The Ancients - How Corinth Became Christian

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Occupied since around 3000 BC, the Ancient city of Corinth is not unique in its transition from a Pagan, Greco-Roman state to a Christian one. What makes it stand out, however, is the incredible evidence that allows us to track this city’s journey throughout this time period, in literature, architecture and art. In this episode, Dr. Amelia Brown outlines Corinth’s administration and its move towards Christianity. She also highlights the incredible evidence of Pausanias, a Greek travel writer and geographer of the second century AD who lived in the time of the Roman emperors. Amelia is a Senior Lecturer in Greek History & Language at the University of Queensland, Australia.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast we are focusing on the city of Corinth in late antiquity at a really, really interesting time because this is when we see this city undergo massive change. It's rebranded, it's rebuilt,

certain buildings are destroyed destroyed certain pieces of sculpture are torn down and you see the construction of new types of buildings particularly churches because yes this is when christianity really starts to take hold of corinth when corinth shall we say became christian now joining me to talk through this incredible topic, I was delighted to get on the show Dr Amelia Brown from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Amelia has written all about Corinth in late antiquity and this radical transformation, so it was great to get on the show to talk through all things Corinth in late antiquity, how Corinth became Christian. Here's Amelia.

In Late Antiquity, How Corinth Became Christian. Here's Amelia. Amelia, thank you so much for coming on the show. You're welcome. Thank you for inviting me to take part in this interview. No problem at all. This is a great topic. Corinth in Late Antiquity, How Corinth Became Christian, shall we say. This is a time of mass destruction, of rebuilding,

of rebranding. This is a city that is radically reshaped. Yes, that's right, Tristan. And my research has focused a lot on Corinth in late antiquity, in particular, because I thought when I first came to research Corinth as a student at Berkeley, and then later at the American School of Classical Studies, that Corinth was the most fascinating city, strategically located, always an important port, but also that late antiquity was its most exciting era to study because of the massive change of the landscape, of the whole infrastructure and daily life of the city, and yet the continuities as well that went with that. Change and continuity. And Amelia, can we also say,

as we kick off with the background, that Corinth, its change in late antiquity, this city serves almost as a microcosm for the radical change that seizes many cities, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean around that time. many cities, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean, around that time? Yes, it's a very good example for the whole Roman Empire, actually, for these cities around the Mediterranean Sea, and even as far north as, say, London or Paris, as far south as cities along the Nile, the Upper Nile, and into what's now Sudan. And as far east as Mesopotamia, as modern Iraq, these cities of the Roman Empire were undergoing profound changes in the era of late antiquity. This dramatic transformation that we're going to be delving into right now. But let's focus

then right on Corinth. And first of all, Corinth's geography is topography because Amelia, in late antiquity, Corinth had occupied a very powerful central position. Yes, it did. between east and west, the land routes between north and south, situated right there on the Acro-Corinth, the Acropolis of Corinth, and looking out over the Isthmus, the narrow six-mile neck of land that is all that attaches the whole Peloponnese Peninsula to the Balkans and northern Greece and the rest of the landmass. So a very strategic location, excellent harbors facing east towards Athens and Asia Minor and Egypt facing west towards Rome and Italy. But it also had a particularly important role in the Roman Empire, which was as the seat of the governor of Greece. So it was the capital city of the province of Greece, or Achaea, as it was called by the

Romans. And that name lasted into late antiquity. And then eventually, because the Byzantine Roman Empire was mostly Greek speaking, they reverted to calling that area again Hellas, or Greece. But it was the basically, from a modern perspective, we would call it the Roman province of Greece, the original Greek peninsula from around the Pass of Thermopylae and the cities of Lamia and Larissa and Thessaly, from those cities southwards through places like Thebes, Chalcis, Athens, and into the Peloponnese. And on the Peloponnese, Corinth was by far the largest and most prosperous city, although Patras, Messene, and Sparta were also significant, and Argos too, not to ignore Argos, although Corinth and Argos

always had a rivalry, and that continued in late antiquity too. Why am I not surprised when thinking about neighbouring Greek city-states in antiquity? I'm glad you mentioned Lamia, that's one of my favourite cities. So incredible, thank you. I mentioned it in this chat. Right, but anyway. Yes, Lamia doesn't get mentioned very often, does it? It doesn't indeed, you're absolutely right there. So let's focus a bit more on the background first of all,

