Korkyra (polis)
State | Defunct
700 BCE to 190 BCE
Korkyra is an ancient Greek city on the island of Corfu in the Ionian sea, adjacent to Epirus.
It is a colony of Corinth, founded in the archaic period.
According to Thucydides, the earliest recorded naval battle took place between Korkyra and Corinth, roughly 260 years before he was writing—and thus in the middle of the seventh century BCE.
He also writes that Korkyra was one of the three great naval powers in fifth century BC Greece, along with Athens and Corinth.
The antagonism between Korkyra and its mother city Corinth appears to have been an old one.
Quite apart from the naval battle Thucydides talks of, Herodotus records a myth involving the tyrant of Corinth, Periander.
Periander was estranged from his younger son, Lycophron, who believed that his father had killed his mother Milissa.
After failing to reconcile with Lycophron, he sent him to Korkyra, then within Corinth's goverance.
In his old age, Periander sent for his son to come and rule over Corinth, suggesting that they would trade places and he would rule Korkyra while his son came to rule Corinth.
To prevent this, the Korkyraeans killed Lycophron.
In punishment, Periander captured three hundred young men of Korkyra with the intention of castrating them.
This is more likely to be a myth explaining the animosity between Corinth and Korkyra (and justifying the use of the word tyrant for Periander's rule) than an actual historical event.
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The immediate causes of the Peloponnesian War vary from account to account, but three causes are fairly consistent among Thucydides and Plutarch.
Corinth and one of its colonies, Corcyra (modern-day Corfu), enter into a dispute in 435 BCE over the new Corcyran colony of Epidamnus, and war breaks out between Corinth and Corcyra.
Sparta refuses to become involved in the conflict and urges an arbitrated settlement.
Corcyra in 433 BCE, seeks the assistance of Athens in the war against Corinth, as that city-state is a traditional enemy of Athens.
Emphasizing the strategic locations of Corcyra itself and the colony of Epidamnus on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, Corcyra promises that Athens will have the use of Corcyra's navy, the third largest navy in Greece.
Accordingly, Athens signs a defensive alliance with Corcyra.
Corinth and Athens argue in the next year over control of Potidaea (near modern-day Nea Potidaia), eventually leading to an Athenian siege of Potidaea.
Athens in 434-433 BCE had issued the "Megarian Decrees", a series of economic decrees that places economic sanctions on the Megarian people.
Sparta and her allies accuse Athens of violating the Thirty Years Peace through the aforementioned actions, and, accordingly, formally declare war on Athens.
The war will last twenty-seven years, partly because Athens, a naval power, and Sparta, a land-based military power, will find it difficult to engage with each other.
Historians have traditionally divided the war into three phases.
In the Archidamian War, the first phase of the Great Peloponnesian War, Sparta launches repeated invasions of Attica, while Athens takes advantage of its naval supremacy to raid the coast of the Peloponnese in attempts to suppress signs of unrest in its empire.
A devastating epidemic strikes Athens in ancient Greece during the second year of the war, when an Athenian victory still seems within reach.