most notorious. Any tyranny which endured until the third
generation was remarkable, for, in spite of its apparent vigour, this
form of government was suited to no Greek people. Everywhere democracy
and oligarchy were united in hatred of an hereditary ruler. In Athens
the short-lived despotism was itself greatly modified, and the picture
of the tyrant in Athenian literature, in Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon,
was drawn from the more violent models known from the histories of
Corinth or Sicyon or Miletus, or seen contemporaneously in Syracuse.
Plato not only as a philosopher but as a Greek interpreted the tyrant’s
life as one of mental misery: “In good truth he turns out a pauper, if
one but knows how to contemplate the soul in its entirety; and all his
life long he is loaded down with fear, all a-quiver with convulsions and
with pangs, at least if he is like the disposition of the state over
which he holds sway, ... and he must needs, by reason of his rule, ever
more and more become envious, distrusted, unjust, friendless, unholy,
and of every vice the host and nurse; and by reason of all this he must
first of all become unhappy and then must make like to himself those
near him.”
In Corinth Periander was the typical despot, powerful and violent,
killing his wife and earning the hatred of his sons, overriding the
sensibilities of his people, crushing the stronger and richer citizens.
And yet by masterly statesmanship, a cultivated taste, and careful
paternalism, he brought about the peaceful prosperity which more than
one nation in history has preferred to liberty, and created a
civilization in which brilliant achievement and temperate life were not
incompatible. At no other time was Corinth so great a city. In addition
to the older colonies of Syracuse and Corcyra, trading posts were
obtained along the northwestern coast of Greece, controlling the
commerce of the Adriatic. Rivalry with the cities of Eubœa and with
Ægina was succeeded by unquestioned superiority. Alliances were
contracted in Asia Minor and in Egypt. At home the enervation of luxury
was guarded against by sumptuary laws. That some of these outlived the
period may be gathered from a fragment of the comic poet Diphilus, a
contemporary of Menander, in which, apparently, a Corinthian reproaches
a foreign spendthrift who has come to town and cornered the vegetable
market so that the natives have to struggle for the parsley as at the
Isthmian games:—
“’Tis here the law, good sir, with us Corinthians,
If we see anybody in the market-place
Forever making showy purchases, to ask
On what he lives? By doing what? And then if he
Has capital of which the income balances
The outlay, to permit him to enjoy his mode
Of life. But if it turns out that beyond his means
He’s spending money, they shut down on this forthwith,
And if he disobeys, impose a fine. And if
A man, possessing nothing, lives expensively
They hand him over to the executioner!”
Periander also, desirous, as Aristotle suggests, of keeping his people
too busy to think, stimulated the artistic skill which they had always
possessed. A persistent tradition has asserted that Corinthian
architects at an early date invented the roof-tiles by means of which
temple roofs could be made to slope, thus forming the pediment or
“eagle.” The Temple of Apollo was probably built at Periander’s
instigation. Corinthian workmanship in terra-cotta, wood, and metal was
famous from prehistoric to Roman times. Periander dedicated at Olympia
the chest (_cypsele_) in which his father Cypselus had been concealed in
infancy, made of cedar wood, gold, and ivory, ornately and exquisitely
carved, in Pausanias’s time still one of the finest sights of the place.
No bronze was better than that dipped in Peirene, and long before the
vases of Corinthian artists were imported or stolen by Roman capitalists
they were a part of the conventional display of the _bon vivant_ in
Athens.
