Corinthia, Greece
In the early classical period, the eighth and seventh centuries BC, Corinth was regarded as the leading place in Greece. Few commentators have been able to resist the idea that this exceptional status was linked to its position on the nipped-in waist of the Greek peninsula; traffic through and across this isthmus must surely have been the factor that gave Corinth its head start. In support of this thesis is the fact that around 600 BC the Corinthians built a paved road across the isthmus, and the assumption that they would have made this investment only if there was already a useful transit trade in existence. Maybe so, but by every other indication Corinth, far from facing both ways, always looked westwards. It was in the west that Corinthian merchants sought the wheat they needed to support the homeland’s population, it was there that they founded colonies – including such famous examples as Corcyra (Corfu) and SYRACUSE – where they could decant their surplus population. And it was to western markets, sometimes as far afield as CARTHAGE and Etruria, that they sent the export wares that balanced the city’s budget. Corinth’s position at the head of the Corinthian gulf made it the starting point for the swiftest, safest journey between Old Greece and Great Greece (Sicily and southern Italy); the fact that the Aegean lapped the Corinthians’ back door seems of little relevance in their history.
In the middle of the sixth century BC, Corinth town was displaced from its position at the top of the Greek urban hierarchy by ATHENS. As Athens probably had no more than 5,000 people at the time, this is the ballpark figure for Corinth too. It fits with what we know about the tiny scale of urban life in early classical Greece, and if Corinth got a little bigger as the Greek economy expanded in the course of the next half century, it is unlikely ever to have had 10,000 inhabitants. In fact, Corinth played only a modest part in the dramas of the fifth century BC. By this time, incidentally, the Diolkos, the paved road across the isthmus, had clearly lost whatever significance it may have had previously. Ships had become bigger and their captains more confident, taking voyages around the south of the peninsula.
Corinth’s isthmian position now conferred on it another role. Philip of Macedon aspired to rule all Greece, and in 338 BC, by winning the Battle of Chaeronea, he was able to fulfil this ambition. Corinth, lying at the entrance point to the Peloponnese, was the obvious place to plant a Macedonian garrison. Consequently, Acrocorinth, the citadel on the hill overlooking Corinth proper, became one of the three ‘fetters of Greece’, the strong points that ensured Macedonian control of the peninsula. (The others were PIRAEUS and Demetrias, the latter a castle in Thessaly.) The Romans, after defeating the Antigonid kingdom and inheriting its hegemony, made Corinth the meeting place of the Achaean League. It was at the nearby Isthmus that the Roman general Flaminius proclaimed Greek freedom. The following decades saw uneasy coexistence between the Achaeans and Roman hegemony, or at least influence, in Greece. The ultimate outcome was a revolt by the Achaean League against the Romans. The war ended in disaster for the league, and for Corinth. In 146 BC the Roman general Lucius Mummius not only sacked the city, he razed it and left it an uninhabited ruin.
Exactly 100 years later, Julius Caesar decided to rebuild Corinth. The task was taken over by his heir, the future emperor Augustus, who justified the expenditure by making the restored city the capital of his new province of Achaea (central and southern Greece, previously part of the province of Macedonia). Although Greece was not what it had been in its classical heyday, the focusing of its government on a single city meant that Roman Corinth quickly outstripped its Greek predecessor. The town gained the series of buildings needed for its administrative functions, plus temples for the imperial cult, baths, theatres and Greece’s only amphitheatre. With the arrival of Christianity it also acquired the appropriate complement of churches. Corinth appears to have survived the troubles of the later empire reasonably well – there is no sign of the sudden collapse that occurred at Athens in the late third century AD – and it probably retained much of its population until well into the fifth century. The sixth century saw a rapid dwindling, and although Corinth became the capital of the Byzantine theme of Hellas, by then the population was numbered in the tens rather than the hundreds and confined to the hilltop fortress of Acrocorinth. The site of the town itself was deserted by this time, and remains so today.
There are no useful data for Corinth town, although there are a few pointers for the population of Corinthia, town and country taken together. The main evidence is the Corinthian contribution to the Greek army at Plataea in 479 BC, presumably a maximum effort; this consisted of 5,000 hoplites, half the number contributed by Athens, and implying a total population of around 60,000. As Corinthia was less than a third the size of Attica, the density will have been considerably higher (roughly seventy, compared to forty-five, per square kilometre), which would explain why the Corinthians had difficulty feeding themselves at this period. As for Corinth town, as it had no special inputs, there is no reason to attribute anything out of the ordinary to it as regards numbers. A figure of around 5,000 is a reasonable guesstimate for the period 500–146 BC.
Roman Corinth was certainly more populous. The inputs associated with the business of administering Achaea may well have sustained a population on or over the 10,000 mark. In support of this are the public buildings, which are on a considerable scale and are spread over a wide area. But perhaps the most convincing evidence for a population of this exceptional order is the extensive perimeter of the late Roman wall (possibly built c. AD 300). This encloses 145 hectares, making Roman Corinth nearly two-thirds the size of classical Athens. Walls are not normally a very good way of judging the number of inhabitants in a place – classical Greek towns often had tiny populations nestling inside walls that ran up the surrounding hills and across empty valleys (witness Corinth itself) – but in the late empire the Romans usually built tight circuits, defending what had to be defended but not much more. No one is suggesting that Corinth town contained two thirds of Athens’s fifth-century BC population, i.e. 23,000 people, but, given the town’s administrative status and physical remains, 10,000 seems acceptable for the period AD 1–300, and maybe on to AD 500.