ABSTRACT

Corinth has featured repeatedly in our account of the preliminary hostilities; and in ucydides’ account of Spartan consultations with their allies it was the Corinthians who took the lead in urging open war. e evidence for the organization and internal politics of classical Corinth is meagre, and not in proportion to the city’s importance. ere are good reasons for this: 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 showing what has been done or spent.2 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 used lead for public inscriptions at early dates.3 Lead is more easily reused than stone, and texts more easily eaced.) ird, and less depressing than the rst two, Corinth is not completely excavated (most of what the modern 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 on Euboia and for the same reason, has much to say but stays silent. Fourth and last, Corinth produced few historians or writers of any kind (the fourth-century orator Dinarchus may have been a Corinthian but he moved to Athens). And Corinth inspired little specic history writing, though Herodotus has much to tell about the archaic tyrants Kypselos and Periander and ucydides’ information about Corinth and Corinthians was specially good.4 Antiochus, from Corinth’s daughter-city Syracuse, who was a contemporary and source of ucydides and who aimed to be the western Herodotus, must have included good material about the mother-city. Of works specically about Corinth, Aristotle’s Constitution of the Corinthians does not survive, nor does eopompos’ Korinthiakos (T48); 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. Nor was Corinth rich in mythology, because the city had no Mycenaean past. e most famous mythical gures connected with Corinth are neither of them really Corinthian:

the eban Oedipus grew up there, and Medea came to Corinth from Colchis at the east end of the Black Sea.5 If Pindar in Olympian 13, a victory ode for Xenophon son of another great Corinthian athlete ettalos, meant anything specic by saying that the Muses breathed sweetly over Corinth (line 22), he was perhaps thinking less of his own fth-century period than of that of the Corinthian Arion who invented the dithyramb in the years around 600. Or perhaps Pindar was gracefully acknowledging that Simonides too had celebrated Xenophon’s family the Oligaithidai. e general impression we have of fth-century Corinth before the Peloponnesian War is of a stable, even slightly smug, oligarchy. But a fragmentary poem of Pindar (fr. 70c) seems, surprisingly, to hint at stasis in Corinth, and may be a prayer that it should cease: a reminder of how little we really know about Corinthian internal aairs.6