Corinth in the spring sun

A weary sailor dreaming of the priestesses of Aphrodite

A chubby Hellenistic flutist and friends

The fortress of Aphrodite: Acrocorinth

From Corinth or from Syracuse?

A Corinthian capital from Corinth

A goat contemplating the vanity of existence

Apollo and Daphne

That old bloody-mindedness again

Apollo on guard 

The ruins of Corinth are opulent and exquisitely wrought, as was to be expected. But they are not "Greek". They are Roman, or more precisely Greco-Roman, with the exception of that stalwart of quintessential Hellenism, the archaic temple of Apollo. Looking at that long suffering giant, the oldest free standing edifice in Greece, I was instantly reminded of its brother, the temple of Apollo in Syracuse. They are uncannily similar, as they ought to be. The columns of both temples are monolithic. The temple in Ortygia is not in such a prominent spot as that in Corinth, but otherwise the family resemblance is striking. It could not be otherwise: Syracuse was the most illustrious colony of Dorian Corinth.

For the rest what we are looking at here today is Colonia laus Julia Corinthensis, namely the city founded by Julius Ceasar in 44 B.C some time after his victory over Pompey at Pharsala in Thessaly. The Hellenic city had ceased to exist in 146 B.C. when Mummius Achaicus razed it to the ground slaughtering its population, in another feat of glory as understood in those beloved classical times. The new city had a mixed population, consisting of Roman legionaries and their families, Greeks, Jews and others. The Jewish population in particular increased dramatically after the crushing of the Judean revolt by Vespasian and Titus. Vespasian dispatched to Corinth 6000 Jewish slaves, the pitiful remnants of another glorious massacre, in order to participate in the great project of cutting a sea passage across the Isthmus. This had already been dreamed up by Periandros who had to settle with the δίολκος instead, and revived by no other than Caligula. Nero was still enamored of this idea.

These facts are well known and in a sense trite. Nevertheless, they go against the grain of the historical understanding prevalent in modern Greek society and education. If you bring up the Roman dimension, you will most likely get disapproving frowns: how dare you claim that such an unrivalled culture as the Greek was ever mixed together with the crudity of the West which, as we all know, was eating acorns when "we" were building Parthenons? This is the level of imbecilic stupor that learning in general has descended to here, especially during the past generation. The chief assumption behind this moronic notion is, of course, that there has always existed a racially and culturally "pure" nation, which went through various phases of foreign occupation without ever forfeiting its identity. Thus we are taught in school that first there was the Ρωμαιοκρατία, then the Φραγκοκρατία and finally the Τουρκοκρατία. Of course, no mention is made of a Μακεδονοκρατία, although the descent of the Macedonians and their military destruction of political freedom in southern Greece was very much perceived by the southern Poleis as a violent imposition of a foreign regime.

The Romans, then, supposedly came and strangled the freedom of Greece, although there was no politically unified Greece in 146 B.C. In fact it was the Roman conquest that amalgamated the disparate fragments of Hellas, which had been warring among themselves as always, into a unitary province of Achaia, with Corinth as its capital. It pays to be reminded that Rome itself was most probably founded by Hellenic traders sailing from Greek Sicily up the Tiber (the Aenean tale being an Augustan concoction). Besides the Roman elites already at the time of the late Republic had been decisively Hellenized. The upper crust was Greek speaking or at least bilingual. When Ceasar was assassinated his last words were spoken in Greek, and Suetonius presents Caligula for instance speaking in Greek and citing the Greek poets in the original. In another period the official language of the Christian church with Rome as its center was Greek as late as the 4th c. A.D., a whole line of early Popes being Greek-speaking (some of them being celebrated as "saints" by the Orthodox church even to this day). Roman culture had developed under the guidance of Hellenic and Hellenistic prototypes.

