the gaps of which you can see far into
the Morea on one side, and into Northern Greece on the other. But the
bays or harbors on either coast are few, and so there was no city able
to wrest the commerce of these waters from old Corinth, which held the
keys by land of the whole Peloponnesus, and commanded the passage from
sea to sea. It is, indeed, wonderful how Corinth did not acquire and
maintain the first position in Greece.

But as soon as the greater powers of Greece decayed and fell away, we
find Corinth immediately taking the highest position in wealth, and even
in importance. The capture of Corinth, in 146 B.C., marks the
Roman conquest of all Greece, and the art-treasures carried to Rome seem
to have been as great and various as those which even Athens could have
produced. No sooner had Julius Caesar restored and rebuilt the ruined
city, than it sprang at once again into importance, and among the
societies addrest in the Epistles of St. Paul, none seems to have lived
in greater wealth or luxury. It was, in fact, well-nigh impossible that
Corinth should die. Nature had marked out her site as one of the great
thoroughfares of the old world; and it was not till after centuries of
blighting misrule by the wretched Turks that she sank into the hopeless
decay from which not even another Julius Caesar could rescue her.

The traveler who expects to find any sufficient traces of the city of
Periander and of Timoleon, and, I may say, of St. Paul, will be
grievously disappointed. In the middle of the wretched straggling modern
village there stand up seven enormous rough stone pillars of the Doric
Order, evidently of the oldest and heaviest type; and these are the only
visible relic of the ancient city, looking altogether out of place, and
almost as if they had come there by mistake. These pillars, tho
insufficient to admit of our reconstructing the temple, are in
themselves profoundly interesting. Their shaft up to the capital is of
one block, about twenty-one feet high and six feet in diameter. It is to
be observed, that over these gigantic monoliths the architrave, in which
other Greek temples show the largest blocks, is not in one piece, but
two, and made of beams laid together longitudinally. The length of the
shafts (up to the neck of the capital) measures about four times their
diameter, on the photograph which I possess; I do not suppose that any
other Doric pillar known to us is so stout and short.

Straight over