because we need to talk about the sources. What sources, Amelia, do we have for Corinth in late antiquity? Well, in late antiquity, archaeology is absolutely essential for understanding anything about what is going on at the city during this time. We have a really extensive history of excavation at the city of Corinth. So the city itself never lost its name, never lost the knowledge of the people who lived there or the visitors that it was Corinth. The Doric temple columns have always been visible and been a central monument along with the Pyrenees fountain water, the natural spring right next to them. But it was the case that in the 19th century, when archaeology was

beginning in a formal way in Greece, that Corinth was selected by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens to be the very first excavation of the school that was organized, where all students, whether they came from the U.S. or from Canada or even from Greece, if they were studying at an American university, they could come over to Athens and then they could participate in an archaeological excavation. So from 1896, there have been annual campaigns directed by the American school with this very international team of students and scholars and local workers, for the most part, uncovering more and more of the ancient city. So the archaeology is very important for the actual artifacts that get recovered,

but it's also important for the epigraphy, for the inscriptions that get recovered, because we have actually hundreds of early Christian gravestones from Corinth. It's a really wonderful body of archaeological evidence. There are whole buildings like churches and temples, and then there are, you know, even tiny fragments of epitaphs. Now, they can supplement this picture with some literary sources, but there are really not very many of them. There are mentions in passing. We don't have any literature written by Corinthians, for Corinthians, or even by Corinthians, other than very tangential people such as Galen, for example, the famous medical writer. He lived and worked at Corinth for some of his career in the later

second century. So we can say, well, he was at Corinth, he knew Corinth, but he was not a Corinthian. So we have to go in the literary sources through several levels of interpretation, whether it's a physician like Galen, the travel writer Pausanias, at the second century end of things, the second sophistic writer, Philostratus, or if it's at the other end of things with Procopius writing about Justinian's massive building program, we can also there apply some filters as to what Procopius knew from Constantinople about the actual building of the fortifications across the isthmus, you know, in the middle of the 6th century. That's really interesting sources of evidence that we therefore do have surviving from the archaeology to the literature. Now there's one

literary source who seems the invaluable starting point for this discussion. I know he's a big favourite of yours. Pausanias. Amelia, who was Pausanias? I'm very happy to talk more about Pausanias and to give him a huge shout out because I think he's not very well known still outside of classical scholarship and outside of archaeological scholarship of the classical world and especially the Greek world. And he really deserves to be. He really deserves to be more well-known. He is our earliest extant travel guide. He's our earliest author who is not just a geographer, but an actual travel guide. His work is called, literally, The Guide to Greece, Guide to Greece, Perigesis Tisselados. So he presents himself in his work as a travel guide. He also does note the existence of other guides at the various places he goes, and he does also apply some literary technique to his guidebook. He begins, though, very systematically, and he proceeds systematically, always in a

clockwise fashion, for the most part. So he begins actually with Athens, with Attica. He probably begins there because of topographic, but also cultural reasons, because of the great importance of Athens and Attica in classical and Hellenistic Greek culture and history and art and architecture. And then he moves systematically from Athens and Attica to Corinth and the Corinthia. And then he goes south to Argos and on south to Sparta. He loops back around up to Olympia and then to Delphi. back around up to Olympia and then to Delphi. And so he ends his work with what he also considered clearly to be a central important part of Greece and the navel of Greece, right? The Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. Now his interests are very much in what for him was ancient history. So he wants

to point out the monuments by which the archaic classical and hellenistic but especially the archaic and classical world of Greece was preserved in his day in the second century so in the second sophistic in the Roman empire under Marcus Aurelius when he was writing his work and when he was actually traveling I Amelia, just so we're then crystal clear, if Pausanias, he's writing, let's say, the high Roman imperial period, so not late antiquity, and he's got a main focus on ancient history in his day, looking at these buildings from hundreds of years before him. So why is he such a significant starting point for looking at Corinth at a later date in late antiquity?

