“Where is thy beauty exciting men’s wonder, Dorian Corinth, and ramparts that crowned thee? Where are the blessed ones’ columns, whereunder Sisyphid wives from their dwellings around thee Came with glad thousands to meet and to sunder? Bides not a trace of thee, luckless, devoured, Ravaged of war! We alone undeflowered, Nereids, halcyons, daughters of Ocean, Wait on thy woes with our loyal devotion.” The existence of the temple of Periander’s age, if nothing else, betrays the poet’s exaggeration. Pausanias says that the remarkable objects in the city of his day included “some remains of ancient Corinth.” Most of them, however, dated from the restoration. Julius Cæsar rebuilt the city, repopulated it with freedmen from Rome, and made it the seat of the proconsul of the “province of Achæa.” Corinth is the proper centre from which to study the Romanized Greek world. In wealth the Roman city began to equal and to outstrip the Greek city. But the old moderation in private life, imposed by Periander, was gone. The Romans of the empire had outlived the precepts of their own republican Cato, and the riches easily acquired at Corinth enabled them to satisfy their coarsened desires. Greek refinement was never native to the masters of the world, and into a nation, once satisfied at public festivals with beautiful processions and serious dramatic representations, were imported gladiatorial shows and all the excesses of a brutalized taste. The Greek Corinth had been regarded by the Athenians as rich and immoral. The Roman Corinth would have seemed to Plato a cave filled with passion-driven men lost to the sunlight of wisdom. It was into this Corinth that Paul came “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.” Acrocorinth saw the Roman pass and the Byzantine, the Venetian and the Turk. It may again see in “New Corinth” a powerful Greek city. The excavations at Old Corinth have uncovered but slight traces of the successive centuries of robust living, but the imaginative observer will soon perceive the archæologist’s success. Although the harbours of Lechæum and Cenchreæ are deserted and although the walls that connected them with the city are invisible, yet there are traces of a “paved street to Lechæum” with colonnades on either side, to bring to life again the crowds of sailors, merchants, and visitors from all parts of the ancient world who passed and repassed between the city and its ports. Aristotle, with characteristic distrust of cosmopolitanism, questioned the political advantage of such intercourse, but to Corinth it was the breath of life.