Corinthian Matters

Category: Late Antiquity

  • Dropping into Ancient Corinth (the CyArk and Google Partnership)

    Dropping into Ancient Corinth (the CyArk and Google Partnership)

    Years ago, a visitor to ancient Corinth (and other sites of Greece) had immediate access to most of the archaeological remains within the site. One could stand directly next to one of the standing columns of the Temple of Apollo, or even climb within the Fountain of Peirene, as I know a group of university…

  • A Coin Hoard at Lechaion is not the Real Story

    A Coin Hoard at Lechaion is not the Real Story

    Some more Corinthian clickbait hit us last week in a series of news articles about a coin hoard from Lechaion. We have heard quite a bit in the past about the Lechaion Harbor Project (LHP), a Danish and Greek operation to document the underwater remains at Lechaion since 2013. Their press releases, which come at the…

  • Early Byzantine Pottery from a Building in Kenchreai

    Early Byzantine Pottery from a Building in Kenchreai

    Back in August, I noted that the American Excavations at Kenchreai had developed its own website and digital archive for artifacts recovered from investigations of the last half century. I was pleased to see later in the fall the release of this preliminary report about an assemblage of late Roman /early Byzantine pottery found in a sea-side building excavated by the Greek Archaeological Service in 1976,…

  • On the Churches and Saints of Corinth

    On the Churches and Saints of Corinth

    Tomorrow marks the feast day of Kodratos, Corinth’s most famous ancient country saint martyred during the reign of the Emperor Decius. As I noted a number of years ago when I paraphrased a Latin version of his life, Kodratos was Corinth’s quintessential rural saint: an orphan raised by his Father God in the fields and mountains after his parents’ early death. When he descended into the city of sin…

  • Bridge of the Untiring Sea (Gebhard and Gregory, eds.)

    I finally have my hands on Bridge of the Untiring Sea: the Corinthian Isthmus from Prehistory to Late Antiquity, fresh off the press (December 2015) from the Princeton office of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. I wrote briefly about this forthcoming book in June (here and here). The Bridge has been a long time in the making. It…

  • The Long Lent

    The liturgical season of Lent begins today in the western Christian churches. If you don’t know what this is, Lent is a penitential season of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving that culminates in the celebration of Easter / Pascha. As far as liturgical seasons go, it’s a pretty old one that had emerged clearly by the council of Nicaea in AD…

  • The Roman Audience: Classical Literature as Social History (Wiseman)

    This new book by T.P. Wiseman caught my eye when I saw it via Google Alerts in late August. Published this fall by Oxford University Press, The Roman Audience: Classical Literature as Social History offers a novel interpretation of Roman literature and its reach to broad public audiences. The book is clearly relevant for a city like Roman Corinth, for which most of our…

  • The End of Greek Athletics in Late Antiquity (Remijsen)

    This new book by Sofie Remijsen, scheduled for publication this month with Cambridge University Press, offers a fresh evaluation of how and why the tradition of athletic competitions came to an end in late antiquity. A work like this is long overdue in light of the long-standing and battered assumption that an imperial edict of Theodosius the Great simply shut the games down in the later fourth…

  • Thirty New Roman Sites on the Corinthian Isthmus

    I recently finished editing proofs of a chapter for the forthcoming book, “The Bridge of the Untiring Sea”: The Corinthian Isthmus from Prehistory to Late Antiquity”. The piece, which grew out of a paper I delivered in Athens in 2007, offers a new synthesis of settlement patterns on the Isthmus during the Early Roman (44…

  • Deserted Villages Session: AIA 2016

    Another interesting conference session is in the works—this one for the 2016 meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America on the theme of “Deserted Villages.” I had never seen as much talk on FB about “abandonment” and “formation processes” as the day last summer when friends began to bandy about this session idea. Proposed Colloquium Session for…