Right. Well, he's absolutely essential, actually, for any period of study of Corinth or any other city in Greece, because he's the only author who actually wrote this sort of guide and had it survive. So if you're looking, for example, at the classical agora, you also need to use him as a touchstone because he is so systematic and so descriptive. He's also important as a jumping off point for late antiquity, however, because he represents this concentration of information and writing about both the past and the present that is happening in the second century. That is this era that we call the second sophistic, the second era of sophists, of learned writers, especially in Greek, but also in Latin, about the world,

basically, and about history, but also about literature of the past. Also, it's important to start with him because he says, this is a temple dedicated to Dionysus. This is a temple dedicated to Apollo. So in the case, for example, of the monumental temple, the Doric temple that I mentioned, he's really the kicker for scholars of classical Corinth and scholars of late antique Corinth, saying this temple was identified as a temple dedicated to Apollo in the second century. And therefore, when we come to Christian Corinth, when we come to the building of churches, to the renovation of the agora of the central area, we can say this is the agora,

this is the Roman Forum, this is the Temple of Apollo. We can give names to these areas which otherwise would remain hotly contested. Well there you go, Pausanias the invaluable source. And let's then keep on Pausanias as we delve into this first area where it seems Corinth experienced some significant transformation, and that's in regards to the administration of Corinth. I mean, Amelia, first of all, Pausanias, he does tell us quite a bit about how Corinth was managed. Yes, he does. He notes the Boulaterion, the site of the local senate or bule in Greek. This was set up by the Roman colonial administration when Corinth was refounded as a colony in the first century BC. But he also mentions this

massive basilica, which we now call the Julian Basilica because it had a statue of Julius Caesar in it. And it also had other members of the Julian family. It had massive statues of Augustus and his poor grandsons, Gaius and Lucius. It also rose above the east side of the Forum or Agora in a really grand fashion. So Pausanias tells us not just about the local civic administration, but he tells us about that imperial administration too, that there's a governor and that that governor administers from the big apse of the Julian Basilica, that that's the most important building on the forum. But then he lists other basilicas, which we can connect with archaeology. So we can see these administrative buildings.

And he talks about the theater too, that wonderful massive Greek theater on the natural slope of Corinth, which had been first paved with stone seating, probably in the fourth century BC, but which was still in active use under the Roman Empire, had had a massive stage building built and had a lot of monuments in and around it, which Pausanias was excited to point out. And so it begs the question then, Amelia, as we get to late antiquity, how does the whole administration, the whole running of Corinth, how does it change? Well, the biggest change is in the rise to authority of the Bishop of Corinth. And he has a really important role to play, not just in the city, but in the wider actual province of Greece,

because the church hierarchy is modelled directly upon the Roman provincial landscape of the Roman Empire. And that means that wherever there is a governor, that bishop is also the metropolitan bishop, the bishop with authority over the clerics, priests, or bishops of the other cities in that province. So this goes from being actually an illegal position, someone who can be persecuted, in fact, often is executed by the Roman civic authorities in the third century. In the fourth century, then suddenly the bishop is a valued part of the Roman imperial hierarchy. He's got equal status in a way to the consul, the pro-consul of Achaia, the governor of Greece. And so in the fourth century, we see the bishop and the governor slowly staking out different areas of authority.

We think that the bishop probably administered at first from his house, from his house church, at first from his house, from his house church, somewhere in the vicinity of the Forum, and the governor continued to use the Julian Basilica. But in the late 4th century, there were a series of earthquakes and also barbarian invasions. The Goths, in particular under Alaric, were actually invited to Corinth by the governor of Achaia, maybe because he was getting some kickbacks from their piratical raids on the countryside, and maybe because he expected a promotion up to Constantinople. So that means that there's a lot of destruction and debris in and around the forum and the public buildings in the late 4th and early 5th centuries. And then there is also a corresponding rise in status of the bishop in the 5th century and a diminution of status of

the governor of Greece in the 5th century. So we think by the 6th century, basically, there's a much more military role for the governor, much less administration. And the city council, that bule or senate, the curia, they are actually added on to the clergy of the bishop to make a new city council of which the bishop is the head. This happens not just at Corinth, but it's enshrined in Roman law. You can find laws about it in the Justinianic Codex, that in every city the bishop shall be the head of the city council, and he shall work closely with the treasurer, the kind of money man, Logophetis, and he also shall work closely with the pater, the father of the city,

