The life and work of St. Paul

314 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL.
have beheld its famed Acropolis, he never felt the smallest inclination to enter
it again. This was his only recorded experience of intercourse with the
Gentile Pharisaism of a pompons philosophy. There was more hope of raging
Jews, more hope of ignorant barbarians, more hope of degraded slaves, than of
those who had become fools because in their own conceit they wore exceptionally
wise ; who were alienated by a spiritual ignorance born of moral blindness ;
who, because conscience had lost its power over them, had become vain in their
imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
He sailed to Corinth, the then capital of Southern Greece, which formed
the Roman province of Achaia. The poverty of his condition, the desire to
waste no time, the greatness of his own infirmities, render it nearly certain
that he did not make his way over those forty miles of road which separate
Athens from Corinth, and which would have led him through Eleusis and
Megara, but that he sailed direct, in about five hours, across the Saronic bay,
and dropped anchor under the low green hills and pine-woods of Cenchreae.
Thence he made his way on foot along the valley of Hexamili, a distance of
some eight miles, to the city nestling under the huge mass of its rocky citadel.
Under the shadow of that Acrocorinthus, which darkened alternately its double
seas, 1 it was destined that St. Paul should spend nearly two busy years
eventful life.
of hia
It was not the ancient Corinth the Corinth of Periander, or of Thucydides,
or of Tiinoleon that ho was now entering, but Colonis Julia, or Laus Juli
When
Corinthus, which had risen out of the desolate ruins of the older city.
the Hegemony had passed from Sparta and Athens, Corinth occupied their
place, and as the leader of the Achaean league she was regarded as the light
nnd glory of Greece. Flamininus, when the battle of Cynoscephalae had
destroyed the hopes of Philip, proclaimed at Corinth the independence of
Hellas. 2 But when the city was taken by L. Mummius, B.C. 146, its inhabi-
tants had been massacred, its treasures carried off to adorn the triumph of the
conqueror, and the city itself devastated and destroyed. For a hundred years
it lay in total ruin, and then Julius Caesar, keenly alive to the beauty and
importance of its position, and desiring to call attention to the goddess for
whose worship it had been famous, and whoso descendant he professed to be,
rebuilt it from its foundations, and peopled it with a colony of veterans and
freedmen. 8
It sprang almost instantly into fame and wealth. Standing on the bridge
of the double sea, its two harbours Lechaeum on the Corinthian and Cenchreae
m the Saronic Gulf instantly attracted the commerce of the east and west.
The Diolkos, or laud-channel, over which ships could be dragged across the
Isthmus, was in constant use, because it saved voyagers from the circum-
navigation of the dreaded promontory of Malea.4 Jews with a keen eye to
i s
Stat. Theb. vii. 106.
B.C. 196.
* B.C. 44. Pausan. ii. 1, 8 ; Plut. Caes. 57 ; Strabo viii. 6.
/
*
Cape Matapan. The Greeks had a proverb, MoAe'oj irtpurMtov ri\o0ow rav ooc3 M
r might say, "Before sailing round Malea, make your will" (Strab. riii. p. 368).
"Formidatum Maleae caput" (Stat. Theb. ii. 33).