Those who believe in Semitic or other foreign settlements in Greece are apt, though they have no legend like those of Pelops or Kekrops to help them, to quarter a Phœnician settlement on Akrokorinthos. A name or two is all that they have to show, and a hill called φοινίκαιον, and an Ἀθήνη Φοινίκη do not prove much. No site can be more thoroughly Greek; the hill-top, near the sea, but not on it, is the ideal position for a Greek coast town of the earliest type; and at Corinth we have the mightiest of hilltops, near but not on, not one sea only, but two. It is the central point of Hellas, looking all ways, commanding her coasts and her mountains on every side. Its earliest name of Ephyrê is one scattered over many sites of central and northern Greece, from Argolis and Sikyonia to Thessaly and Thesprotia. Semitic elements may have mingled with the local worship of Aphroditê without supporting any Semitic occupation. Corinth traded with all the world, and she may have learned many things from Phœnician visitors without Phœnician settlers ever occupying her soil. The most Hellenic in its position of all Hellenic cities cannot be given up to the barbarian. Instead of a Phœnician origin, the votaries of the East must be satisfied with the most striking of Phœnician analogies. If Corinth and Carthage were not sisters in origin, they were at least sisters in destiny. They perished together, and they rose again together, if the foundation of the Roman colony can be called a rising again of either the Greek or the Phœnician city.
The old memories of far-distant Poseidônia come again on the mind—not unfittingly in a place where Poseidôn was so highly honoured—when we look on the one surviving building of the lower city. Old Corinth is now a mere village of a few houses. A few memorials of Roman times are there; but, as at Poseidônia, they have to be looked for. The one ancient building which strikes the eye and gives a character to the place is the shattered temple, where seven columns still stand in all the stern majesty of the earliest and severest Doric. Corinth gives her name to the latest, the richest, the most graceful form of architecture of Greece. But her one surviving relic is, of all buildings on old Hellenic soil, the one which is furthest removed from the character of her own order. The birthplace, so men deemed, of painting, one of the chosen seats of sculpture, a city crowded with splendid temples of later date, has now nothing to show but these half-fallen columns, carrying us back to the earliest days of the historical being of the city. Young as they seem beside the gates and vanished columns of Mykênê, the Parthenôn is young beside them. They carry us back to the days of Bacchiads and Kypselids, the days when Corinth was the mistress of the Western seas, and sent forth her colonists and artists to follow on the peninsular of Korkyra the models which she had reared at the foot of her own guardian mountain.
The columns stand over the modern village, over a site almost as desolate as that over which they must have stood in the hundred years between Mummius and Cæsar. The other fragments, Greek and Roman, hardly come into the view. But the lower city is not the true Corinth. It is the mountain citadel round which the great associations of the city gather. As we look on from far, as we climb up its steep sides, we think of the two great moments of its deliverance, the day
When first Timoleon’s brother bled,
and the night when Aratos, in his earlier and nobler days, climbed up that steep in the teeth of Macedonian guards and baying dogs, and made Corinth once more a free Hellenic city. We picture him the next morning in the agorê, leaning wearied on his spear, and telling to the citizens whom he had delivered the tale of the night’s work which had set them free. And with such a scene before us, we are not tempted to dwell on the darker day when the deliverer undid his own work, when, rather than divide the possession of Peloponnêsos with a Spartan rival, he could give back the mount of Corinth to a Macedonian lord. High indeed the mount soars above the city, as high above the Larissa of Argos as the Larissa of Argos soars above the little hill of Tiryns. Stern and bare it rises above the city; stern and bare it rises above the open land on either side. But where the mountain sinks more gently towards the lesser height on its Sikyonian side, we may climb the winding path; we may enter the gateway of the forsaken fortress; and here indeed we find the history of Corinth, the history of Hellas, written legibly in stone. The fortress which, but fifty-five years back, was so fiercely disputed between the men of the land and their barbarian masters is now a fortress only in name. The warder keeps the gate; but he keeps it only as a form. The walls shelter only ruins. But they are ruins which tell their tale, fragments which tell how
Many a vanish’d year and age,
And tempest’s breath, and battle’s rage,
Have swept o’er Corinth.
Every age, from the earliest to the latest, has left its living and speaking memorials on that memorable hill, and no classical barbarian has yet taken in hand the cruel work of wiping out that long and wondrous history. Here, in the very gateway, is a primæval wall, reared, it may well be, before Corinth was Dorian, a wall of stones such as Corinth’s own Sisyphos might have been set to roll up the mountainside. Hard by is an arch of the thirteenth century of our era, an arch, not of Venetian, but of genuine French work, work of the days when there were Latin Princes of Achaia and Latin Emperors of the New Rome. We pass on among the fortifications, the dwellings, the temples, of all the creeds and races which Corinth has seen as citizens or as masters. Here is work of Hellenic days, of days when Corinth sent forth her colonies on her one sea and met the Persian in arms on the other. Here are traces of the temples of the Roman colony, traces of the Corinth where Paul taught and which Alaric entered as the first armed disciple of Paul’s teaching. Here is the Byzantine church, witness of the long years when Corinth stood as an outpost of Christendom, in one age against the heathen Slave, in another against the Mahometan Turk. Here is the Turkish mosque, the Turkish dwelling, telling of the long struggle when the Turk wrested the fortress from the Greek, when the Venetian wrested it back from the Turk, when the Turk wrested it once more from the Venetian, till the happier day when the fetter of Hellas, the horn of Peloponnêsos, again passed into the hands of her sons. All are in ruins, all are fittingly in ruins, seeing that all are memorials of powers which have passed away. But as ruins let them be guarded and revered, as ruins which tell their tale, the tale of Corinthian and Hellenic history. The blind fury of the destroyer has decreed that the history of Athens shall no longer be read on the akropolis of Athens. Let Corinth harbour no such enemies. Let not a wall be touched, let not a stone be swept away, which still lives to tell how many times and by how many hands
Was Corinth lost and won.