Greek city of Corinth in Corinthia
Silver Stater 21mm (8.19 grams) Struck 350-306 B.C.
Reference: Sear 2630 var.; Ravel 1030 var.; B.M.C. 12.350 var.
Pegasus, with pointed wing, flying left; koppa beneath.
Head of Athena left, wearing Corinthian helmet,
bound with olive-wreath, over leather cap; in lower field, I; behind torch.
The Corinth mint was active throughout the 5th and 4th
Centuries, except for for periods during the Peloponnesian War, when her hostile
attitude toward Athens may have restricted her supply of silver bullion. The
output of staters and drachms increased dramatically in the second half of the
4th Century, probably in connection with Timoleon's successful intervention in
Sicilian affairs, commencing 344 B.C. Corinth was occupied by the forces
of Ptolemy I of Egypt from 308-306 B.C., and her silver coinage ceased soon
after. She joined the Achaean League in the 3rd Century, but later opposed Rome
and was utterly destroyed by the consul L. Mummius in 146 B.C.
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Corinth, or Korinth (Greek:
Κόρινθος, Kórinthos) was a
city-state
(polis) on the
Isthmus of Corinth, the narrow stretch of land that joins the
Peloponnesus to the mainland of Greece, roughly halfway between
Athens and
Sparta. The modern town of
Corinth lies
adjacent to the ancient ruins.
History
Prehistory
and founding myths
Neolithic
artifacts show that the site of Corinth had been occupied as early as the fifth
millennium BC. According to Hellenic myth, the city was founded by Corinthos, a
descendant of the god
Helios (the
Sun), while other myths suggest that it was founded by the goddess Ephyra, a
daughter of the
Titan
Oceanus, thus
the ancient name of the city (also
Ephyra). There
is evidence that the city was destroyed around 2000 BC.
Some ancient names for the place, such as Korinthos, derive from a
pre-Greek, "Pelasgian"
language; it seems likely that Corinth was also the site of a
Bronze Age
Mycenaean palace-city, like Mycenae,
Tiryns or
Pylos. According
to myth,
Sisyphus was the founder of a race of ancient kings at Corinth. It was also
in Corinth that Jason,
the leader of the
Argonauts,
abandoned Medea.
During the
Trojan War Corinthians participated under the leadership of
Agamemnon.
In a Corinthian myth related in the second century AD to
Pausanias[1]
Briareus, one of the Hecatonchires, was the arbitrator in a dispute between
Poseidon
and Helios,
between the sea and the sun: his verdict was that the
Isthmus of
Corinth belonged to Poseidon and the acropolis of Corinth (Acrocorinth) to
Helios. Thus
Greeks of the Classical age accounted for archaic cult of the sun-titan in the
highest part of the site.
The
Upper Peirene spring is located within the walls of the acropolis. "The
spring, which is behind the temple, they say was the gift of
Asopus to
Sisyphus.
The latter knew, so runs the legend, that Zeus had ravished
Aegina, the
daughter of Asopus, but refused to give information to the seeker before he had
a spring given him on the Acrocorinthus." (Pausanias, 2.5.1).
Before the end of the
Mycenaean
period the
Dorians attempted to settle in Corinth. While at first they failed, their
second attempt was successful when their leader
Aletes followed
a different path around the Corinthian Gulf from
Antirio.
Corinth
under the Bacchiadae
The Bacchiadae (Ancient Greek: Βακχιάδαι Bakkhiadai), a tightly-knit
Doric clan
claiming descent from the Dorian
hero
Heracles through the seven sons and three daughters of a
legendary king
Bacchis, were the ruling kinship group of archaic Corinth in the eighth and
seventh centuries BC, a period of expanding Corinthian cultural power. Corinth
had been a backwater in eighth-century Greece.[2]
In 747 BC (a traditional date) an
aristocratic revolution ousted the Bacchiad kings, when the royal clan of
Bacchiadae, numbering perhaps a couple of hundred adult males took power from
the last king, Telestes.[3]
Practicising strict
endogamy[4]
which kept clan outlines within a distinct extended
oikos, they
dispensed with kingship and ruled as a group, governing the city by electing
annually a
prytanis who held the kingly position[5]
for his brief term,[6]
no doubt a council (though none is specifically documented in the scant literary
materials) and a
polemarchos
to head the army.
In 657 BC the Bacchiadae were expelled in turn by the
tyrant
Cypselus,[7]
who had been polemarch. The exiled Bacchiadae fled to
Corcyra but also to
Sparta and
west, traditionally to found
Syracuse in
Sicily, and to
Etruria, where Demaratus installed himself at
Tarquinia,
founding a dynasty of Etruscan kings. The royal line of the
Lynkestis
of
Macedon also claimed Bacchiad descent.
Corinth
under the tyrants
Cypselus or Kypselos (Greek:
Κύψελος) was the first
tyrant of
Corinth, Greece, in the 7th century BC.
