Corinth, City-State of

Athens, unlike the Peloponnese, with its tradition of Dorian invasion from the north, claims to be “autochthonous”—that is, its inhabitants have occupied the same land forever.

Though largely fiction, it helps to make up for Athens' relative poverty in religion and myth: it has nothing to compare with the great legends of Thebes (the Oedipus story) or the Peloponnese (Heracles; the house of Atreus).

There is one hero, however, who can be regarded as especially Athenian, and that is Theseus, to whom the original political synoecism of Attica is attributed.

At whatever date one puts this “Thesean” synoecism, or centralization (900?), the late Dark Age in Attica appea r to have seen the opposite process taking place at the physical level; that is, the villages and countryside of Attica are in effect “colonized” from the center in the course of the eighth century. (The process may not be complete until even later.)

This explains why Athens is not one of the earliest colonizing powers: the possibility of “internal colonization” within Attica itself is (like Sparta's expansion into Messenia) an insurance against the kind of short-term food shortages that force such places as Corinth and Thera to siphon off part of their male population.

Agis, an early Spartan king, is traditionally held to be the son of Eurysthenes (in legend, one of the twins who founded Sparta).

Because the Agiad line of kings is named after him, Agis is perhaps a historical figure.

The fourth-century BCE Greek historian Ephorus attributes to Agis the capture of the city of Helos in Laconia and the reduction of its people to helot (serf) status.

The state of Sparta, historically Lacedaemon, the eventual capital of the Laconia district of the southeastern Peloponnese, is reputedly founded in the ninth century BCE with a rigid oligarchic constitution.

Lycurgus, by tradition the founder of the constitution of Sparta, and the lawgiver who designs this city-state's unique social and military structure, lives (according to fifth century BCE Greek writer Herodotus) about 900, (but later writers, including the biographer Plutarch, date him to the early eighth century BCE.

Scholars have been unable to determine conclusively whether Lycurgus was a historical person and, if he did exist, which institutions should be attributed to him.

Herodotus claimed that the lawgiver belonged to Sparta's Agiad house, one of the two houses (the other being the Eurypontid) that held Sparta's dual kingship.

According to Herodotus, the Spartans of his day claimed that the institutions of Crete inspired Lycurgus' reforms.

The historian Xenophon, writing in the first half of the fourth century BCE, apparently believed that Lycurgus had founded Sparta's institutions soon after the Dorians invaded Laconia around 1000 BCE and reduced the native Achaean population to the status of serfs, or helots.

It was generally accepted by the middle of the fourth century BCE hat Lycurgus had belonged to the Eurypontid house and had been regent for the Eurypontid king Charillus.

On this basis, Hellenistic scholars dated him to the ninth century BCE.

The Greek biographer Plutarch in his Life of Lycurgus will piece together popular accounts of Lycurgus' career.

Plutarch will describe Lycurgus' journey to Egypt and claim that the reformer had introduced the poems of Homer to Sparta.

A great wave of renewed colonization beginning in the eighth century BCE brings Dorian settlers to the island of Corcyra (modern Corfu), to Syracuse and Gela in Sicily, to Taras (now Taranto) in Italy, and to Cyrene in North Africa, as well as to scattered sites in the Crimea and along the Black Sea.

Sparta, Corinth, and Argos are among the most important cities of Doric origin.

The Greeks of Megara begin active colonization, founding Megara Hyblaea in Sicily and Chalcedon on the Bosporus.

Expansion and accompanying colonization from about 700 BCE bring the Ionians of Euboea to eastern Sicily and Cumae near Naples, and Samians to Nagidus and Celenderis in Pamphylia.

The Phocaeans, lacking arable land, establish colonies in the Dardanelles at Lampsacus, on the Black Sea at Amisus, and in the Crimea.

The Greek colonists begin to disseminate their culture throughout the Mediterranean and even into the southern Ukraine, opening new markets for Greek oil, wine, and other wares in return for precious metals, timber, grain, and other goods.

The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BCE, the year of the first Olympic Games.

The Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the seventh or eighth centuries BCE.

With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerge various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, which spread to the shores of the Black Sea, Southern Italy ("Magna Graecia") and Asia Minor.

These states and their colonies reach great levels of prosperity that result in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science, mathematics and philosophy.

Animal representations, floral motifs, and, by the eighth century BCE, human figures in stylized silhouettes, have intruded gradually into the traditional abstract geometric decorations of Greek pottery, particularly abundant in Attica.

The contemporary “Dipylon Krater”, a large vase originally used as a grave monument, depicts dancers, processions of horsemen and chariots, battle scenes, and men and women lamenting the dead.

Most of the Greek city-state governments begin to be run by archons, state magistrates of the highest order.

Athens, initially, has three archons: one each to exercise civil, military, and religious authority.

The tenure of the three Athenian archons, typically ten years in the eighth century BCE is reduced to one year by 683.