In literature Periander could accomplish little. The absence of the
literary gift among the Corinthians is strikingly shown by the fact that
the name of only one native poet, Eumelus, has been handed down to us,
and that he belonged to the ancient oligarchy of the eighth century. Two
lyric lines traditionally assigned to him survive, the only fragment of
Corinthian literature. Their imputed authorship indicates that Eumelus
was not without fame, since the Doric Messenians, even less literary
than the Corinthians, chose him to compose a song to Apollo to be sung
by their embassy at the great Ionian festival at Delos. But embedded in
the most important literature of Greece is an element which probably
came into life in Corinth under Periander’s patronage. The choruses of
the drama and the so-called dithyrambs or Dionysiac songs written by
such lyric poets as Pindar, Simonides, and Bacchylides, seem equally to
go back to some outgrowth of the stray wine-songs extemporized by
revellers. A favourite tradition assigned this new form to a poet called
Arion, who, though a Lesbian by birth, “composed, named, and taught the
dithyramb at Corinth.” Herodotus adds a story which takes Arion out of
the mists of tradition and places him, a sunlit figure, on the
quarter-deck of a Corinthian ship rounding Cape Tænarum on its way back
from Sicily. He had gone thither and made money, and on the return
journey the Corinthian sailors, in whom he had thought he could most
safely confide, gave him his choice of killing himself outright, if he
wished a grave on dry land, or of leaping overboard into the Ionian Sea.
In this strait Arion “begged of them, since such was their
determination, that they would give him leave to take his stand dressed
in his full regalia on the quarter-deck, and promised that from there he
would sing to them and then would make away with himself. To the sailors
it seemed a pleasant thing if they might hear the best of living
singers, and from the stern they drew off amidships. And Arion, clad in
his full costume, took his cithara and, stationed on the planking, went
through with the Orthian strain, and, when the strain was concluded,
flung himself into the sea, just as he was, in full costume dressed. Now
the ship’s crew sailed off to Corinth, but a dolphin, as they say, took
up Arion and carried him to Tænarum and he, alighting, went off, regalia
and all, to Corinth and told, on his arrival, everything that had
befallen.”
Periander’s successor was assassinated after a brief reign, and the
tyranny was succeeded by an aristocracy of merchants. Corinth joined the
Spartan confederacy, and her life continued to be one of commerce and
peace. Her part in the Persian wars was modest, but a recently
discovered commemorative inscription for her sons who died at Salamis is
of peculiar interest as an example of the “many epitaphs composed by
nameless authors in those days of joy and sorrow in various parts of
Greece, all marked by the simplicity of a great age, whose reserve, as
has been said truly, is the pride of strong men under the semblance of
modesty.” The inscription runs: “Salamis the isle of Ajax holds us now,
who once dwelled in the city of Corinth between her waters.”[24]
Footnote 24:
Quoted by J. B. Bury, _History of Greece_, p. 284.
The brilliant and varied energies of the Cypselids had given way to the
dulness of habitual prosperity. But a light from the past must have
seemed to shine again upon Corinth when Pindar, “sailing a mere private
in her ship of state,” drew upon the wealth of all her experiences in
praising her as the native city of an Olympian victor:—
“Therein dwelleth Order and—a sure foundation for the state—her sister
Justice, aye and Peace kin-bred, wealth’s stewards for mankind.”
“Flow’ring richly, oft on you the hours have bestowed the splendour
crowning victory of men preëminent in valour at the sacred games, and
often in their manly hearts inspired subtleties of old. Whoever hath
devised, to him belongs the deed. Whence came to light the gracious
gifts of Dionysus with the dithyramb that wins the ox? Nay, who set
measured check upon the harnessed steeds or on the gables of the gods
the twofold eagle spread?”
Thirty-three years after Pindar’s ode Euripides produced his “Medea.”
This is the only Attic drama which has Corinth as its scene, and in it
the local allusions are but vague. Until the writing of St. Paul’s
epistles no other great literature concerned itself with Corinth.
The city’s policies and life from the Persian wars until the battle of
Chæronea, though dictated by its trading interests, centred about the
fortunes of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes. After Chæronea followed the
common Macedonian domination. The subsequent Roman occupation of Corinth
constitutes the second great period of its history. In 146 B. C. a last
effort at rebellion against Rome resulted in savage vengeance executed
by Lucius Mummius. Cicero was “moved” by the “ruins” of Corinth; and
Antipater of Sidon, not long after the destruction, bewailed its
desolation:—
“Where is thy beauty exciting men’s wonder,
Dorian Corinth, and ramparts that crowned thee?
Where are the blessed ones’ columns, whereunder
Sisyphid wives from their dwellings around thee
Came with glad thousands to meet and to sunder?