who generally is kind of the most wealthy local landowner. And then their council shall be composed of both the clergy and the landowners. And so this is a pretty dramatic change in the city, almost to a church-state hybrid. And it's been compared with some of the theocratic cities of, for example, Babylon or even Jerusalem in this transformation that happens across the Roman Empire, which had not been present before. I mean, Amelia, that's really, really interesting. So from what you're saying, to be a prominent figure in Corinth at this time, it's almost as if you had to be a member of the clergy. It does become more and more like that, yes. We see in the 4th century through the epitaphs and also through the honorific statue bases that are put up that there are still members of the local

elite who are imperial officials but are not part of the clergy. And then in the 5th and the 6th century, more and more of those local elites do take on some sort of clerical role, whether by true spiritual choice or because that is the way to retain power and status in the city. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict we've got the classics understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in potsdam was really stalin saying yeah tell me something i don't know the unexpected and it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair.

And the never ending. So arguably every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history. We've talked about the administration. There seems to be some continuity, but also quite a bit of significant change, as we've mentioned. Let's now talk about a different type of building where we see much starker, more heavy handed changes. And Amelia, this is perhaps most significant of all because these are the iconic entertainment buildings of ancient Greece. Yes, that's right. Theatres, stadiums, amph amphitheaters, hippodromes or circuses.

These are the buildings that are specifically developed in ancient Greece for the first time to provide areas for spectators at massive spectacles, at spectacles of drama, of tragedy and comedy, at spectacles of horse racing and athletics, competition on a large scale, which we now again enjoy in Australia, in America, even in the UK, but which were to come to a sudden dramatic and catastrophic end under Christian rule of the Roman Empire. So at Corinth, that meant that all the seating and the stage building of the theater was chopped up and used for fortification wall building. All of the iconic buildings of the Sanctuary of Poseidon on the Isthmus, the site of the location of the Isthian Games, one of the Panhellenic festivals, not just the theater and the stadium, but even the Temple of Poseidon itself also pulled up and built into a trans-Isthian wall, a massive wall, which we call the Hexamillium, the six-mile-long wall across the isthmus. So these buildings were put to this really brutal reuse, whole seating blocks just carted off. And it meant that if athletics was to continue in any way, if horse racing or chariot racing was to take place, that it would have to be just on the bare

ground. It would have to be temporary stalls or something like a church fair that would be the background for it. And this happened not just at Corinth, but all across the Eastern and Western Roman Empire. And the only places really where any sort of spectacle buildings or entertainment venues survived were in Constantinople as part of the imperial court ceremonial that continued in the hippodrome of Constantinople, which is still preserved to a certain extent today. small-scale performance, very small-scale athletics, and then the larger-scale athletics and horse racing, that would be a kind of pick-me-up, a sideshow at the church fairs that came to dominate the calendar and replace the festivals for the gods and goddesses and even emperors. These were displaced by the festivals for the saints. And at Corinth, that was St. Peter and St. Paul at the end of June, which became the kind of Christian Panegyri. This is such a big change in Corinth, Amelia, and it begs the question, it begs the big debate, why?

Yes, well, at its very most basic level, it comes down to religion and money. It's cheaper if you're going to build walls to do it out of blocks of stone which are nearby, rather than quarrying new ones. in charge of fortifying the city against the barbarian threat, against the threat from the sea and from the land, that threat that had been kept at arm's length by the Roman army, but which now is right here in the city, that if we're going to defeat that threat, if we're going to defend ourselves against that threat, and if the person in charge is a Christian bishop, or even a Christian imperial official, like Victorinus, the official of Justinian, whose name is carved on the inscriptions of the Hexamillian. That person is going to reuse the pagan venues, the venues of the old Greeks, the Elinace of the past, the polytheists, as we might call them, less negatively, but they certainly saw it negatively

that these were places of sin where gods were worshipped, idols of gods were worshipped, where blood had been spilled in gladiatorial combat, because these were venues of not just Greek traditional performances, but of Roman spectacles too, where animals had hunted people, had hunted criminals, had hunted Christians as criminals to death. All of these things meant that first you have a sort of replacement happening of the festivals, the aspects of the festivals that were most odious to the Christians. So you first have the elimination of things like gladiatorial combat and the elimination of blood sacrifice to statues of gods and goddesses, and the least odious parts, the least offensive parts to Christians, like horse racing, for example, which everyone could

