Corinthian Matters at 16

Yesterday I accidentally discovered that September 9 marks the 16th anniversary of my first post here at Corinthian Matters. The piece, titled simply “Corinthiaka,” welcomed the world to the site in 2010. Corinthian Matters was probably my third attempt at websites/blogging as a (then) young assistant professor of history, and it did notably better than my other blog site “History in the Dirt,” which is now lost, somewhere, in an internet blackhole.

I had a lot of ideas and expectations for this website. In the early years, I vigorously published 3-5 posts per week on all manner of new scholarship and news related to Corinthia. But my interests and scholarship evolved in new directions, while my growing responsibilities in teaching, scholarship, and administration at my institution, Messiah College (now University) made keeping up unsustainable. The other thing that changed was the rapid rise of social media usage, which made carefully produced blogging feel burdensome for sharing information. And so I began to reimagine Corinthian Matters as more a dynamic website with only occasional essays. Those essays indeed became very occasional. My last post was nearly four years ago!

Yet, all this time, I’ve faithfully renewed the domain name annually to keep it out of the internet graveyard of websites. I still hear from people who discover something of use in the older content I’ve published on this site, or who reach out in search of specific content on some aspect of the Corinthian past. Meanwhile, I continue to visit Corinth each summer, sometimes with my undergraduate students, and continue to conduct research and publication on topics of ancient, medieval, and modern Corinthia. I continue to think of this site as a worthwhile place to maintain for thinking publicly on Corinthian matters and a host of wider intersecting topics. In a new age of the AI, I can imagine greater value in writing original crafted reflections that combat the average and sometimes tepid response of LLM bots.

I’m going to experiment this year in making my ‘occasional’ posts at Corinthian Matters a little more frequent. I’ll update some of the static pages and share some of the interesting works and news stories I’ve encountered recently. Here’s to another 16 years.

David Pettegrew at the Corinth Canal in May 2026. I love this place.