Bides not a trace of thee, luckless, devoured,
Ravaged of war! We alone undeflowered,
Nereids, halcyons, daughters of Ocean,
Wait on thy woes with our loyal devotion.”
The existence of the temple of Periander’s age, if nothing else, betrays
the poet’s exaggeration. Pausanias says that the remarkable objects in
the city of his day included “some remains of ancient Corinth.” Most of
them, however, dated from the restoration. Julius Cæsar rebuilt the
city, repopulated it with freedmen from Rome, and made it the seat of
the proconsul of the “province of Achæa.” Corinth is the proper centre
from which to study the Romanized Greek world. In wealth the Roman city
began to equal and to outstrip the Greek city. But the old moderation in
private life, imposed by Periander, was gone. The Romans of the empire
had outlived the precepts of their own republican Cato, and the riches
easily acquired at Corinth enabled them to satisfy their coarsened
desires. Greek refinement was never native to the masters of the world,
and into a nation, once satisfied at public festivals with beautiful
processions and serious dramatic representations, were imported
gladiatorial shows and all the excesses of a brutalized taste. The Greek
Corinth had been regarded by the Athenians as rich and immoral. The
Roman Corinth would have seemed to Plato a cave filled with
passion-driven men lost to the sunlight of wisdom. It was into this
Corinth that Paul came “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.”
Acrocorinth saw the Roman pass and the Byzantine, the Venetian and the
Turk. It may again see in “New Corinth” a powerful Greek city. The
excavations at Old Corinth have uncovered but slight traces of the
successive centuries of robust living, but the imaginative observer will
soon perceive the archæologist’s success. Although the harbours of
Lechæum and Cenchreæ are deserted and although the walls that connected
them with the city are invisible, yet there are traces of a “paved
street to Lechæum” with colonnades on either side, to bring to life
again the crowds of sailors, merchants, and visitors from all parts of
the ancient world who passed and repassed between the city and its
ports. Aristotle, with characteristic distrust of cosmopolitanism,
questioned the political advantage of such intercourse, but to Corinth
it was the breath of life.
The trade within the city is suggested by the traces of “shops” and by
the ruins of the Propylæum of the Agora and of fine colonnades and
stoas. Of buildings almost nothing remains, and, save for the
foundations of a small unidentified temple, the Temple of Apollo alone
represents the numerous sacred precincts of ancient and restored
Corinth. The scanty ruins of a theatre recall picturesque stories. The
Corinthian theatre of the sixth century, according to Plutarch, was the
scene of the discovery of the murderers of the poet Ibycus, an important
figure in the history of Greek lyric. A native of Rhegium, he led an
adventurous life in harmony with his passionate temperament, and was
finally killed by robbers on some lonely unknown shore. In dying he
called upon a flock of cranes above his head to avenge him. Their sudden
appearance over the theatre at Corinth so startled the assassins that
they betrayed themselves, and thus the cranes kept their promise to a
poet who had sung with equal ardour of birds and flowers and of the
beauty of youth. In the Roman auditorium, according to a story
attributed to Lucian, Nero had his servants crush in with the sharp
edges of their writing tablets the larynx of a popular professional who
had the temerity to out-sing the royal amateur.
Lucian also tells a delightful story connected with the Craneum—Skull
Place—a frequented suburb of Corinth, where Diogenes the Cynic had set
up his jar (not the “tub” of English tradition). When the news came that
Philip of Macedon was advancing on the city, the Corinthians, in a fever
of anxiety, set to work on their defences. Diogenes, mocking their
activity, girded up his blanket, and with a great show of energy went
bowling his jar up and down the Craneum. When some of his intimates
asked him “Why do you do this, Diogenes?” he said, “I too roll my jar so
as not to be the only idle one among so many workers.”
The most fortunate result of the excavations at Corinth was the
uncovering of the well-house of Peirene. This spring, compared with
which the temple columns are young, shared with Acrocorinth the ancient
solitude of the plain; gave its waters to the first nameless adventurers
who made their way from north and east; served the city of Dorians and
Romans; and before the excavators enclosed it was still being used by
the washer-women of the neighbouring hamlet. From Periander to the
Byzantines, the grateful inhabitants were ever and again moved to build
for Peirene a suitable enclosure, and traces of six building periods
have been discovered. In the fifth century B. C. the natural rock was
hewn into shape. Later generations added architectural panels, façades
and colonnades.