agree they enjoyed. Those things, they last the longest. The hunts in the theater of Corinth were still going on in the fourth century, and they were very popular to watch acrobatic hunters mock hunt trained bears, for example, for the entertainment of the people at imperial birthdays, right? So that was considered fairly neutral in Christian terms. You could have acrobats and hunters, and that was what was painted actually on the inside wall of the theater at Corinth. There's some spectacular paintings that were found when it was first excavated of these hunters and their trained bears and even some big cats like lions or tigers, which probably would have been chained up otherwise in cages. But they certainly wouldn't have killed them during these spectacles because they weren't exactly, you know,

cheap. And Argos and Corinth had disputes over the money for these spectacles, which we can see being moderated in the letters of Emperor Julian. He wanted to favour the Greek cities, in particular Athens and Corinth, but he was also caught up in these more local rivalries around the staging of imperial spectacles. There you go, those local rivalries, they endure into late antiquity, don't they? Yes, they sure do. That is super interesting particularly how you see some entertainment buildings they seem to last a little bit longer

because of what's associated with them if we move across then from entertainment buildings to another piece of architecture shall we say art in ancient Corinth that we know there was a lot of visible throughout the city and And this is also affected because, Amelia, this is sculpture. That's right. And that's what actually got me into this area of research in the first place, was the incredible body of sculpture. You can see on the cover of the paperback of my book, this grumpy looking old priest and his head along with two other heads were found in the Pyrenee Fountain Spring. And they had obviously been rescued, but they had also been separated from their bodies, their bodies likely going into this construction of walls or melted down for lime, and the heads perhaps preserved, but more likely cursed or

consigned, let's say, to the watery dark depths so that they might not curse the Christians. One of them was marked on his forehead with a cross, and we see this cross marking, especially on the forehead, the eyes, the mouth, the active parts of statuary all over the eastern Mediterranean, at Sparta, at Argos, at Athens, at Ephesus. In Egypt, it's an iconoclastic step which leads from cross-marking to the defeat of any sort of spirit, whether of a person or a god, that might lurk within the statue and which ends up with widespread decapitation of statuary, the marble statuary that used to stand all over the cities of the whole eastern Mediterranean. Even in the west, it caught on around the Mediterranean where there were honorific portraits of local grandees, portraits of the governor and the local elites, but there were also incredibly widespread imperial portraiture. Justinian and Theodora for the imperial Christian couple par excellence. It's still on this kind of

median space because they have halos in the mosaics in Ravenna and their portraits. We know their sculptural portraits that stood in both Ravenna, Milan, and in Constantinople, as well as undoubtedly more widely. Those are idealized figures. In the case of Justinian, he's up on a column high in the air. Again, he's got an orb and a cross and he's got a halo and he was definitely not being depicted as a man. And of course, we also had lots of just honest to goodness, divine sculpture everywhere in this world, not just around the Mediterranean, but up in London, there were many temples, big and small, that had cult statues in them and also had votive statues that had been dedicated to the god or goddess who was thought to reside in the temple. So all this

statuary is targeted for destruction, except under very rare circumstances in the 5th and 6th centuries. Absolutely, Amelia. I mean, I might ask why, but it seems quite interesting how all of the decapitated statues across the eastern Mediterranean, some of them have, let's say, Christian graffiti edged onto them. Why do we think all of this sculpture across the Roman world was destroyed so suddenly at this period of time? Well, here it really is a religious thing. I mean, it doesn't have anything to do, in my opinion, with economics. It is solely about the Christian church becoming powerful and dominant in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, with them having the support of the Roman emperors and the legal system, and therefore to form mobs to tear

down the statuary. Now, statuary in some places we know was torn down specifically because it was thought to have demons inside of it, whether it had originally been a portrait of a human or a divine statue. There are literary sources talking about demons that live in the statues that will get you if the statue is not destroyed. But it was also destroyed for the reason of the Ten Commandments, Second Commandment, that you shall make no idols or graven images, this in Greek, in the Septuagint, and in the Latin translation of the Vulgate and actually the Prevulgate, this was interpreted to mean sculpture in the round. So any sort of image of a god or goddess had to go, but so did also any sort of image in the round. Saints, and even

as time went on, emperors, empresses, you know, people who could afford portraits, it would always be flat. It would be two-dimensional, either in mosaic or in fresco, in stucco or in relief carved in stone. There was a move away across the whole Roman Empire from the very idea of creating or even having around a three-dimensional image of the human form. And that just accelerated with Islam and its iconoclastic tendencies and inheritance from Judaism and Christianity. Now, before we head on, I just want to bring up something that I think is really, really interesting, and it's related to what we were talking about here,

