CORINTH (Kórinthos, Corinthus). - A city of the Peloponnese, capital of the Roman province of Achaea, famous not only for its wealth, splendor and corruption, but also for the apostolate carried out there by St. Paul and for the letters he addressed to the local Christian community.
Thanks to the excavations conducted from 1895 onward, first by the Greeks and then by American archaeologists, our knowledge of pre-Hellenic and, above all, Hellenic and Roman C. has been greatly enriched.
Ancient C. stood about 7 km southwest of the present-day Neo-Kórinthus, north of the Acrocorinth. Of this citadel, analogous to the acropolis of Athens, the excavations have revealed little; much, on the other hand, of the rest of the city. Roman C. was built almost entirely over the Greek one, so that it is, as it were, its continuation.
Already advanced in civilization in the 9th century B.C., with the rise of Macedonian influence it became the seat of the "League of Corinth." After the turbulent period of the "Achaean League" (C. entered it in 243), when the other allied cities had previously fallen, C. too ended up under the yoke of the Romans. These limited themselves, at first, to occupying the Acrocorinth (196 B.C.); then, following an attempted rebellion, the city was besieged by the consul L. Mummius, who reduced to a heap of ruins the last symbol of Greek freedom (146 B.C.).
But the geographical position of C., which with its isthmus represented a bridge between the north and the south of Greece, indeed between Asia and Europe, was too important for a field of ruins to remain there forever. In fact, a century later Caesar began its reconstruction, calling it Colonia Laus Julia Corinthus and settling there, alongside the scanty Greek element, a colony of veterans and freedmen, who, with the arrival of the many outsiders belonging to the commercial world, gave life to a city not far, in wealth and refined corruption, from the ancient Hellenic metropolis. When, less than a century later, Paul began his apostolic work there, C. had again become a city of most intense traffic. Its two ports, one on the Saronic or Aeginetan gulf (the port of Cenchreae), the other on the gulf of Patras or of C. (the port of Lechaeum) - whence the city's epithet διθάλασσος ο ἀμυθάλασσος (himaris: Horace, Odes, 1, 7, 2) - spared ships the long and dangerous circumnavigation of the Peloponnese, either by the system of unloading at one port and reloading at the other, or by dragging the smaller ships from one port to the other over the so-called δίωλος (Strabo, VII, 2, 1).
To C., a city of costly pleasures (hence the proverb "not everyone can go to C.": cf. Horace, Epist., 1, 17, 36), there flocked, particularly on the occasion of the biennial Isthmian games (does I Cor. 9, 24-27 allude to them?), the wealthiest of Rome and of the Empire. As in the past, and even more so, Aphrodite, served by more than a thousand prostitutes in her temple on the Acrocorinth (Strabo, VIII, 6, 20), was the sovereign goddess of this city, which had become, besides a strange mixture of races and civilizations, an immense house of corruption; so much so as to give an infamous meaning to the expression "Corinthian girl" (Plato, Rep., III, 404) and to coin the corresponding verb κορυνθάζομαι, "to Corinthianize," "to live in the Corinthian manner" (Aristophanes, Fragm. 133).
In this cosmopolitan center of intense traffic, alongside the Latins and the Greeks, there could not fail to be a large representation of Jews. To these, before turning decisively to the pagans (Acts 18, 4-7), Paul directed his efforts, as to those who had the right to enjoy the first fruits of the Gospel. It was a failure. Among the pagans, on the other hand, who were to be considered far more reluctant to welcome the "word of the Cross" (I Cor. 1, 18), there was realized, in less than two years (50-52 or 51-53), what Jesus had foretold to Paul at the moment of the break with the synagogue of C., that in this city He was reserving for Himself a numerous people (Acts 18, 10). There the Apostle worked with his hands, to procure a living, particularly before the aid of the good sons of Macedonia reached him (II Cor. 11, 9); he worked with the word, chiefly among the humble classes, who were the most docile to the evangelical message (I Cor. 1, 26); he had as a point of support the house of Titius Justus, a Roman who had already previously been sympathetic to the religion of Israel (Acts 18, 7); he was dragged by the Jews before the tribunal of the proconsul Junius Gallio, who, having ascertained that it was a purely religious question, washed his hands of it with an ostentatious display of contempt (Acts 18, 12-27).
After almost two years of work, vigils and worries of every kind (also on the part of other communities founded earlier), Paul judged the Church of Corinth sufficiently formed that he could leave it temporarily. There remained, however, serious remnants of the ancient vices, with abuses and turmoils, as the two canonical letters to the Corinthians (v. CORINTI, EPISTOLE ai) and the letter addressed by Clement of Rome to the same community about forty years later make known to us.
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Teodorico da Castel San Pietro
ARCHAEOLOGY
Eusebius recalls (Hist. eccl., IV, 23) the bishop Dionysius, who exercised his zeal also toward other communities through the letters written to the Church of the Lacedaemonians, to the Athenians, to those of Nicomedia, of Gortyna and of the other churches of Crete, to the Church of Amastris and to those of Pontus, to the inhabitants of Knossos; his is also the well-known letter to the bishop of Rome Soter (166-75), in which he declares that on Sundays the Church of C. was accustomed to read the first letter written to the Corinthians by Pope Clement. The bishop Perigenes of C. was at the third Council of Ephesus (431); the bishop Peter at the fourth Council of Chalcedon.
The martyrs of C., Leonidas and companions, appear not only in the Syriac and Hieronymian Martyrology but also in the liturgical tradition of the Greeks; all give the date of April 16 (H. Delehaye, Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, Brussels 1902, p. 605).
A Christian basilica was discovered at C. in the years 1928-29 on the outskirts of the present city near the Cenchrean gate, a place inhabited in the Justinianic age.
To the right of the basilica with three naves with diaconicon and non-apsed prothesis stands a trichora cell, which de Waele identifies with the Martyrium. All the tombs had been profaned and stripped. Erected perhaps toward the end of the 4th century or at the beginning of the 5th. Coins of the 11th century and fragments of sculpture of the same age suggest that a second church with a floor of yellow bricks of Corinthian manufacture existed then. The church fell into ruin in the 14th century with the Turkish occupation. Of the famous sanctuary of Asclepius nothing was found but a layer of burnt material with marble remains, lamps and coins of the 4th century. It is believed to have been demolished and set on fire by the Christians, who did not occupy the area of the temple for burials, but only the adjacent one.
For the Christian inscriptions of C. cf. B. D. Meritt, Greek Inscriptions 1896-1927 in Corinth's Excavations, VIII, I, Cambridge 1931, no. 136 ff. An ancient Christian cemetery of C. has been found near the spring of Lerna; 315 Christian tombs have been discovered; the oldest go back to the middle of the 4th century; the last are in a mass and seem to belong to the period of the ruinous earthquakes that afflicted C. in the 6th century, that is, before 542 and around 551 (F. J. de Waele, The fountain of Lerna and early christian cemetery of Corinth, in The American Journal of Archeology, 39 [1935], pp. 352-59).
C. is now a titular archbishopric.