CORDOVA—CORINTH 25,857 cattle, 214,908 slieep, 61,703 goats, and 54,668 pigs. About 365,000 acres are covered with wheat crops, 228,200 with barley, 50,820 with rye, 62,810 with oats, 36,357 with chick peas, 12,635 with vines, 482,495 with olives. QO I'd OVa, the capital of the above province, had a population of 55,615 in 1887, and 55,506 in 1897. The township includes a very extensive territory outside the city proper; in fact, 310,000 acres of area, studded with factories of alcohol, hats, woollen stuffs, and silversmiths’ works. The famous leather manufactures have decayed, though some good imitations of the old style are to be met with. Within the area of the town there are lovely gardens, plantations, orange, olive, and lemon groves, and pastures where popular and famed breeds of bulls for the national sport are reared, Cordova being celebrated for its school of bull-fighters. There are many modern public buildings and useful institutions, secondary and primary schools, a school founded in 1590 by the Bishop Pacheco of Cordova for girls, who take the same degrees as the other sex, a school of veterinaries, an academy of sciences, fine arts, and letters, polytechnic school, and an athenaeum. Corea.. See Korea. Corfu. See Greece (Ionian Islands). Corinth.—The modern town of New Corinth, capital of an arrondissement in the province of Argolis and Corinth, Greece, is situated on the isthmus of Corinth, near the Bay of Lepanto, Greece, about 3| miles from the site of the ancient city, at the junction of two railway lines, 57 miles west of Athens and 87 east-south-east of Patras, with which there is also frequent communication by steamer. With the opening of the Corinthian Ship Canal in 1893 its prosperity has somewhat revived. The chief exports are raisins, corn, oil, and silk. Population, 4100. Corinth, after passing through its various stages called Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Turkish, survived until 1858 as one of the most considerable towns of Greece, when it was, with the exception of a few houses, levelled to the ground by an earthquake, and New Corinth, a city with broad streets but no old traditions, was founded. A mere handful of the old population remained on the old site, which was marked out for continuous occupation by flowing water and fertile fields. At present a picturesque but poverty-stricken village of somewhat over 1000 inhabitants, mostly of Albanian descent, holds its place among the ruins of former days, and bears the name of Old Corinth. Its most picturesque features are its one gigantic plane tree nourished by the water of Pirene, shading nearly all of the public square, its venerable temple ruin, and AcroCorinth rising above the village to a height of nearly two thousand feet. The view even from the village, over the Corinthian Gulf, of Parnassus with its giant neighbours on the north, of Cyllene and its neighbours on the west, and of Geraneia on the east, is very fine; but from Acro-Corinth the view is still finer, and is perhaps unsurpassed by any in Greece. Such were the attractions and the features of Corinth known to those who visited it before 1896. The excavations begun in that year by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, under the direction of Mr Rufus B. Richardson, have in each succeeding year brought to light important monuments of the ancient . city, both of Roman and of Greek times. The archaso outlook at the outset was not nopeiul. in logical dis- the first place, the long and continuous occupacoverles. ^on jq appear probable that the slow and remorseless wear of ages had done much more than the destruction of Mummius to obliterate the traces
247
of the ancient monuments; secondly, although there was one landmark of the old Greek city, namely, the old temple ruin, there was no certainty what one of the temples mentioned by Pausanias this was. In fact, by a perverse error, which one topographer after another had handed along, the wrong name of Athena Chalinitis was quite commonly applied to it. The current topography of Corinth was simply a web of conjecture, which gained nothing from the fact that one great name after another wTas added to the list of its vouchers. The great object to be attained by excavations was the locating of the agora; first, because Pausanias says that most of the important monuments of the city were in and near the agora; and secondly, because he could only thus be used as a guide and authority. As he mentions the monuments in order along the streets radiating from the agora, when the starting-point was once gained, one could hope to identify any foundations found along their various lines. One unsuccessful attempt to locate the agora by excavation had already been made. In the first year’s work of the American School twentyone trial trenches from 10 to 20 feet deep, of varying lengths and scattered over a wide area, were dug, in the hope of finding, if not the agora itself, something which would give a clue that might lead up to the agora. The work was successful. Near the close of the campaign, somewhat less than a quarter of a mile to the north-west of the temple ruin, on the edge of a terrace, the theatre was found. This discovery laid the cornerstone of the topography of Corinth; for the theatre was, according to Pausanias, on the street leading from the agora towards Sicyon, and so to the west of the agora. Another trench, dug across the valley to the east of the temple, revealed a broad pavement of white limestone, extending from the north up the valley towards AcroCorinth. This was clearly one of the great thoroughfares of the city, and so probably the street mentioned by Pausanias as leading from Lechaeum up to the agora. It was already as good as certain that, by following up this pavement until it was intersected by a line coming from Sicyon past the theatre, one would find oneself in the agora. Even before the agora was found, the temple seemed to take its place as the temple of Apollo, mentioned by Pausanias as “the first monument on your right as you go out of the agora on the street leading towards Sicyon.” The limestone pavement yielded in the following year all that it had promised. It was soon seen to end in a flight of thirty-seven marble steps, in their present form of a late date, which lead up to the propylaea of the agora, the buttresses of which are well preserved and agree with the form of a Roman triumphal arch, a form given to the propylaea on the coins of imperial times from Domitian to Commodus. To the east of the staircase and close up against the agora itself, only at a much lower level, was found, buried under 35 feet of earth, the famous fountain, Pirene, tallying exactly with the description of Pausanias, as “a series of chambers resembling grottoes, and bearing a facade of white marble.” This two-storey facade of porous stone, with arches opening into the chambers, belonged to the Roman city; and before the time of Pausanias, had received a facing of marble, which has now fallen off but has left traces of itself in the holes by which it was attached and in cartloads of chips which lay in front of the facade. This was not, however, the first form of Pirene. It was built up in front of a more simple Greek facade, which consisted of seven cross walls supporting a conglomerate stratum, and forming six chambers, whose only ornamentation was antae at the front end of the cross walls, and on