because you mentioned how some of these heads, they're thrown down drains. Some of them are placed under the feet of people, so they're walking over them. What is so interesting is that we can see these parallels. At other times in history, we're going to Merui we're going to the kingdom of Kush a few centuries earlier I was fortunate enough to interview someone a few months back about this where we see during a Kushite campaign against the Romans they

sack a Roman city in southern Egypt they cut off the head of Augustus and they put it in the entranceway I believe of a temple or tomb cannot remember which, but basically so that they just then walk over the head as this symbol of dominance, that they've succeeded, that they're more powerful than this figure. And is it the same with the Christians at this time in late antiquity? They're now walking over these pagan heads and they're showing their dominance. Yes, they absolutely are. And I'm glad you brought up Meroe, because there's some wonderful examples also in that kingdom in Nubia, in ancient Nubia, of battles between the Nubians and the Egyptians in the Archaic era, where wholesale groups of pharaohs' portraits are actually thrown down and built into the floor of the newer temple. So it's even pre-Augustus,

I think this was back in the 6th century BC, that there was a whole lot of pharaoh statues that had that done to them too. In Archaeology Magazine, there was something about that. And so this is the case as well with the Christians. And at Corinth in particular, I published an article in the journal Hesperia about one of these portraits of a governor of Greece, actually.

He's wearing the uniform of office. He's got this very important crossbow fibula on his shoulder. He's got his belt of office and the buckle, which was also given you when you took up imperial office. also given you when you took up imperial office, but he has been cut into a door threshold block, face down, head cut off, and a door mounted upon his back so that the Corinthians could move from the baptistry to the narthex of a building that we now call the Cranion Basilica. This is a great Christian basilica, which was built by a local Corinthian benefactor, maybe the Bishop of Corinth, we're not really sure. But it was built at the cemetery, the Eastern Cemetery of Corinth, where Diogenes the Cynic had his tomb, where Lys, the famous courtesan, had her tomb. So this is a very old cemetery. But just like in Rome with St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican, this existing cemetery is Christianized and a

great big basilica church is built there. And among the many different pieces of stone that are reused is this governor's portrait statue statue full-length portrait statue from head to toe placed face down as a door threshold to be stepped on daily as whoever was being baptized would go in and out of the baptistry from the narthex of the church i love those historical parallels absolutely extraordinary if we then go back to Corinth quickly. So it sounds like only the Christian sculpture really is spared. Only the Christian sculpture remains. So Amelia, that instantly brings my mind to, I believe it's the patron goddess of Corinth, Aphrodite. Even her sculptures, even they are not spared.

No, no, they aren't. And they're particularly targeted for beheading, for the limbs to be taken off. There were many nude statues of Aphrodite. Corinth was not the first city to have a fully nude portrait. That distinction belonged to Canidos. But Corinth did have a partly nude statue of Aphrodite, armed Aphrodite of Acrocorinth, who has many copies extant. The best known copy is the Venus de Milo, now in the Louvre, but from the island of Milos. Anyway, her statue from Acrocorinth was destroyed so thoroughly that there's no trace of it on Acrocorinth. In fact, there's no trace of her statuary at all on Acrocorinth. There are a few of her small statuettes, a few images of her in frescoes that survive from the lower city, from the city center of Corinth. But up on Acrocorinth, on the very

height of what was the Acropolis of Corinth, the entire temple of Aphrodite, patron goddess of the city, was replaced with a church. So all of the architectural blocks of the whole temple, the church. So all of the architectural blocks of the whole temple torn down, repurposed into a church in the 6th century, we think, possibly by the local bishop who carved his name on one of the columns of that structure. But that church was a very bold statement of replacement and superseding the cult of the goddess. And it would have been visible as the temple previously had been, not just from the city itself down below, but also from ships out at sea from the eastern and western approaches. It would have been a really notable statement. And then there was also a massive Christian basilica built at the Lekion Harbor and a somewhat smaller one at the

Kencrian Harbor, the eastern harbor. So these are both churches that would also greet the traveler. As soon as you got off the boat, you would encounter a really large church right at the waterfront, both harbors of Corinth, and in both cases replacing previous sanctuaries of Aphrodite, and in both cases replacing previous sanctuaries of Aphrodite, a notable grove of Aphrodite at Lecyon at the western harbor and a notable sanctuary of Aphrodite and Isis at the eastern harbor of Cancrii, which is the place that Apuleius set the climax of his second sophistic novel, The Golden Ass or The Metamorphoses. So we know that both the one on Akkrokorinth and the sanctuaries at the eastern and western harbors, these were really important, essential sanctuaries for the identity and history of the city.

