Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

CORINTH
Temple of Apollo, and Acrocorinth

The diversity of legends concerning the pre-Dorian origin of Corinth illustrates the hospitality of the Greek mind toward incompatible stories. Ephyre, daughter of Ocean, in Homer gave her name to the city. Sisyphus, the son of Æolus, the son of Hellen, was introduced as founder in the effort to trace historical development. The Corinthians themselves set great store by an eponymous hero, Corinthus, the son of Zeus. Their reiteration of this exasperating claim became proverbial among the other Greeks. When the Aristophanic Dionysus arrives in Hades and bids his servant take up the wraps again and carry them inside, Xanthias exclaims:—

“Aye, pick ’em up! now there it goes again,

They’ve Zeus’s Corinth in ’em, that is plain!”

Sisyphus and his descendants owe a long debt to the poets, if posthumous fame be a recompense for vicissitudes. Sisyphus was found by Odysseus in Hades in “strong torment,” pushing a monstrous stone up the hill only to have it roll back again. A great-great-grandson fought among the Lycians on Priam’s side at Troy and, questioned by Diomede of his ancestry, made the famous comparison which betrays the melancholy already lurking in the youth of Hellas:—

“As with the leaves’ generations so it is with the passing of mortals. Some of the leaves the wind strews on the ground while others the trees of the forest, budding and blooming, put forth when the spring cometh on in its season. Thus with the races of mortals, one blooms and another one ceases.”

He also told the story of his grandfather, Bellerophon of Corinth: his refusal of a queen’s love, his hard labours in punishment, his rise to fame and power, and his ultimate failure to retain the favour of the gods, so that he ended his life far from the paths of men, devouring his own heart in desolate northern plains. Pindar took up the Homeric legend and shifted the emphasis to the winged Pegasus, tamed by Bellerophon, with Athena’s aid, at Peirene, the city fountain, and finally stabled in the stalls of Olympus, after he had aided his master “from out the desert bosom of the ether chill” to “smite and slay the woman brood of archer Amazons, Chimæra breathing fire, and the Solymi.”

In the history of Corinth two periods are of special interest and might serve as the bases for a study of important epochs in the larger history of Greece. These periods, separated by more than four hundred years, were dominated respectively by the “tyrants” and the Romans.

Although historians now avoid the restrictive term “age of the despots,” it is true that from the eighth to the sixth centuries tyrannies arose in Greek cities on the Asiatic coast, on the islands of the Ægean, and in Greece proper, implying the same conditions of public life. The tyranny of Corinth, beginning with Cypselus in the seventh century and ending with his grandnephew, Psammetichus, in the sixth, was one of the longest and most notorious. Any tyranny which endured until the third generation was remarkable, for, in spite of its apparent vigour, this form of government was suited to no Greek people. Everywhere democracy and oligarchy were united in hatred of an hereditary ruler. In Athens the short-lived despotism was itself greatly modified, and the picture of the tyrant in Athenian literature, in Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon, was drawn from the more violent models known from the histories of Corinth or Sicyon or Miletus, or seen contemporaneously in Syracuse. Plato not only as a philosopher but as a Greek interpreted the tyrant’s life as one of mental misery: “In good truth he turns out a pauper, if one but knows how to contemplate the soul in its entirety; and all his life long he is loaded down with fear, all a-quiver with convulsions and with pangs, at least if he is like the disposition of the state over which he holds sway, ... and he must needs, by reason of his rule, ever more and more become envious, distrusted, unjust, friendless, unholy, and of every vice the host and nurse; and by reason of all this he must first of all become unhappy and then must make like to himself those near him.”

In Corinth Periander was the typical despot, powerful and violent, killing his wife and earning the hatred of his sons, overriding the sensibilities of his people, crushing the stronger and richer citizens. And yet by masterly statesmanship, a cultivated taste, and careful paternalism, he brought about the peaceful prosperity which more than one nation in history has preferred to liberty, and created a civilization in which brilliant achievement and temperate life were not incompatible. At no other time was Corinth so great a city. In addition to the older colonies of Syracuse and Corcyra, trading posts were obtained along the northwestern coast of Greece, controlling the commerce of the Adriatic. Rivalry with the cities of Eubœa and with Ægina was succeeded by unquestioned superiority. Alliances were contracted in Asia Minor and in Egypt. At home the enervation of luxury was guarded against by sumptuary laws. That some of these outlived the period may be gathered from a fragment of the comic poet Diphilus, a contemporary of Menander, in which, apparently, a Corinthian reproaches a foreign spendthrift who has come to town and cornered the vegetable market so that the natives have to struggle for the parsley as at the Isthmian games:—