Corinth

Corinth was a wealthy city on the narrow isthmus that joins the Peloponnese to central Greece. In myth it was the kingdom of Sisyphus, the home of Bellerophon and the winged horse Pegasus, the place where the Isthmian Games were founded, and the city where Jason abandoned Medea. Its early history is told in several rival versions, with different founders and different names for the city.

Founders and Early Names

Pausanias (2.1.1) says that the Corinthians themselves called their founder Corinthus a son of Zeus, but that he never heard anyone else say so seriously. He cites instead the old Corinthian poet Eumelus: Ephyra, a daughter of Oceanus, was the first to live in the land, which was called Ephyraea after her. Later Marathon, a son of Epopeus and a great-grandson of Helios, divided his kingdom between his sons Sicyon and Corinthus, and the land of Ephyra took the name Corinthia from Corinthus (Pausanias 2.1.1; 2.3.10). Apollodorus (1.9.3) gives another origin: Sisyphus, son of Aeolus, founded Ephyra, “which is now called Corinth”, and married Merope, daughter of Atlas. In the Iliad (6.152–155) Glaucus describes Ephyre as a city in the heart of horse-pasturing Argos where Sisyphus, the craftiest of men, once lived; in the Catalogue of Ships “wealthy Corinth” is one of the towns of Agamemnon’s kingdom of Mycenae (Iliad 2.569–570), which is why its men fought under him at Troy.

Poseidon and Helios

Pausanias (2.1.6) records that Poseidon and Helios once disputed the land. Briareos judged between them and gave the Isthmus and the land beside it to Poseidon, and the height above the city, the Acrocorinth, to Helios. According to Eumelus, Helios gave the Asopian land to Aloeus and Ephyraea to Aeetes, who left it in the keeping of Bunus, son of Hermes, when he went away to Colchis (Pausanias 2.3.10).

Sisyphus

Sisyphus is the best known of the kings of Corinth. Apollodorus (1.9.3) says that he was punished in the underworld for revealing one of Zeus’ secrets: he told the river-god Asopus that Zeus had carried off his daughter Aegina. His punishment, as Odysseus sees it in the Odyssey (11.593–600), is to push a great stone up a hill with both hands, only for it to roll back down each time he nears the top. Pausanias (2.2.2) adds that Sisyphus was buried on the Isthmus, but that even in his own day few Corinthians knew where the grave lay. Through his son Glaucus, Sisyphus was the grandfather of Bellerophon (Iliad 6.154–155).

Melicertes and the Isthmian Games

The Isthmian Games, one of the four great festivals of Greece, were traced to Sisyphus. When Ino leapt into the sea with her son Melicertes, the boy’s body was carried to the Isthmus by a dolphin; Sisyphus found it, buried it there, and founded the games in his honour (Pausanias 2.1.3; Apollodorus 3.4.3). Melicertes was afterwards worshipped under the name Palaemon, and his sanctuary stood beside the temple of Poseidon on the Isthmus (Pausanias 2.2.1).

Bellerophon and Pegasus

Bellerophon was sent by Proetus to Lycia, where he was set the task of killing the Chimaera, fighting the Solymi and defeating the Amazons, as his grandson Glaucus recounts in the Iliad (6.155–195). Proetus had sent him there because his wife Anteia had falsely accused Bellerophon of trying to seduce her. In the end, Glaucus says, Bellerophon came to be hated by all the gods and wandered alone over the Aleian plain (6.200–202).

The winged horse belongs to the Corinthian part of his story. Pindar, in an ode for a Corinthian victor (Olympian 13.63–92), tells how Bellerophon suffered greatly trying to harness Pegasus beside the spring of Peirene, until Athena brought him in a dream a bridle with golden cheek-pieces and told him to sacrifice a white bull to Poseidon; he woke to find the bridle beside him and tamed the horse. Pausanias (2.4.1) likewise says that Athena helped Bellerophon more than any other god and gave him Pegasus, having broken him in herself. Pausanias also tells (2.3.2–3) that Peirene was a woman who wept for her son Cenchrias, whom Artemis had accidentally killed, until she became a spring.

Jason and Medea

After the Argonauts won the Golden Fleece with Medea’s help, Jason and Medea came to Corinth. According to Apollodorus (1.9.28) they lived there happily for ten years, until Jason put Medea aside and married Glauce, the daughter of King Creon; Medea sent the bride a poisoned robe, Glauce and her father died, and Medea killed her own children, Mermerus and Pheres, before escaping to Athens in a chariot drawn by winged dragons that Helios gave her. The Corinthians showed the Well of Glauce, into which she was said to have thrown herself to wash off Medea’s drugs (Pausanias 2.3.6). This is the story of Euripides’ tragedy Medea, which is set at Corinth. The Corinthians told it differently. Eumelus, as Pausanias reports (2.3.10–11), said that the Corinthians sent for Medea from Iolcus and gave her the kingdom as the heir of Aeetes, so that Jason ruled as her husband; when Jason found her hiding their new-born children in the sanctuary of Hera in the hope of making them immortal, he sailed away to Iolcus, and Medea left too, handing the kingdom to Sisyphus. Local tradition also held that Medea’s children were stoned to death by the Corinthians because of the gifts they had carried to Glauce, and that yearly rites were paid to them at their tomb by the Odeum (2.3.6–7).

See Also: Sisyphus, Helios, Poseidon, Bellerophon, Pegasus, Melicertes, Jason, Medea