The connection with literature and identity couldn't be more striking. And they were all three replaced with Christian basilica churches in the 6th century. Well we'll definitely get on the Lekion Basilica as a focus in a second but outside of Corinth and outside of the Acro-Corinth then Amelia that's really striking do we see elsewhere in the empire temples particularly prominent temples like the Temple of Aphrodite on top of the Acrocorath, being directly replaced with churches? We do. We see this very widely. And again, this is an area of scholarship where there's a lot of debate whether this replacement of temples by churches happened right away or after some lapse of time. So whether these temples had been abandoned in the second or third or fourth

century, and whether the church maybe didn't get built till the fifth or sixth century, you know, we talk about centuries like it's, you know, every day, but look around and even a building that's been a ruin for 50 years is in a pretty bad state and might, you know, not be suitable for doing anything else other than demolishing and replacing with something new. On the other hand, I'm in favor of the argument that the temples retained civic importance and spiritual importance into the fourth century in most cities and even into the fifth century in some places. And so I don't see there being a very long lapse time between deconsecration, removal of the statue, destruction of iconography of the human form, and the taking

up of the building with minimal intervention often as a church, or with maximal intervention, the tearing down of the entire temple and then the reuse of its architectural members for the construction of a church on or near that site. Well, let's go into Corinth proper then once more. And you mentioned it just then, the Lacaion Basilica, because Amelia, of all the churches that are constructed in Corinth at this time, this seems to be the pinnacle. This is the big one. Yes, this is really the big one. The ones up on Acrocorinth and in the Cranion Cemetery and the other cemetery basilicas, the other old cemeteries, even the one at

Cancria at the eastern port, they're all normal size, right? They're similar size to the Christian basilica churches that are being built all over Greece and all over the Mediterranean world, even all over Northern Europe and the Middle East. They're normal size churches. There's almost a standard, you know, there is flat pack, right, that's going out around the Mediterranean of columns and capitals. But the Lechion Basilica is something different. It's something special. It is really massive. It's the biggest church built in Greece in late antiquity. Its size would not be equaled in Greece, I think, until the construction of the Church of St. Andrew

in Patras in the 19th or early 20th century, the new Church of St. Andrew. It is the length of about two football fields, if you add up not just the actual church building, the basilica with the five aisles instead of the usual three, but there's also the narthex and then the exonarthex, and then there's an atrium that also stretches away to the west of this really massive, massive church complex. And high, it would have also been a lot higher than your average basilica. It may have had a dome over the apse area. So it compares in its scale to imperial and specifically Justinianic benefactions. The Church of St. John at Ephesus, for example,

that actually has the monograms of Justinian and Theodora on the column capitals, and was a similar kind of hybrid form. It compares with the massive old St. Peter's and old St. Paul outside the walls at Rome, and St. John Lateran, these massive basilicas that had been put up by Constantine and his sons to consecrate the old imperial capital as a Christian capital. So the most telling thing about it, though, is that the stone used for the columns and the capitals is brand new. It's freshly quarried from the islands on the Sea of Marmara, the Proconisos island, just outside of Constantinople in the Sea of Marmara, between the Bosporus and the Hellespont. This is very distinctive marble, blue and white veined, and brand new quarrying. So this was sent

from, if not Justinian, at least from a Constantinopolitan quarry, from an imperial quarry, from an imperial patronage that is meant to create a massive statement about the Christianity of Corinth and about the status of the Bishop of Corinth, who's going to conduct services there. Quite a picture to imagine indeed, Amelia. Amelia, this has been a brilliant chat. I mean, last thing, your book is called? It's called Corinth in Late Antiquity, a Greek, Roman and Christian city. It's available from Bloomsbury Academic in both paperback and electronic versions. Fantastic. Amelia, thanks so much for coming on the show. You're welcome. Thank you for having me on the show, Tristan. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова