Studies of Travel: GreeceFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Greece
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Greece -- Description and travel
Those who believe in Semitic or other foreign settlements in Greece
are apt, though they have no legend like those of Pelops or Kekrops to
help them, to quarter a Phœnician settlement on Akrokorinthos. A name
or two is all that they have to show, and a hill called φοινίκαιον,
and an Ἀθήνη Φοινίκη do not prove much. No site can be more thoroughly
Greek; the hill-top, near the sea, but not on it, is the ideal position
for a Greek coast town of the earliest type; and at Corinth we have
the mightiest of hilltops, near but not on, not one sea only, but two.
It is the central point of Hellas, looking all ways, commanding her
coasts and her mountains on every side. Its earliest name of Ephyrê
is one scattered over many sites of central and northern Greece, from
Argolis and Sikyonia to Thessaly and Thesprotia. Semitic elements may
have mingled with the local worship of Aphroditê without supporting
any Semitic occupation. Corinth traded with all the world, and she
may have learned many things from Phœnician visitors without Phœnician
settlers ever occupying her soil. The most Hellenic in its position of
all Hellenic cities cannot be given up to the barbarian. Instead of a
Phœnician origin, the votaries of the East must be satisfied with the
most striking of Phœnician analogies. If Corinth and Carthage were not
sisters in origin, they were at least sisters in destiny. They perished
together, and they rose again together, if the foundation of the
Roman colony can be called a rising again of either the Greek or the
Phœnician city.
The old memories of far-distant Poseidônia come again on the mind--not
unfittingly in a place where Poseidôn was so highly honoured--when we
look on the one surviving building of the lower city. Old Corinth is
now a mere village of a few houses. A few memorials of Roman times
are there; but, as at Poseidônia, they have to be looked for. The one
ancient building which strikes the eye and gives a character to the
place is the shattered temple, where seven columns still stand in all
the stern majesty of the earliest and severest Doric. Corinth gives her
name to the latest, the richest, the most graceful form of architecture
of Greece. But her one surviving relic is, of all buildings on old
Hellenic soil, the one which is furthest removed from the character
of her own order. The birthplace, so men deemed, of painting, one of
the chosen seats of sculpture, a city crowded with splendid temples
of later date, has now nothing to show but these half-fallen columns,
carrying us back to the earliest days of the historical being of the
city. Young as they seem beside the gates and vanished columns of
Mykênê, the Parthenôn is young beside them. They carry us back to the
days of Bacchiads and Kypselids, the days when Corinth was the mistress
of the Western seas, and sent forth her colonists and artists to follow
on the peninsular of Korkyra the models which she had reared at the
foot of her own guardian mountain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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