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. One of the most famous of its early kings was Sisyphus, whose name is supposed to have been a reduplication of the Greek word _sophos_. His wisdom, however, seems to have been of a mean and sinister kind, better described as cunning, if we may judge from some of the illustrations of it which have come down to us. According to a well-known tradition he was condemned by Zeus to the hopeless and never-ending task, in Hades, of pushing a stone up the side of a mountain, from which it always rolled back before he could place it securely on the summit--an appropriate enough punishment for a man who had been guilty of murdering travellers as they crossed the isthmus by rolling down great stones upon them from the mountains.