The name Peirene seems to have belonged not only to the city fountain
but also to another spring, crystal clear, a little below the summit of
Acrocorinth, which, like Hippocrene on Helicon, was struck out by the
hoof of Pegasus. In a translation of Euripides’s “Trojan Women,” Mr.
Murray goes beyond his original in specifying this upper Peirene,
vividly including in the women’s dread anticipation of their Greek
slavery the steep climb up Acrocorinth:—
“Or pitchers to and fro to bear
To some Peirene on the hill
Where the proud water craveth still
Its broken-hearted minister.”
Two other fountains have also been discovered in Corinth, one the spring
of Glauke, Medea’s rival, and the other an unnamed well-house with
bronze lion heads still _in situ_. It is no wonder that St. Clement in
his epistle to the Corinthians, when he enumerated the blessings of God,
remembered especially the perennial fountains, shaped for pleasure and
health, which give their breasts to sustain the life of men.
The canal across the Isthmus recalls several periods of Corinth’s
history. Periander conceived the idea of making a canal, inspired
perhaps by the engineering marvels he had seen in Egypt, and probably
the lack of slave labour, rather than the popular Greek feeling of
impiety, prevented him from joining the “two seas” on either side of the
narrow isthmus. Julius Cæsar also thought of undertaking the work, but
Nero was the first to begin its execution. His vanity saw in it an
opportunity for dramatic display. Suetonius relates that he appeared in
person, chanted hymns in honour of the deities of the sea, and with a
golden pick-axe made a few motions before the thousands of soldiers and
prisoners who were to do the cutting. Troubles at Rome, however,
deflected his attention, and the making of the canal was left for the
French engineers of 1881. Two cuttings made by Nero’s workmen were still
visible when the French began.
The absence of a canal in antiquity was not so inconvenient as might be
supposed, for light ships could be transferred on land from one port to
another by means of a portage or tramway, of which traces are still
visible. This “Diolkos” was invented even before the age of the tyrants,
when the Corinthians were first developing their naval resources. At
Lechæum they built the first artificial harbour, and at its docks the
trireme was gradually perfected through the necessity of protecting the
slow and heavy merchantmen by a fighting convoy. Thucydides refers to
the Diolkos in describing the events of 412 B. C., when a general revolt
against Athens began under Chios. The Spartans had sent word that
thirty-nine ships lying at anchor at Lechæum must be dragged across the
Isthmus as quickly as possible to the port on the Gulf of Ægina and
thence despatched to Chios. Twenty-one had been transferred and were
eager to set sail, but the Corinthians insisted on waiting till the
Isthmian Games had been celebrated. The result was that the Athenians
who went to the games discovered what was going on and Athens was able
to balk her enemies.
The Isthmian Games were held biennially in the Corinthian territory less
than a mile southwest of the little modern town of Isthmia, at the
eastern end of the canal. The Athenians frequented them especially
because they were said to have been instituted by Theseus. Socrates
visited them on the only occasion of his leaving Athens “except with the
colours.” The sacred precinct, excavated by the French, has yielded
small remains of the temples and statues, theatre and stadium, and
Pindar’s Isthmian odes are still the noblest memorial of the ancient
contests. In the Stadium, now but a natural hollow, two dramatic events
took place. In 336 B. C. Alexander had himself proclaimed leader of the
Greeks before his Persian expedition, and in 196 B. C. Flaminius
announced to the Greeks their “freedom.” It was probably also here, at
least it was at the Isthmian Games, that Nero perpetrated his mocking
renewal of Greek independence.
In this Stadium, within reach of the two seas which had been highways
for wealth and luxury, vigorous youths from century to century gave
proof of restrained and temperate living. Even those Corinthians to whom
Paul’s preaching was “foolishness” would be hospitable to his
illustration:—
“Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth
the prize? So run that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for
the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a
corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible.”