Ancient Corinth Private Tour – 6 Hours

You stop on the bridge and look down into a slot 79 metres deep and just 25 metres wide, cut through solid limestone between 1882 and 1893. Ships still pass through it, and they still pass under tow, because there is so little room to manoeuvre.

The idea is far older than the cut. Periander of Corinth wanted a canal here in the 7th century BC but decided against it — too expensive, and possibly too dangerous to Corinth’s own monopoly. What he built instead was the Diolkos: a paved stone trackway across the six-kilometre isthmus, with grooves cut into the stone, along which ships were hauled on wheeled platforms from one sea to the other. It worked for something like seven hundred years. Sections of it survive beside the modern canal.

Nero attempted the canal in 67 AD, using six thousand Jewish prisoners of war, and broke ground himself with a pickaxe. He got about a tenth of the way across before he died and the work stopped. The modern canal broadly follows his line.

Corinth was rich because of where it sat. Anything moving between the Aegean and the Adriatic either went around the Peloponnese — a long, dangerous sail past Cape Malea — or came through here and paid. By the 8th century BC, the city was already wealthy from it.

Rome destroyed Corinth utterly in 146 BC, killed or enslaved its population, and left the site empty for a century. Then Julius Caesar refounded it in 44 BC as a Roman colony, and it became the capital of the province of Achaia and one of the great cities of the empire again — Roman in law, Greek in bone, and cosmopolitan in a way that made moralists nervous. What you walk through is that Roman city.

Above it stands the Temple of Apollo, older than everything around it: 6th century BC, one of the earliest stone temples in Greece, with seven of its original thirty-eight Doric columns still standing — each cut from a single block of stone rather than assembled from drums. It survived the Roman destruction and was still functioning when Paul walked past it.

Below it opens the forum, the largest in Greece, and the Lechaion Road — the marble-paved avenue that ran down to the port, lined with shops and statue bases, still there beneath your feet. The Peirene Fountain was the city’s water source and is its most beautiful ruin: a rock-cut basin system with chambers and a courtyard, named for a woman who, according to the myth, wept so hard at her son’s death that she dissolved into the spring. It is also where Bellerophon is said to have caught Pegasus drinking.

On the south side of the forum is a marble-faced platform rising a couple of metres above the pavement. It is the bema — the judgment seat, where Roman magistrates heard cases in public, in the open, in front of whoever happened to be in the market that day.

Paul lived in Corinth for eighteen months, from about AD 50 to 52, working as a tentmaker alongside Aquila and Priscilla. In about AD 51, he was brought here and accused before Lucius Junius Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia and brother of the philosopher Seneca. Gallio heard the charge, decided it was a religious dispute rather than a matter of Roman law, refused to rule, and had the accusers driven from the tribunal (Acts 18:12–17). Paul stayed. The letters he later wrote to this city are 1 and 2 Corinthians.

This is one of the very few places in the New Testament you can actually stand on. Not a plausible location, not a traditional site — the platform itself, identified with the tribunal mentioned in Acts.

And the date is anchored. In the early twentieth century, French archaeologists at Delphi — 130 kilometres north — uncovered fragments of a letter from the emperor Claudius naming “Lucius Junius Gallio, my friend and proconsul of Achaia”. The emperor’s titles in the text date the letter to AD 52, helping to establish Gallio’s term and, in turn, the chronology of Paul’s time in Corinth. The Gallio Inscription is one of the key chronological anchors for dating Paul’s life and travels.

It is on display in the Delphi Archaeological Museum, which you can see on our full-day Delphi tour. The bema and the inscription that helps date Paul’s time here are 130 kilometres apart; between the two tours, you can see both.

Small, and unusually rich in things that connect directly to the texts. It holds the Erastus inscription — a paving block recording that an aedile named Erastus laid it at his own expense, and very plausibly the same Erastus Paul greets in Romans 16:23. There is a synagogue inscription, menorah reliefs, and the mosaics and sculpture of the Roman colony.

And there are the votives to Asklepios: hundreds of terracotta body parts — hands, feet, limbs, breasts, genitals — left by people asking to be healed of that particular thing, or thanking the god that they had been. They are displayed together, and the effect is not quite what you expect from an archaeological museum.