ABSTRACT
Flourishing though Ionia was, the Peloponnese from the 8th to the 6th century had prosperous studios 2 in the great cities of Corinth under the Bacchiadae and Cypselidae (627-629), of Argos, Sicyon and Sparta which played an important political role, whose commerce (with the exception of Sparta) rivalled that of the Ionians, and which founded distant colonies and exported the products of their industrial arts, more especially their pottery and worked metals. Corinth and Sicyon even wrongly prided themselves on having invented painting and on having seen its earliest progress, in the time of Craton, Cleanthes and Aregon.
