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 Phoenician settlement on Akrokorinthos. A name or two is all that they have to show, and a hill called [Greek: phoinikaion], and an [Greek: Athênê Phoinikê] 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 Phoenician visitors without Phoenician 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 Phoenician origin, the votaries of the East must be satisfied with the most striking of Phoenician 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 Phoenician 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.