Corinth

When Thucydides spoke of the allies who urged Sparta to go to war, he was thinking of Corinth above all. Our evidence for the organization and internal politics of classical Corinth is meagre, and out of proportion to the city's importance. There are good reasons for this: first, Corinth was an oligarchy, and in oligarchies, unlike democracies such as Athens after 462, magistrates are not accountable to the same extent and there is less need to put up inscriptions. Second, Corinth was sacked by Lucius Mummius in 146 BC with Roman thoroughness, not to rise again for a century. Perhaps inscriptions were among the casualties. (It may also be relevant that Corinth, as recent fmds show, used lead for public inscriptions at early dates: Arch. Reps, 1975--6, p.8. Lead is more easily reused than stone, and texts more easily effaced.) Third, and less depressing than the first two, Corinth is not completely excavated (most of what the modem visitor sees is Roman) and there is still hope that the classical agora may produce evidence of the kind we want; though to get it, the excavators (the American School in Athens) will need permission to dig under the main square of the modern town. For the moment, classical Corinth, like archaic Chalkis and for the sanie reasons, has much to say but stays silent. Fourth and last, Corinth inspired little history-writing: Aristotle's Constitution of the Corinthians does not survive, nor does Theopompus' Korinthiakos (T 48); apart from that there are only hellenistic prose versions of the archaic Corinthian poetry of Eumelos, and hellenistic treatises on the Isthmian games, which were held nearby. If Pin dar in the Thirteenth Olympian meant anything at all by saying that the Muses breathed sweetly over Corinth, he was not referring to his own day but perhaps to that of the Corinthian Arion who invented the dithyramb. Corinthian philistin­ ism, more real though less notorious than Theban, is part of something deeper and more disturbing: she had no ideology to offer, nothing that is like Athenian paideia or Spartan agoge, 'culture' and 'discipline' respectively. Actually the charge of lacking those two

qualities was levelled against Thebes (by Ephorus: see F 119), but even Thebes had a decade of hegemony; Corinth never. This is not fortuitous. Corinth was always, however, important. This importance was

partly strategic: by walling off the Isthmus (land narrows) ofCorinth, as was done in the Persian Wars and again in the hellenistic period, the Peloponnese could be turned into an island, or a tonoise with its head tucked in, as the Roman commander Flamininus put it. Polybius (xviii.11) called Corinth and Chalkis the handcuffs ofGreece, and the importance of Corinth to Macedon, which this comparison indicates, goes back to 338 when Philip II made Corinth the physical centre of his new Greek league (though whether the meeting-chamber has been identified on the ground is disputed). There were military reasons, too, for Julius Caesar's choice of refounded Corinth as the site of a colony and the Roman capital of Greece, colonia taus Julia Corinthi: even in Caesar's day, the Roman colonies had military or policing functions. Corinth controlled both the north-south route joining the Peloponnese to central Greece and the east-west haulage passage1 on the site of the modern Corinthian Canal. Corinth's peculiar position created two prosperous harbours, Lechaion in the west·and Kenchreai in the east. A further strategic asset was the colossal citadel, the Akrokorinth, which is very hard to take by storm: its most famous capture, by Aratos of Sikyon in the third century, involved treachery. The Akrokorinth dominates the Isthmus region, and it is one reason why Aratos' home city of Sikyon just west of Corinth was never more than a second-rate power. As Plutarch says (Aratos xvi) of the Akrokorinth: 'it hinders and cuts off all the country south of the Isthmus from intercourse, transits, and the carrying on of military expeditions by land and sea, and makes him who controls the place with a garrison sole lord of Greece.'2 The Akrokorinth has its own water supply, the Peirene spring, which meant that the inhabitants could stand long sieges. All this makes it hard to see why Mycenaean Corinth was of no

consequence; the answer is probably just that, unlike Attica and the Argolid, it lay off the main routes of Mycenaean penetration. But by Homeric, i.e. Dark Age, times its natural epithet was already 'the wealthy', as Thucydides noticed (i.l3). Partly this was the result of Corinthian trade and craftsmanship; Herodotus (ii.167) says that the Corinthians despised craftsmen less than did other Greeks (note the negative formulation) and a recent survey of Corinthian territory

