Corinth

The Greek name of the city, Kórinthos, the wealthy city of the Isthmus, sacred to Aphrodite and notorious for its luxury. The name is not Greek but pre-Greek, inherited by the Greek inhabitants from the older population of the land, and it wears its antiquity in its sound: the cluster -nth- is one of the small set of pre-Greek markers, with the -mp- of Ólympos and the -ss- of Parnassós, that philologists read as the fingerprint of the substrate language spoken in the Aegean before Greek.

Kórinthos is the head of the family and the source of every later form. It belongs to the same class of names as the great Anatolian-coast cities, Éphesos and Mílētos, pre-Greek words that the Greeks took over with the places, and like them it carries no Greek meaning anyone could recover. The city built a brilliantly Greek history on a name that was never Greek at all, the most cosmopolitan of Greek cities bearing, at its root, a word from the people the Greeks displaced.

The Latin name of the city, Corinthus, taken from the Greek, the name of the place Rome first destroyed and then rebuilt. Lucius Mummius razed Corinth to the ground in 146 BCE in an act of calculated terror, and for a hundred years the site lay empty; then Julius Caesar planted a colony there, and Roman Corinth rose again as the capital of Achaia and one of the great cities of the Greek east.

Corinthus is the Greek name in Roman form, and it carries the city’s reputation as well as its name. Corinthian bronze, Corinthian columns, and the proverb of the city’s costly pleasures all came into Latin with the word; Cicero could call Corinth “the light of all Greece” even as he recalled its destruction. Through the Latin the name reached the modern languages, so that the city of the Isthmus is “Corinth” still, the pre-Greek word carried west by way of Rome.

The Syriac name of the city, Qurintos, taken from the Greek of the New Testament, where Corinth is the seat of one of the most vivid of the early churches. The Peshitta opens the first letter “to the church of God which is at Corinth,” and the long, quarrelsome correspondence of Paul with the Corinthians, on factions and lawsuits and the resurrection and love, made the city’s name familiar throughout the Syriac-reading world.

Qurintos reached Syriac, like Atēnos and Efesos, straight from the Greek of Acts and the Epistles, the scriptural road by which so many Greek city-names entered the eastern church. It is the city of Aphrodite named in the language of the monks, the worldly Greek port remembered in Syriac chiefly as a congregation Paul scolded and loved; the same name that meant luxury to the Greeks meant, to the Syriac church, a community of the faithful and the founding letters of Christian practice.