hardly wonder at the great hygienic reputation of the place. The dog and the serpent are almost always associated with Asclepios in pictorial representations, the serpent entwined around his staff, and both animals figure prominently in the stories of miraculous cure, the dog sometimes licking the sores of the patient. How the serpent was so highly esteemed is not very clear. But it became the great emblem of the healing art, perhaps owing to the silence and subtlety of its movements and its connection with the underground world. The Epidaurians always took it with them when they went to found a colony; and on one occasion, when ambassadors, in obedience to an oracle, came from Rome in a time of pestilence, seeking the help of the god, the serpent was sent back with them as his representative.
One of the most interesting ruins of the place is the Tholos, a kind of rotunda, more than 100 feet in diameter, of which only the ground parts are standing. These consist of six concentric walls, the three innermost of which supported a circular floor or platform, paved with black and white marble, with a hole in the centre, the purpose of which is not very clear, whether for offering sacrifice, which is suggested by the name of Thumela applied to the building, or for drawing water from beneath. The fourth of the circular walls just mentioned, counting from the centre, supported fourteen Corinthian pillars of marble, the fifth a wall above the ground, the sixth an exterior colonnade with twenty-six columns. The three underground walls nearest the centre, forming a vault, have doors in them by which you can pass from one to the other, but so arranged as to form a labyrinth. An inscription shows that the building was erected by contract and took twenty-one years to finish. The contract was in the hands of two sets of commissioners, the one having charge of giving it out, the other being entrusted with the duty of seeing that the work was properly done. The list of contractors shows that many different cities had an interest in the undertaking.
Presumably the work of the younger Polykleitos; the auditorium (koilon) hollowed out of the side of the hill, as is usual in Greek theatres. In the diazoma, or horizontal gangway, half-way up the side of the auditorium, are thrones or seats of honour. The orchestra, marked by a circle of white marble, is clearly shown, and also the foundations of the stage buildings. By an act of barbarism, which has sadly ruined the artistic interest of this, the most beautiful ancient Greek theatre, the marble proscenium decorated with engaged Ionic columns has been removed, as not being part of the original design of the building. One of the great gateways opening into the passage (parados) leading to the orchestra occupies the lower middle part of the drawing.
CHAPTER VII
CORINTH AND ITS CANAL
BY its geographical position Corinth seems to have been predestined to commercial greatness. While it commanded the land route from the Peloponnesus to continental Greece, its two harbours on either side of the isthmus, opening, the one on the Corinthian, and the other on the Saronic Gulf, made it a natural emporium for East and West. There was no reason indeed why its military power should not have been as distinguished as its opulence. Its great acropolis (Acro-Corinthus, as it was called), a precipitous mountain nearly 1900 feet high, rising abruptly out of the plain and commanding a view of nearly the half of Greece, with a plateau on its summit large enough to accommodate thousands of men, was marked out by nature as an impregnable fortress. But, whether owing to the Phœnician element in the population or to the peace-making tendencies of its commercial pursuits, Corinth was never of very much account in war, though it was the first city in Greece to build a navy.