Coin of Corinth. Sixth century
Corinth, with her mighty natural fortress, more than a mile in circuit and 1800 feet high, her two seas and her command over a narrow isthmus, was admirably situated for commerce. She was one of the earliest states to develop a tyranny, to found an empire, and to revive the arts. Her colonies were mostly towards the west, and in Corcyra she had a valuable stepping-stone for Sicily and Italy. It is at Corinth that a new type of vase-painting appears early in the sixth century. It is very obvious that the motive was still derived from textile art, probably from Assyrian embroidery. The result, with its rich purples, is very pleasing from a decorative point of view, though the actual scenes and ornaments are unmeaning, and therefore un-Greek.[32] The coin types of Corinth in the sixth century are already beautiful designs. It was Cypselus, tyrant of Corinth, who dedicated at Olympia that famous chest of which we have spoken, with its parallel bands of mythological scenes. Periander, his son, was originally one of the Seven Sages, though Plato wanted to cast him out for a tyrant. The name of the third, Psammetichus, proves the close intercourse of Corinth with Egypt. It was Corinth under her tyrants that evolved a new poetical form, the dithyramb, and that first erected a Doric temple in Greece proper. This grave and splendid style of architecture was very probably based upon Egyptian models, but with characteristically Greek modifications. The earliest Greek temples seem to have been of wood and sun-baked brick. Such originally was the temple of Hera at Olympia, but as the wooden columns fell down one by one they were replaced with stone. In many features of Doric architecture it is possible to trace development from wooden technique. The whole roofing system is one of joists and beams, even when the roof is of stone. The triglyphs are the ends of the beams, translated into stone. The metopes were originally left open, then filled with terra-cotta reliefs, and finally with slabs of stone carved in high relief. In the earliest Doric temples the columns are very thick and heavy and the intercolumnar spaces very narrow. These things indicate that the architect had not yet fully realised the superior strength of stone. An ignorant or hasty glance might suggest that there was no progress in Greek architecture, but the close observer sees how the succeeding generations of architects continued to make subtle improvements, rendering the shafts more graceful, the mouldings more refined in their curves, correcting most cunningly the optical illusions of a straight row of tall columns, improving the lighting arrangements, improving the masonry, substituting stone for wood and precious marble for stone, adding ornament where it was appropriate, as on the frieze inside the peristyle, rejecting it where it was unsuitable, as on the architrave, which, being a main beam, ought to look heavy and strong, reaching forward, in fact, to the telos, the ultimate end of the type which his predecessors had set him. That is the Greek way. The Parthenon is the goal at which this old temple of Corinth had been aiming.
| DORIC STYLE | IONIC STYLE |
Seven columns of the Corinthian temple[33] have stood through the Roman destruction of Corinth and all the subsequent batterings of history. Their antiquity is shown by their clumsy strength. The height of the columns is only about four times the diameter of the base. Each column is a monolith of rough limestone covered with stucco and painted, in height 23½ feet, in diameter tapering rather sharply from the base (5 feet 8 inches) to the top (4 feet 3 inches). The temple was peripteral—i.e. it had a colonnade all round the nave, six columns at each end, fifteen on each side. Already there is an attempt to correct the optical illusion which makes horizontal lines seem to sink in the middle and vertical lines seem to bulge outwards, the stylobate, or floor from which the columns rise, being slightly curved, so that the centre columns stand about 2 centimetres higher than those on the wing. The interior building consists of two oblong chambers back to back, without communication between them. The side walls are prolonged at each end so as to form wings, and between each pair of wings stood two columns “in antis.” Thus there is a porch at each end under the colonnade. From the existence of the two separate chambers we conclude either that the temple united two distinct cults, or that one of the chambers was a treasury, for temples in Greece were always used as banks. I have gone into some detail in describing this building, because it is probably the oldest Doric temple in Greece, except the old wooden Heræum at Olympia. Roof-tiles, which made a sloping roof possible, were said to be an actual Corinthian invention. The Corinthian colony of Corcyra (Corfu) can boast a similar temple about fifty years later (? 600 B.C.).
It was under these Cypselid tyrants that Corinth began to acquire her historical character of a luxurious, sensual, and cosmopolitan city. Aphrodite, as she was worshipped at Corinth, was none other than “Ashtaroth, the abomination of the Sidonians,” and was imported along with the Tyrian purple from Phœnicia. She had a famous temple on the citadel of Corinth, which was thronged by her sacred slaves, the courtesans. Their numbers grew to more than a thousand, and they were a notorious snare to the commercial travellers of antiquity. You had to be a rich man to visit Corinth, as the proverb said:
οὐ παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἐς Κόρινθον ἔσθ’ ὁ πλοῦς
“non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum.”
That this immoral state of affairs began under the tyrants we can be sure, though Periander is said to have collected all the procuresses he could find and drowned them in the sea. Pindar delicately sings of “the hospitable damsels, ministers