Rome's takeover of the Greek mainland was a political event of great significance. But it was no "enslavement" as today's nationalists would portray it, with the fuming patriots huddles in dank underground cells, singing Greek anthems sotto voce and plotting the overthrow of the foreign yoke as the boots of the legionaries pounded the pavement above and the barbarian Latin tongue drowned out the noble sounds of Greek in the marketplaces.The Greek people were not a pariah community under Roman jurusdiction. That is why they never dreamt of revolting (as the Jews repeatedly did). Their language, religion and philosophy had triumphed all along the line and the leading lights of Greek thought (Polybius, Plutarch, Herodes Atticus) were fully integrated into a civilization they considered their own without the least detriment to their robust and proud Hellenism. To them civis romanus sum was in no way an insult, as our "national" baboons would have it. But then they would also condemn Polybius and Plutarch and a host of other late Greeks as traitors and bootlickers of the oppressors of the fatherland. Their atrophic mind is capable of just so much.

It was out of this Roman imperium that the later Byzantine entity, the eastern portion of the Empire, emerged.  Here we observe a remarkable somersault in the nationalist fairy tale. The "Byzantines" were Romans, they called themselves Romans, and they claimed for themselves the entire heritage of the former world empire through Constantine's translatio imperii. Magically, though, in nationalist hands the Byzantines spring out of the box once again Greeks, the descendants of that pure race that the Roman conquest had enslaved. In every schoolchild's mind today, and for the wider society too, it is a firm truth that Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian were Greeks, i.e. the same in all respects as today's Greeks, as Greek as Kolokotronis and Athanasios Diakos -and Andreas Papandreou, God forbid!

Christianity itself has also been reinterpreted from this angle as a Greek project, chiefly on account of the Hellenistic Koine being the language of the gospels (there is even a nationalist fringe propagating the notion that Jesus himself was Greek). Capitalizing on the rivalry between the eastern and the western church from the 9th c. onwards, the nationalists also eject the "Franks" from the precincts of the "true faith". Correct Christianity now becomes the exclusive property of the only god-anointed race: it is Greek Orthodoxy (mind you this implicitly also excludes the Slavs and Arabs of the Orthodox persuasion, just about everyone in fact who is not of the only allowable ethnic lineage). In this manner the accursed races of Jews and Latins are cleansed away and the annals of world civilization now sparkle with only one jewel of a race to adorn them.

It is entirely superfluous for any sane person (but sanity is in short supply here) to remark that although Paul, for instance, wrote in Greek, he was no Greek at all in the ethnic, cultural, racial or any other sense as the nationalist monstrosity would have it. Although he is indeed someone that, in a broad sense, any truly educated and fair-minded Greek of today in possession of his/her language and a critical historical sense would be rightly proud of. But these Greeks are a tiny minority in the "Greece" of today, which is instead a den of ranting nationalist apemen, under black or red flags regardless. And, thus, as a result of the above violation of just about every canon of right thinking and plain decency, the correlative historical tale of the Φραγκοκρατία emerges. Here again, we have the western beast  springing out of its forests and caves in order to annihilate the only fortress of ethnic purity and religious sanctity in the universe, Greek Constantinople. It would be self-demeaning to comment on this piece of abomination.

A visit to Corinth under the spring sun is refreshing and rejuvenating. The temple of Apollo still stands guard over the slope of the Corinthian Acropolis, the Acrocorinth, towering above and sheltering within its walls the remnants of the renowned temple of Aphrodite with its one thousand-strong crew of dazzlingly beautiful female servants of the Goddess. In the distance the Corinthian gulf sparkles, with the ornate Lechaion road pointing the way to the once bustling port of the same name. That Corinth was filthy rich just stares you in the face, and you don't necessarily need Horace to remind you that penurious nobodies are better advised to stay away. This is the Hellas of the world, an ecumenical city ably moulding with clearly Hellenic tools a universal humanism in which other cultures could also feel at ease. Roman Corinth is in fact a restoration of the universal cultural and political significance of its archaic and classical predecessor. In the marvelous museum you come face to face with the artifacts of this exciting epic: the remnants from the time of Kypselos and Periandros, the delightful pastoral mosaics and the haunting facade of the Phrygian captives which are the flowers of Hellenic art in its Roman reincarnation.

It is here also that you can stare straight into the eyes of Caligula. But more of this anon.