Corinth

Corinth controlled the isthmus joining the Peloponnese to mainland Greece, with a harbour on each side, and grew rich on that geography alone. Ships were dragged across the neck on a paved slipway, the diolkos, rather than sailing round the Peloponnese. The city was a colonising power in the eighth and seventh centuries, founding Syracuse and Corcyra, and its pottery was exported across the Mediterranean. The tyrant Cypselus and his son Periander ruled it through the seventh century and made it as wealthy as anywhere in Greece. A quarrel between Corinth and its own colony Corcyra was one of the immediate causes of the Peloponnesian War, in which Corinth pushed Sparta into fighting Athens. It later fought Sparta in turn. Its wealth attracted a reputation for luxury and prostitution that Greek and later Christian writers repeated at length. Rome destroyed it in 146 BC. The consul Mummius sacked the city, killed the men, sold the women and children, and shipped the art to Italy, on Senate orders intended as an example to Greece. The site lay largely empty for a century. Julius Caesar refounded it as a Roman colony in 44 BC, settled with freedmen, and it became the capital of the province of Achaea. Paul spent eighteen months there and wrote letters to its congregation that are still read. The diolkos has been partly excavated and its grooves are still visible. Corinthian bronze was the most valuable alloy in the ancient world and its composition is unknown. A canal through the isthmus was attempted by Nero with six thousand Jewish prisoners and abandoned. It was finally cut in 1893.

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