By Zeus’s wife sent forth to roam,
With impious murder to the mere,
Ah wretched one! from headland springing
Her children twain and self out-flinging,
She perished with them in the foam.”
Ino became Leucothea, the kindly goddess of Odysseus’s journey, and Melicertes became Palæmon, the Greek representative of the Phœnician Melkart, worshipped on the Isthmus. To them, in the Anthology, sailors prayed on their way to the “sweet shore of Piræus” and fishermen dedicated strange sea creatures that came up in their nets or were found upon the shore.
The train keeps on its way by the Saronic Gulf, crosses the canal on a bridge and reaches New Corinth on the Corinthian Gulf.
The destiny of Corinth was so peculiarly the result of its situation that to describe the one is to foreshadow the other. Aristotle might have illustrated by this city the physical qualities which he considered desirable. It had “a native abundance of streams and fountains” to promote health, and its acropolis was one of the strongest in Greece. Most of all, it was “well situated in regard both to sea and land.” Thus it was “a strategic centre for protecting the whole district,” and was “convenient for receiving the crops and also for the bringing in of timber and any other natural products.” Corinth commanded two ports, one on either side of the Isthmus, and stood also at the entrance to the Peloponnesus. As “god-built portal of the bright island of Pelops” she controlled the land routes for the exports and imports of southern Greece, and as a city “of two seas” she was mistress of the trade of the far east and the far west. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War she urged the Dorian allies to remember that if they did not protect her seaboard they would find it difficult to carry their produce to the sea or to barter in return for the goods which the sea gives to the land. Already in Homer Corinth was “rich,” and her later history was one of commerce, colonization, invention, and the arts and crafts rather than of literature. For that reason the pathos of her present desolation is unrelieved by thoughts of a rescued legacy.
New Corinth, lying close to the shore of the Gulf, several miles from the ancient western harbour, is a town of hopeful energy and ambition, its railroad station and steamboat quay indicating a potential capacity for growth. Old Corinth, three and a half miles inland, consists of a few poor houses unified into a certain village dignity by a great plane tree that shadows the “public square.” These houses have gathered near the spot to which tourists make their way on foot or by carriage from the seashore town. Before the excavations of the American School were begun in 1896, they came in order to ascend the massive rock of Acrocorinth and to see the remaining monoliths of a Doric temple which antedates the classical period of Greek architecture. The excavations have added sites deserving of close attention, but without effect on the general features of the landscape. Acrocorinth rules the Isthmian plain, and its summit offers an outlook, from Strabo’s time the theme of many panegyrics, over wide-flung country and sea to the mountain crests of Delphi and Arcadia, of Attica and Bœotia. The plateau on the north and east of this acropolis was the site of the ancient city. Apollo’s columns, which saw its greatest power and have withstood its successive blights, alone compete with the impressiveness of the citadel. Seated on the steps of the temple and watching the mists break away from the impatient heights of Acrocorinth, we may recount to ourselves the tale “of Corinth blest, the vestibule of Isthmian Poseidon, nurse of manly splendour.”
