Corinth's clay and stone made it rich long before Paul wrote to it
Sitting on the narrow neck of land between the Peloponnese and mainland Greece, Corinth grew into one of the biggest Greek cities, home to some 90,000 people by 400 BC. Rome razed it in 146 BC and rebuilt it a century later. Christians know it best from two letters by Paul.
The site was made for settlement. The city occupied two broad natural terraces edged by farmland and freshwater springs, topped up by seasonal streams from Mount Ziria and the Ayios Vasilios valley. Underfoot lay oolitic limestone, quarried for local buildings and shipped around the Aegean, and deposits of marl that, dried, ground, heated and wetted, gave a clay ideal for light pottery. Corinthian ceramics were exported widely.
Pottery shows people living here from at least 6500 BC and through the Early Bronze Age, when it may have been a trading hub. Finds then thin out sharply before the Mycenaean era, and the site was probably not busy again until about 900 BC, when Dorians are thought to have arrived. In the 8th and 7th centuries BC a close-knit Doric clan, the Bacchiadae, perhaps a couple of hundred adult men, ruled collectively, electing a prytanis each year to hold kingly powers for a short term, as Corinth rose from backwater to cultural power.
Myth crowds the place. Pausanias reports a founder named Corinthos, descended from Zeus, while another story credits the goddess Ephyra, giving the city an older name. Sisyphus was said to have begun a line of Corinthian kings; Jason left Medea here; and the winged horse Pegasus drank at the Upper Peirene spring before the local hero Bellerophon tamed him. In one tale the giant Briareus settled a quarrel by giving the isthmus to Poseidon and the high citadel, Acrocorinth, to the sun god Helios.
After capturing Corinth in battle, the Romans destroyed it in 146 BC, founded a new city on the site in 44 BC and made it capital of the province of Achaea. That Roman city appears in the Acts of the Apostles and in Paul's two epistles to the Corinthians. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens has excavated the ruins, about 5 kilometres from the modern town, since 1896.
Source: Ancient Corinth