With increased wealth and more complicated trade relations and social
structures,
Greek
city-states tended to overthrow their traditional hereditary
priest-kings; Corinth, the richest archaic
polis, led
the way.[8]
Like the signori
of late medieval and Renaissance Italy, the
tyrants usually
seized power at the head of some popular support. Often the tyrants upheld
existing laws and customs and were highly conservative as to cult practices,
thus maintaining stability with little risk to their own personal security. As
in
Renaissance
Italy, a
cult of
personality naturally substituted for the
divine right of the former legitimate royal house.
Cypselus, the son of
Eėtion and a disfigured woman named
Labda, who was a member of the Bacchiad kin usurped the power in archaic
matriarchal right of his mother, became tyrant and expelled the Bacchiadae.
Temple of
Apollo,
Ancient Corinth.
According to
Herodotus
the Bacchiadae heard two prophecies from the
Delphic
oracle that the
son of Eėtion
would overthrow their dynasty, and they planned to kill the baby once it was
born. However, Herodotus says that the newborn smiled at each of the men sent to
kill it, and none of them could go through with the plan. An etiological
myth-element, to account for the name Cypselus (cypsele, "chest")
accounted how Labda then hid the baby in a chest, and when the men had composed
themselves and returned to kill it, they could not find it. (Compare the infancy
of
Perseus.) The
ivory chest of Cypselus, richly worked with mythological narratives and
adorned with gold,
was a votive offering at
Olympia, where
Pausanias gave it a minute description in his second century AD travel
guide.[9]
When Cypselus had grown up, he fulfilled the prophecy. Corinth had been
involved in wars with
Argos and
Corcyra, and the Corinthians were unhappy with their rulers. At the time,
around
657 BC, Cypselus was
polemarch,
the archon in
charge of the military, and he used his influence with the soldiery to expel the
king. He also expelled his other enemies, but allowed them to set up
colonies in
northwestern Greece.
He also increased trade with the colonies in
Italy and
Sicily. He was
a popular ruler, and unlike many later tyrants, he did not need a bodyguard and
died a natural death.
He ruled for thirty years and was succeeded as tyrant by his son
Periander
in
627 BC. The treasury Cypselus built at
Delphi was
apparently still standing in the time of Herodotus, and the
chest of Cypselus was seen by the traveller Pausanias at Olympia in the
second century AD.
During the 7th century BC, when Corinth was ruled by the tyrants, the city
sent forth colonists to found new settlements:
Epidamnus (modern day
Durrės,
Albania),
Syracuse,
Ambracia (modern day
town of Lefkas),
Corcyra (modern day
town of Corfu)
and Anactorium.
Periander also founded
Apollonia in Illyria (modern day
Fier, Albania) and
Potidaea
(in
Chalcidice). Corinth was also one of the nine Greek sponsor-cities to found
the colony of
Naukratis in
Ancient Egypt. Naucratis was founded to accommodate the increasing trade
volume between the Greek world and the pharaohnic Egypt, during the reign of
Pharaoh
Psammetichus I of the
26th dynasty.
Classical
Corinth
In
classical times, Corinth rivaled
Athens and
Thebes in wealth, based on the Isthmian traffic and trade. Until the mid-6th
century Corinth was a major exporter of
black-figure pottery to cities around the Greek world. Athenian potters
later came to dominate the market. It was once believed that Corinth housed a
great temple on its ancient
acropolis
dedicated to the goddess
Aphrodite;
yet excavations of the temples of Aphrodite in Corinth reveal them to be small
in stature
[10].
Despite the mythical story from Strabo of there being more than one thousand
temple prostitutes employed at the Temple of Aphrodite, this was likely not
accurate as the story rests on a misunderstanding.[11]
Corinth was also the host of the
Isthmian Games.
Periander
was considered one of the
Seven Wise Men of Greece. During his reign the first Corinthian
coins
were struck. He was the first to attempt to cut across the Isthmus to create a
seaway to allow ship traffic between the Corinthian and the Saronic Gulf. He
abandoned the venture due to the extreme technical difficulties he met, but he
created the
Diolkos (a stone-build overland ramp) instead. The era of the Cypselids,
ending with Periander's nephew
Psammetichus, named after the hellenophile Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus I
(see above), was the golden age of the city of Corinth.
During this era Corinthians developed the
Corinthian order,
the third order of the classical architecture after the
Ionic
and the Doric. The
Corinthian order was the most complicated of the three, showing the accumulation
of wealth and the luxurious lifestyle in the ancient city-state, while the Doric
order was analogous to the strict and simplistic lifestyle of the older Dorians
like the Spartans, and the Ionic was a balance between those two following the
philosophy of harmony of Ionians like the Athenians.
Horace is quoted as saying: "non licet omnibus adire Corinthum", which
translates as "Not everyone is able to go to Corinth",[12]
due to the expensive living standards that prevailed in the city. The city was
renowned for the temple prostitutes of
Aphrodite,
the goddess of love, who served the wealthy merchants and the powerful officials
living in or traveling in and out of the city. The most famous of them,
Lais, was said to have extraordinary abilities and charged tremendous fees
for her favours.
