They hand him over to the executioner!”
Periander also, desirous, as Aristotle suggests, of keeping his people too busy to think, stimulated the artistic skill which they had always possessed. A persistent tradition has asserted that Corinthian architects at an early date invented the roof-tiles by means of which temple roofs could be made to slope, thus forming the pediment or “eagle.” The Temple of Apollo was probably built at Periander’s instigation. Corinthian workmanship in terra-cotta, wood, and metal was famous from prehistoric to Roman times. Periander dedicated at Olympia the chest (cypsele) in which his father Cypselus had been concealed in infancy, made of cedar wood, gold, and ivory, ornately and exquisitely carved, in Pausanias’s time still one of the finest sights of the place. No bronze was better than that dipped in Peirene, and long before the vases of Corinthian artists were imported or stolen by Roman capitalists they were a part of the conventional display of the bon vivant in Athens.
In literature Periander could accomplish little. The absence of the literary gift among the Corinthians is strikingly shown by the fact that the name of only one native poet, Eumelus, has been handed down to us, and that he belonged to the ancient oligarchy of the eighth century. Two lyric lines traditionally assigned to him survive, the only fragment of Corinthian literature. Their imputed authorship indicates that Eumelus was not without fame, since the Doric Messenians, even less literary than the Corinthians, chose him to compose a song to Apollo to be sung by their embassy at the great Ionian festival at Delos. But embedded in the most important literature of Greece is an element which probably came into life in Corinth under Periander’s patronage. The choruses of the drama and the so-called dithyrambs or Dionysiac songs written by such lyric poets as Pindar, Simonides, and Bacchylides, seem equally to go back to some outgrowth of the stray wine-songs extemporized by revellers. A favourite tradition assigned this new form to a poet called Arion, who, though a Lesbian by birth, “composed, named, and taught the dithyramb at Corinth.” Herodotus adds a story which takes Arion out of the mists of tradition and places him, a sunlit figure, on the quarter-deck of a Corinthian ship rounding Cape Tænarum on its way back from Sicily. He had gone thither and made money, and on the return journey the Corinthian sailors, in whom he had thought he could most safely confide, gave him his choice of killing himself outright, if he wished a grave on dry land, or of leaping overboard into the Ionian Sea. In this strait Arion “begged of them, since such was their determination, that they would give him leave to take his stand dressed in his full regalia on the quarter-deck, and promised that from there he would sing to them and then would make away with himself. To the sailors it seemed a pleasant thing if they might hear the best of living singers, and from the stern they drew off amidships. And Arion, clad in his full costume, took his cithara and, stationed on the planking, went through with the Orthian strain, and, when the strain was concluded, flung himself into the sea, just as he was, in full costume dressed. Now the ship’s crew sailed off to Corinth, but a dolphin, as they say, took up Arion and carried him to Tænarum and he, alighting, went off, regalia and all, to Corinth and told, on his arrival, everything that had befallen.”
Periander’s successor was assassinated after a brief reign, and the tyranny was succeeded by an aristocracy of merchants. Corinth joined the Spartan confederacy, and her life continued to be one of commerce and peace. Her part in the Persian wars was modest, but a recently discovered commemorative inscription for her sons who died at Salamis is of peculiar interest as an example of the “many epitaphs composed by nameless authors in those days of joy and sorrow in various parts of Greece, all marked by the simplicity of a great age, whose reserve, as has been said truly, is the pride of strong men under the semblance of modesty.” The inscription runs: “Salamis the isle of Ajax holds us now, who once dwelled in the city of Corinth between her waters.”[[24]]
The brilliant and varied energies of the Cypselids had given way to the dulness of habitual prosperity. But a light from the past must have seemed to shine again upon Corinth when Pindar, “sailing a mere private in her ship of state,” drew upon the wealth of all her experiences in praising her as the native city of an Olympian victor:—
“Therein dwelleth Order and—a sure foundation for the state—her sister Justice, aye and Peace kin-bred, wealth’s stewards for mankind.”
“Flow’ring richly, oft on you the hours have bestowed the splendour crowning victory of men preëminent in valour at the sacred games, and often in their manly hearts inspired subtleties of old. Whoever hath devised, to him belongs the deed. Whence came to light the gracious gifts of Dionysus with the dithyramb that wins the ox? Nay, who set measured check upon the harnessed steeds or on the gables of the gods the twofold eagle spread?”
Thirty-three years after Pindar’s ode Euripides produced his “Medea.” This is the only Attic drama which has Corinth as its scene, and in it the local allusions are but vague. Until the writing of St. Paul’s epistles no other great literature concerned itself with Corinth.
The city’s policies and life from the Persian wars until the battle of Chæronea, though dictated by its trading interests, centred about the fortunes of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes. After Chæronea followed the common Macedonian domination. The subsequent Roman occupation of Corinth constitutes the second great period of its history. In 146 B. C. a last effort at rebellion against Rome resulted in savage vengeance executed by Lucius Mummius. Cicero was “moved” by the “ruins” of Corinth; and Antipater of Sidon, not long after the destruction, bewailed its desolation:—
“Where is thy beauty exciting men’s wonder,