“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.”

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:—

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:—

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:—

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.”

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:—

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:—

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:—

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]

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:—

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:—

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:—

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.”