The trade within the city is suggested by the traces of “shops” and by the ruins of the Propylæum of the Agora and of fine colonnades and stoas. Of buildings almost nothing remains, and, save for the foundations of a small unidentified temple, the Temple of Apollo alone represents the numerous sacred precincts of ancient and restored Corinth. The scanty ruins of a theatre recall picturesque stories. The Corinthian theatre of the sixth century, according to Plutarch, was the scene of the discovery of the murderers of the poet Ibycus, an important figure in the history of Greek lyric. A native of Rhegium, he led an adventurous life in harmony with his passionate temperament, and was finally killed by robbers on some lonely unknown shore. In dying he called upon a flock of cranes above his head to avenge him. Their sudden appearance over the theatre at Corinth so startled the assassins that they betrayed themselves, and thus the cranes kept their promise to a poet who had sung with equal ardour of birds and flowers and of the beauty of youth. In the Roman auditorium, according to a story attributed to Lucian, Nero had his servants crush in with the sharp edges of their writing tablets the larynx of a popular professional who had the temerity to out-sing the royal amateur.
Lucian also tells a delightful story connected with the Craneum—Skull Place—a frequented suburb of Corinth, where Diogenes the Cynic had set up his jar (not the “tub” of English tradition). When the news came that Philip of Macedon was advancing on the city, the Corinthians, in a fever of anxiety, set to work on their defences. Diogenes, mocking their activity, girded up his blanket, and with a great show of energy went bowling his jar up and down the Craneum. When some of his intimates asked him “Why do you do this, Diogenes?” he said, “I too roll my jar so as not to be the only idle one among so many workers.”
The most fortunate result of the excavations at Corinth was the uncovering of the well-house of Peirene. This spring, compared with which the temple columns are young, shared with Acrocorinth the ancient solitude of the plain; gave its waters to the first nameless adventurers who made their way from north and east; served the city of Dorians and Romans; and before the excavators enclosed it was still being used by the washer-women of the neighbouring hamlet. From Periander to the Byzantines, the grateful inhabitants were ever and again moved to build for Peirene a suitable enclosure, and traces of six building periods have been discovered. In the fifth century B. C. the natural rock was hewn into shape. Later generations added architectural panels, façades and colonnades.
The name Peirene seems to have belonged not only to the city fountain but also to another spring, crystal clear, a little below the summit of Acrocorinth, which, like Hippocrene on Helicon, was struck out by the hoof of Pegasus. In a translation of Euripides’s “Trojan Women,” Mr. Murray goes beyond his original in specifying this upper Peirene, vividly including in the women’s dread anticipation of their Greek slavery the steep climb up Acrocorinth:—
“Or pitchers to and fro to bear
To some Peirene on the hill
Where the proud water craveth still
Its broken-hearted minister.”
Two other fountains have also been discovered in Corinth, one the spring of Glauke, Medea’s rival, and the other an unnamed well-house with bronze lion heads still in situ. It is no wonder that St. Clement in his epistle to the Corinthians, when he enumerated the blessings of God, remembered especially the perennial fountains, shaped for pleasure and health, which give their breasts to sustain the life of men.
The canal across the Isthmus recalls several periods of Corinth’s history. Periander conceived the idea of making a canal, inspired perhaps by the engineering marvels he had seen in Egypt, and probably the lack of slave labour, rather than the popular Greek feeling of impiety, prevented him from joining the “two seas” on either side of the narrow isthmus. Julius Cæsar also thought of undertaking the work, but Nero was the first to begin its execution. His vanity saw in it an opportunity for dramatic display. Suetonius relates that he appeared in person, chanted hymns in honour of the deities of the sea, and with a golden pick-axe made a few motions before the thousands of soldiers and prisoners who were to do the cutting. Troubles at Rome, however, deflected his attention, and the making of the canal was left for the French engineers of 1881. Two cuttings made by Nero’s workmen were still visible when the French began.