V. CORINTH

A few more mountains, and the traveler re-enters, in Sicyon, the area of Dorian settlement. Here, in 676, one Orthagoras taught the world a trick of politics that aftercenturies would use. He explained to the peasants that they were of Pelasgic or Achaean stock, while the landowning aristocracy that exploited them was descended from Dorian invaders; he appealed to the racial pride of the dispossessed, led them in a successful revolution, made himself dictator, and established the manufacturing and trading classes in power.* Under his able successors, Myron and Cleisthenes, these classes made Sicyon a semi-industrial city, famous for its shoes and its pottery, though still named from the cucumbers that it grew.

Farther east is the city that should have been, by all geographic and economic omens, the richest and most cultured center in Greece. For Corinth, on the isthmus, had an enviable position. It could lock the land door to or upon the Peloponnesus; it could serve and mulct the overland trade between northern and southern Greece; and it had harbors and shipping on both the Saronic and the Corinthian Gulf. Between these seas it built a lucrative Diolcos (“a slipping through”)—a wooden tramway along which ships were drawn on rollers over four miles of land.† Its fortress was the impregnable Acrocorinthus, a mountain peak two thousand feet high, watered by its own inexhaustible spring. Strabo has described for us the stirring sight from the citadel, with the city spread out on two bright terraces below, the open-air theater, the great public baths, the colonnaded market place, the gleaming temples, and the protective walls that reached to the port of Lechaeum on the northern gulf. At the very summit of the mount, as if to symbolize a major industry of the city, was a temple to Aphrodite.⁸⁰

Corinth had a history stretching back to Mycenaean times; even in Homer’s day it was famous for its wealth.⁸¹ After the Dorian conquest kings ruled it, then an aristocracy dominated by the family of the Bacchiadae. But here, too, as in Argos, Sicyon, Megara, Athens, Lesbos, Miletus, Samos, Sicily, and wherever Greek trade flourished, the business class, by revolution or intrigue, captured political power; this is the real meaning of the outbreak of “tyrannies” or dictatorships in seventh-century Greece. About 655 Cypselus seized the government. Having promised Zeus the entire wealth of Corinth if he succeeded, he laid a ten per cent tax on all property each year, and gave the proceeds to the temple, until, after a decade, he has fulfilled his vow, while leaving the city as rich as before.⁸² His popular and intelligent rule, through thirty years, laid the basis of Corinthian prosperity.⁸³

His ruthless son, Periander, in one of the longest dictatorships in Greek history (625-585), established order and discipline, checked exploitation, encouraged business, patronized literature and art, and made Corinth for a time the foremost city in Greece. He stimulated trade by establishing a state coinage,⁸⁴ and promoted industry by lowering taxes. He solved a crisis of unemployment by undertaking great public works, and establishing colonies abroad. He protected small businessmen from the competition of large firms by limiting the number of slaves that might be employed by one man, and forbidding their further importation.⁸⁵ He relieved the wealthy of their surplus gold by compelling them to contribute to a colossal golden statue as an ornament for the city; he invited the rich women of Corinth to a festival, stripped them of their costly robes and jewels, and sent them home with half their beauty nationalized. His enemies were numerous and powerful; he dared not go out without a heavy guard, and his fear and seclusion made him morose and cruel. To protect himself against revolt he acted on the cryptic advice of his fellow dictator Thrasybulus of Miletus, that he should periodically cut down the tallest ears of corn in the field.*⁸⁶ His concubines preyed upon him with accusations of his wife, until in a temper he threw her downstairs; she was pregnant, and died of the shock. He burnt the concubines alive, and banished to Corcyra his son Lycophron, who so grieved for his mother that he would not speak to his father. When the Corcyreans put Lycophron to death Periander seized three hundred youths of their noblest families and sent them to King Alyattes of Lydia, that they might be made eunuchs; but the ships that bore them touched at Samos, and the Samians, braving Periander’s anger, freed them. The dictator lived to a ripe old age, and after his death was numbered by some among the Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece.⁸⁷

A generation after him the Spartans overthrew the dictatorship at Corinth and set up an aristocracy—not because Sparta loved liberty, but because she favored landowners against the business classes. Nevertheless it was upon trade that the wealth of Corinth was based, helped now and then by the devotees of Aphrodite, and the Panhellenic Isthmian games. Courtesans were so numerous in the city that the Greeks often used corinthiazomai as signifying harlotry.⁸⁸ It was a common matter in Corinth to dedicate to Aphrodite’s temple women who served her as prostitutes, and brought their fees to the priests. One Xenophon (not the leader of the Ten Thousand) promises the goddess fifty hetairai, or courtesans, if she will help him to victory in the Olympic games; and the pious Pindar, celebrating this triumph, refers to the vow without flinching.⁸⁹ “The Temple of Aphrodite,” says Strabo,⁹⁰ “was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely squandered their money here.” The city was grateful, and looked upon these “hospitable ladies” as public benefactors. “It is an ancient custom at Corinth,” says an early author quoted by Athenaeus,⁹¹ “whenever the city addresses any supplication to Aphrodite . . . to employ as many courtesans as possible to join in the supplication.” The courtesans had a religious festival of their own, the Aphrodisia, which they celebrated with piety and pomp.⁹² St. Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians,⁹³ denounced these women, who still in his time plied there their ancient trade.

In 480 Corinth had a population of fifty thousand citizens and sixty thousand slaves—an unusually high proportion of freemen to slaves.⁹⁴ The quest for pleasure and gold absorbed all classes, and left little energy for literature and art. We hear of a poet Eumelus in the eighth century, but Corinthian names seldom grace Greek letters. Periander welcomed poets at his court, and brought Arion from Lesbos to organize music in Corinth. In the eighth century the pottery and bronzes of Corinth were famous; in the sixth her vase painters were at the top of their profession in Greece. Pausanias tells of a great cedar chest, in which Cypselus hid from the Bacchiadae, and upon which artists carved elegant reliefs, with inlays of ivory and gold.⁹⁵ Probably it was in the age of Periander that Corinth raised to Apollo a Doric temple famous for its seven monolithic columns, five of which still stand to suggest that Corinth may have loved beauty in more forms than one. Perhaps time and chance were ungrateful to the city, and her annals fell to be written by men of other loyalties. The past would be startled if it could see itself in the pages of historians.