under Sparta, in which her financial resources
and strategic position secured her an unusual degree of independence.
Thus the city successfully befriended the Athenians against Cleomenes I.
(q.v.), and supported them against Aegina, their common commercial rival
in eastern waters. In the great Persian war of 480 Corinth served as the
Greek headquarters: her army took part at Thermopylae and Plataea and
her navy distinguished itself at Salamis and Mycale. Later in the
century the rapid development of Athenian trade and naval power became a
serious menace. In 459 the Corinthians, in common with their former
rivals the Aeginetans, made war upon Athens, but lost both by sea and
land. Henceforward their Levantine commerce dwindled, and in the west
the Athenians extended their rivalry even into the Corinthian Gulf.
Though Syracuse remained friendly, and the colonies in the N.W.
maintained a close commercial alliance with the mother-city, the
disaffection of Corcyra hampered the Italian trade. The alliance of this
latter power with Athens accentuated the rising jealousy of the
Corinthians, who, after deprecating a federal war in 440, virtually
forced Sparta's hand against Athens in 432. In the subsequent war
Corinth displayed great activity in the face of heavy losses, and the
support she gave to Syracuse had no little influence on the ultimate
issue of the war (see PELOPONNESIAN WAR). In 395 the domineering
attitude of Sparta impelled the Corinthians to conclude an alliance with
Argos which they had previously contemplated on occasions of friction
with the former city, as well as with Thebes and with Athens, whose
commercial rivalry they no longer dreaded. In the ensuing "Corinthian
War" the city suffered severely, and the war-party only maintained
itself by the help of an Argive garrison and a formal annexation to
Argos. Since 387 the Spartan party was again supreme, and after Leuctra
Corinth took the field against the Theban invaders of Peloponnesus
(371-366). In 344 party struggles between oligarchs and democrats led to
a usurpation by the tyrant Timophanes, whose speedy assassination was
compassed by his brother Timoleon (q.v.).

After the campaign of Chaeronea, Philip II. of Macedon summoned a Greek
congress at Corinth and left a garrison on the citadel. This citadel,
one of the "fetters of Greece," was eagerly contended for by the
Macedonian pretenders after Alexander's death; ultimately it fell to
Antigonus Gonatas, wh