Ancient Corinth

Corinthian helmet from the 600's BC

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After the Macedonians conquered Corinth in 338 BC, Corinth was not as powerful as it had been before. But Corinth was still an important port during the Hellenistic period.

When the Romans conquered Greece in the 100's BC, they ended up destroying the city of Corinth completely in 146 BC (the same year that the Romans also destroyed the African city of Carthage).

A hundred years after this destruction, in 44 BC, Julius Caesar rebuilt Corinth as a Roman city. The Romans built many new buildings in the Roman style. The early Christian preacher St. Paul visited Corinth about 50 AD, and gave a series of speeches there to convert the Corinthians to Christianity. Corinth lasted as a Roman city throughout the Roman Empire, although it was attacked by Herulians (Germanic invaders) in 267 AD, and by Alaric the Visigoth in 395 or 396 (and Alaric sold many people who lived in Corinth into slavery). Corinth was still a city in the Byzantine Empire, although a terrible earthquake in 521 AD did a lot of damage. By the 1400's Corinth had been taken over by the Ottoman Empire, where it was not an important city.

To find out more about ancient Corinth, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:

Wealthy Corinth: A History of the City to 338 BC, by J. B. Salmon (1984). Not especially for kids, but readable.

St. Paul's Corinth: Texts and Archaeology, by Jerome Murphy-O'Connor (second edition 1990). See what ancient Greeks and Romans had to say about Corinth in the time of St. Paul, in their own words (translated into English).

First page on Ancient Corinth
Corinthian coins
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