confirms the exceptional variety of goods manufactured there. 3 Corinth was also famously cosmopolitan: its prostitutes gave it a reputation somewhere between nineteenth-century Paris and Post­ Second World War Saigon: 'not everybody has the wealth to go to Corinth' the proverb said, and those who did go there might be unlucky and take away more than pleasant memories, judging from the terracotta penises still visible along with models of other parts of the body in the Corinth Museum - dedications by sufferers from venereal disease (see also AJA, 1941, 442£.). It is, however, a mistake to pigeon-hole Corinth as just a city of

traders, craftsmen and luxury. On the contrary Corinth was very rich in agricultural land, as no one who has climbed to the top of the Akrokorinth can doubt. The old quarrel between Corinth and Megara was about borders; by the end of the archaic period Corinth had absorbed most of this frontier zone ofgood arable land, so that Strabo (380) can say of Krommyon, which is halfway to Megara, that it 'was once Megarian but is now Corinthian'. Nor was this a purely archaic problem: the border trouble with Megara in the 460s may reflect population pressure in the Corinthia.4 A further sign of the importance of agriculture to Corinth_ is the quantity of fertility offerings to Demeter the com-goddess - again these can be seen in the Corinth Museum. The most fertile land lay towards Sikyon. The politics of Corinth reflect the prosperity of its agriculture and

commerce. The Corinthians celebrated the fall of the Bacchiad tyrants in the sixth century by building the great temple of Apollo-and also by reorganizing and strengthening their tribal system. The Corinthia, the territory of Corinth, was by now large: it included the lonely cul-de-sac of Perachora in the north, as well as the territory towards Megara in the north-east, towards Sikyon in the west and Kleonai to the south. The new system is a blend of tribal and geographical: there are now eight tribes and three geographical groupings (perhaps Corinth city, the northern districts of Perachora and the Megarian border, and the southward extension towards Kleonai and Argos). 5 In Kleisthenic Athens and in the Cyrene ofDemonax (seep. 59), as also in the Rome of Servius Tullius, such tribal changes, compromises between the criteria of family descent and physical residence, were a way of coping with new claimants to citizenship; and perhaps the same is true of Corinth, which needed to enfranchise immigrant craftsmen and the population of freshly incorporated and conquered

areas, thus strengthening the citizen body. (The military aspect of Kleisthenic-type changes should never be forgotten.) It is remarkable that this reform, which is so like that at democratic Athens, was the work of oligarchs, showing that there is nothing distinctively democra­ tic about Kleisthenes' tribal changes, although Herodotus says Kleisthenes introduced the tribes and the democracy, in that order (vi.l31). What Athens and Corinth had in common was perhaps the

immigrant craftsmen who had been drawn to the cities in the salad days of their respective tyrannies. But Corinth went oligarchic, Athens democratic. Why was this? Perhaps Sparta, who helped to eject the Cypselids, and tended to favour oligarchies, was better able to influence Corinth, which was closer than Athens; or perhaps the explanation is just that 506 is much later than 585 when the Cypselids fell. Classical Corinth possessed some of the ingredients of Athenian-type democracy: she had what for Athens was a great catalyst of naval democracy, a colonial empire (in the north-west and north-east), comparable to Athens' possessions before 500 at Sigeion, the Chersonese and on Euboia at Chalkis. Her geographical position, like Athens', was accessible to outside influences and radical thinking. She even had, by the classical period, Long Walls running down to Lechaion harbour, like those which joined Athens to Piraeus; and she had a decent-sized navy: the Corinthians lent twenty ships to Athens before the Persian Wars and contributed forty in the Persian Wars themselves, and they had ninety ships at the battle of Sybota (p. 89). But by the mid-fifth century the oligarchs' grip was tight. That did not change till the Peloponnesian War, one effect of which

was to erode the Corinthian middle class. 6 A recent archaeological find is illuminating: one Corinthian fishmonger, whose Carthaginian amphoras and exotic western Mediterranean merchandise (the scales of the fish can be identified) show that his was a high-grade shop, went out of business in the early years of the Peloponnesian War, perhaps as a result of the Athenian blockade of the Corinthian gulf (Arch. Reps, 1978-9, p.IO). Corinth suffered badly from the war: in a naval building programme in 413 BC she provides only fifteen ships (to which should perhaps be added another twenty-five operating in the Corinthian Gulf). 7 The political result was longer delayed, but equally startling: in the 390s, by an amalgamation unthinkable half a century before, Corinth merged with Argos to form a single, democratic,

anti-Spartan state. Corinth, which had done so much to bring on the war by urging on Sparta, was more damaged by it, and more permanently, than any other city.