The city had two main ports, one in the Corinthian Gulf and one in the
Saronic Gulf, serving the trade routes of the western and eastern
Mediterranean, respectively. In the Corinthian Gulf lay
Lechaion,
which connected the city to its western colonies (Greek:
apoikoiai) and
Magna
Graecia, while in the Saronic Gulf the port of
Kenchreai
served the ships coming from Athens,
Ionia,
Cyprus and the
rest of the Levant.
Both ports had docks for the large war fleet of the city-state.
The city was a major participant in the
Persian Wars, offering forty war ships in the sea
Battle of Salamis under the admiral
Adeimantos and 5,000
hoplites (wearing their characteristic
Corinthian helmets[citation
needed]) in the following
Battle of Plataea but afterwards was frequently an enemy of Athens and an
ally of Sparta
in the
Peloponnesian League. In
431 BC, one of
the factors leading to the
Peloponnesian War was the dispute between Corinth and Athens over the
Corinthian colony of Corcyra (Corfu), which probably stemmed from the
traditional trade rivalry between the two cities.
After the end of the Peloponnesian War, Corinth and Thebes, which were former
allies with Sparta in the Peloponnesian League, had grown dissatisfied with the
hegemony of Sparta and started the
Corinthian War
against it, which further weakened the
city-states of
the Peloponnese. This weakness allowed for the subsequent invasion of the
Macedonians of the north and the forging of the
Corinthian League by
Philip
II of Macedon against the
Persian Empire.
In the
4th
century BC, Corinth was home to
Diogenes of
Sinope, one of the world's best known
cynics.
Later
history
In the
3rd
century BC, Corinth was a member of the
Achaean League,
and was completely destroyed by the Roman general
Lucius Mummius in
146 BC.
While there is archeological evidence of some minimal habitation in the years
afterwards,
Julius Caesar refounded the city as Colonia laus Iulia Corinthiensis
in 44 BC shortly before his assassination. According to
Appian, the new settlers were drawn from
freedmen of Rome.[citation
needed]
The
city and its environs
Acrocorinth,
the acropolis
Main article:
Acrocorinth
Acrocorinthis, the
acropolis
of ancient Corinth, is a monolithic rock that was continuously occupied from
archaic times to the early nineteenth century. The city's archaic acropolis,
already an easily defensible position due to its geomorphology, was further
heavily fortified during the
Byzantine Empire
as it became the seat of the
strategos
of the
Thema of Hellas. Later it was a fortress of the Franks after the
Fourth Crusade, the Venetians and the Ottoman Turks. With its secure water
supply, Acrocorinth's
fortress was used as the last line of defense in southern Greece because it
commanded the
isthmus of
Corinth, repelling foes from entry into the Peloponnesian peninsula. Three
circuit walls formed the man-made defense of the hill. The highest peak on the
site was home to a
temple to
Aphrodite which was
Christianized as a church, and then became a
mosque. The
American School began excavations on it in 1929. Currently, Acrocorinth is one
of the most important medieval castle sites of
Greece.
The
city
The
two ports: Lechaeum and Cenchreae
Corinth had two harbours:
Lechaeum on the
Corinthian Gulf and
Cenchreae on the
Saronic
Gulf. Lechaeum was the principal port, connected to the city with a set of
long
walls of ca. 2 miles length, and was the main trading station for Italy and
Sicily, where there were many Corinthian colonies, while Cenchreae served the
commerce with the Eastern Mediterranean. Ships could be transported between the
two harbours by means of the
diolkos
constructed by the tyrant
Periander.
Biblical
Corinth
Corinth is mentioned in the New Testament in the epistles of Corinthians 1
and 2. Under the Romans, Corinth became the seat of government for Southern
Greece or
Achaia (according to
Acts 18:12-26). It was noted for its wealth, and for the luxurious,
immoral and vicious habits of the people. It had a large mixed population of
Romans, Greeks, and
Jews.
When the apostle
Paul first
visited the city (AD 51 or 52),
Gallio, the brother of
Seneca, was
proconsul.
Paul resided here for eighteen months (see
Acts
18:1-18). Here he first became acquainted with
Aquila and
Priscilla,
and soon after his departure
Apollos came
from Ephesus.
Paul visited Corinth for a "second benefit" (see
2 Corinthians 1:15), and remained for three months, according to
Acts
20:3. During this second visit, believed to have occurred in the spring of 58,
it is likely that the
Epistle to the Romans was written.[13]
Based on clues within the Corinthian epistles themselves scholars have
concluded that Paul wrote possibly as many as four
epistles to
the church at
Corinth.[14]
Only two of them,
the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians and
the 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians are contained with the
Canon of Holy
Scripture. The first Epistle reflects the difficulties of maintaining a
Christian community in such a cosmopolitan city. The second reaffirms the love
Paul has for this young church and his hopes for their continued growth. |