The six junior archons (thesmotetai), or magistrates, are said by Aristotle to have been instituted in Athens after 683 BCE to record the laws.

Trade begins to flourish beginning in the eighth century BCE between the developing city-states of Greece and Italy, many of which, like Athens, are building states that include wider sectors of society in their political activity than had any previous society, laying the basis of democracy.

Athens becomes the largest polis, combining several regions of the peninsula of Attica; its huge size and favorable configuration makes it unusual by any standards among Greek poleis.

Its territory is far larger than that of Corinth or Megara; while Boeotia, though in control of a comparable area, resorts to the federal principle as a way of imposing unity.

Like Corinth but unlike Thebes (the greatest city of Classical Boeotia), Athens has a splendid acropolis (citadel) that has its own water supply, a natural advantage making for early political centralization.

Athens is, moreover, protected by four mountain systems offering a first line of defense.

Second, Attica has a very long coastline jutting into the Aegean, a feature that invites it to become a maritime power (one may contrast it with Sparta, whose port of Gythion is far away to the south).

This in turn is to compel Athens to import quantities of the shipbuilding timber it lacks, a major factor in Athenian imperial thinking.

Third, although Attica is rich in certain natural resources, such as precious metal for coinage—the silver of the Laurium mines in the east of Attica—and marble for building, its soil, suitable though it is for olive growing, is thin by comparison with that of Thessaly or Boeotia.

Athens, whose territory became more densely populated after the post-Mycenaean depopulation, which had affected all Greece, had had to look for sources of grain outside Attica: to secure those sources, it had to act imperialistically.

The Peloponnesian site of Corinth, about fifty miles (eighty kilometers) west of Athens, at the eastern end of the Gulf of Corinth, had been occupied from before 3000 BCE, but its history is obscure until the early eighth century BCE, when the city-state of Corinth, established by Dorians, begins to develop as a commercial center.

The city has grown up at the base of the citadel of the Acrocorinthus—a Gibraltar-like eminence rising 1,886 feet (575 meters) above sea level.

The Acrocorinthus lies about one and a half miles (two and a half kilometers) south of the Isthmus of Corinth, which connects the Peloponnese with central Greece and which also separates the Saronic and Corinthian gulfs from each other.

The citadel of the Acrocorinthus rises precipitously above the old city and commands the land route into the Peloponnese, a circumstance that gives Corinth great strategic and commercial importance.

Corinth's political influence is increased through territorial expansion in the vicinity, and by the late eighth century, it has secured control of the isthmus.

During the eighth and seventh centuries, the Bacchiad family of nobles rules Corinth, but they are eventually overthrown by Cypselus, one of the newly powerful class of ambitious merchant-aristocrats and only a partial Bacchiad, who rules the city as a tyrant from about 657.

This is the first firmly datable and well-authenticated Greek tyranny, or one-man rule by a usurper.

Evidently, no one regrets the passing of the Bacchiadae.

Corinth is a backwater city-state (polis) on the Isthmus of Corinth, the narrow stretch of land that joins the Peloponnesus to the mainland of Greece, roughly halfway between Athens and Sparta.

An aristocratic revolution ousts the monarchy in 747 BCE (a traditional date), when the royal clan of Bacchiadae, a tightly knit Doric clan numbering perhaps a couple of hundred adult males and claiming descent from the Dorian hero Heracles through the seven sons and three daughters of a legendary king Bacchis, takes power from the last king, Telestes.

Practicing strict endogamy, which keeps clan outlines within a distinct extended oikos, they dispense with kingship and rule as a group, governing the city by electing annually a prytanis (executive) who holds the kingly position for his brief term, doubtless with a council (though none is specifically documented in the scant literary materials) and a polemarchos (war leader) to head the army.

Corinth is on its way to becoming a unified state.

Corinthians send out agricultural settlers in about 734 BCE to Corfu (Kérkira), a Greek island of two hundred and twenty-nine square miles (five hundred and ninety-three square kilometers) that lies in the Ionian Sea, just off the coast of Epirus in northwest Greece, thereby supplanting a settlement of Eretrians from Euboea, who retire to the Albanian coast.

The island derives its name from the Greek word “coryphai,” meaning "crests" (the fertile island, flat in the south, has mountain ranges in its northern and central regions).

According to legend, the island was Scheria, home of the Phaeacians in Homeric epic.

Corinthians led by the aristocrat Archias settle Syracuse on the east coast of Sicily in 734 BCE; the city soon dominates the coastal plain and hill country beyond.

The original Greek settlers of the city form an elite (gamoroi), while the Sicel natives (Siculi) work the land as an oppressed class.

These settlements set the trend for the earliest colonization movement to the west.

Southern Italy and Sicily will become known as Magna Graecia (Great Greece) because of the extent and density of colonization that follow the initial ventures.