The Gulf of Corinth is a very beautiful and narrow fiord, with chains of mountains on either side, through the gaps of which you can see far into the Morea on one side, and into northern Greece on the other. But the bays or harbors on either coast are few, and so there was no city able to wrest the commerce of these waters from old Corinth, which held the keys by land of the whole Peloponnesus, and commanded the passage from sea to sea. It is, indeed, wonderful how Corinth did not acquire and maintain the first position in Greece. It may, perhaps, have done so in the days of Periander, and we hear at various times of inventions and discoveries in Corinth, which show that, commercially and artistically, it was among the leading cities of Greece. But, whenever the relations of the various powers become clear, as in the Persian or Peloponnesian Wars, we find Corinth always at the head of the second-rate states, and never among the first. This is possibly to be accounted for by the predominance of trade interests, which are the source of such material prosperity that men are completely engrossed with it, and will not devote time and labor to politics, or stake their fortunes for the defence of principle. Thus it seems as if the Corinthians had been the shopkeepers of Greece. But as soon as the greater powers of Greece decayed and fell away, we find Corinth immediately taking the highest position in wealth, and even in importance. The capture of Corinth, in 146 B. C., marks the Roman conquest of all Greece, and the art-treasures carried to Rome seem to have been as great and various as those which even Athens could have produced. Its commercial position was at once assumed by Delos. No sooner had Julius Cæsar restored and rebuilt the ruined city than it sprang at once again into importance,(146) while Delos decayed; and among the societies addressed in the Epistles of St. Paul, none seems to have lived in greater wealth or luxury. It was, in fact, well-nigh impossible that Corinth should die. Nature had marked out her site as one of the great thoroughfares of the old world; and it was not till after centuries of blighting misrule by the wretched Turks that she sank into the hopeless decay from which not even another Julius Cæsar could rescue her.(147)