A Week in the Life of Corinth

Ben Witherington III

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780830866991
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Ben Witherington III attempts to reenchant our reading of Paul in this creative reconstruction of ancient Corinth. Following a fictitious Corinthian man named Nicanor through an eventful week of business dealings and conflict, you will encounter life at various levels of Roman society--eventually meeting Paul himself and gaining entrance into the Christian community there. The result is an unforgettable introduction to life in a major center of the New Testament world. Numerous full-page text boxes expand on a variety of aspects of life and culture as we encounter them in the narrative.

1

Poseidon’s Revenge

The late winter sun was already warming the chilly Mediterranean air as the ship approached the harbor on the incoming tide. You could just make out the very top of the Acro-Corinth, the ancient acropolis where the temple of Aphrodite stood, towering over the city and majestically rising above the morning mist. The captain had offered the morning sacrifice, a young sea bird caught at dawn, and the auspices were propitious. All hands were on deck, carrying out their orchestrated tasks as the captain bellowed orders. And the passengers did their best to stay clear of the action.

Nicanor had seen enough sea voyages for a while. His poor stomach felt like it had swallowed half the Adriatic Sea, which he had just crossed on his way back from Roma. He had fallen into a pattern of only eating later in the day from the stock of dried fish he had brought with him from Roma. He was regretting his spare diet. Next time he would bring a slave to do the dirty work of cooking and cleaning instead of trying to economize.

Figure 1.1. The Mediterranean world of first-century Corinth

No wonder his former master and present employer, Eras­tos, had sent him, rather than going himself to transact this business deal. Besides, no one should have to sail the Adriatic in the first week of Februarius, not even former slaves. The fact that it was Dies Lunae, the Moon’s Day (that is, Monday), reminded Nicanor of the effect of the moon on the tides. This was not the first time he had acted as the “agent” of Erastos, and doubtless it would not be the last. But next time he would remember to ask that tasks like this be undertaken during the proper sailing season, after the middle of the month of Mars and before the end of the year, when the weather changed. Despite his queasiness, a smile crept across Nicanor’s face when he thought of his success in bargaining for additional Carrera marble for the building project Erastos had undertaken. This was strategic in Erastos’s plan to procure the office of aedile in Corinth.

A CLOSER LOOK

Slaves and Manumission

The Roman Empire was not merely dependent on slave labor, it was largely built on the backs of slaves. Slavery was a burgeoning enterprise. Estimates suggest that up to half the population of Rome, the Eternal City, were slaves. This is not totally a surprise, for the more territory Rome took over, the more prisoners from all walks of life and social status they took, and the more people were turned into slaves. We must resist the temptation to equate ancient slavery with the antebellum slavery in nineteenth-century America, though there are some analogies. One striking contrast is that some of the most highly educated and brilliant persons of the Roman Empire, and some of its best businessmen, were or had been slaves.

Corinth, due to its location, was a clearing-house for the slave trade, and the wealthy in Corinth were able to buy the best slaves available in its slave market. The slave, by the definition of Aristotle, was a piece of living property, but property nonetheless. As such, slaves had no legal rights whatsoever and were subject to the will and whims of their masters. There is some evidence that in Paul’s day there were attempts to ameliorate the absolute power owners had over their slaves, as a result of concerns about slave revolts, like that of Spartacus.

No one, not even the slaves who led slave revolts, was arguing for the abolition of slavery in the Empire. Slaves wanted to be treated fairly, and many of them wanted their freedom and were able, with their masters’ help, to buy their freedom. There are even slave inscriptions that say “slavery was never unkind to me” (CIL 13. 7119). The legal vehicle by which a person like Nicanor could be set free was called the peculium, which allowed slaves to accumulate both property and money, and indeed earn enough to pay for their manumission. But one’s master, in this case Erastos, had to agree to the manumission. A slave had no legal recourse if the master refused his request for manumission. When Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7 that if the slave has the opportunity to become free, he should take it, he is not referring to a situation that the slave himself could initiate. It was the master’s choice.

Nicanor could hardly complain, for he had finally had the opportunity to see Roma for an extended period of time. He had never seen such a huge city before, with people literally living on top of one another in neighborhoods called subura. And, of course, it was always fascinating to see how another race of people lived. For instance, Roman men, unlike the Greeks, were clean shaven and paid a visit to the barber regularly, where gossip abounded. And among the new things Nicanor had discovered during his days in Roma was the Romans even had a religious ceremony called the depositio barbae, in which a teenage boy had the fuzz removed from his face for the first time! Romans seemed to be a more religious and less skeptical lot than many of the Greeks Nicanor knew in his homeland, but some of that religion seemed like mere superstition.

On the other side of the coin, there were things Nicanor saw that his father, a Greek teacher and sometime philosopher, would have called lurid, indicating the Romans were less morally refined than Greeks. Nicanor remembered being asked by his father to memorize a rhetorical speech by a Roman about Roma, which said in part, “Yet the characteristic vices peculiar to our city seem to me to be inculcated almost in the mother’s womb, that is the enthusiasm for acting, and the passion for gladiators and racing. In a mind preoccupied and obsessed by such things, what little space is left for the higher arts?”[1] Nicanor had certainly heard much in the eateries, or taberna, of Roma to confirm the Roman enthusiasm for such coarser forms of entertainment.

A CLOSER LOOK

The Roman Calendar

In 45 B.C. Julius Caesar had regularized the Roman calendar by adding extra days so that the months would not get out of synch with the seasons. Caesar inserted sixty-seven days between November and December. Thus the Julian calendar had a year divided into twelve months with a Leap Day added to February every four years. The Julian year was therefore, on average, 365.25 days long. The calendar we follow today is the Gregorian calendar because a tropical year (or solar year), which determines the cycle of seasons, is actually about eleven minutes shorter than 365.25 days. These extra eleven minutes per year in the Julian calendar caused it to gain about three days every four centuries, when compared to the observed equinox times and the seasons. The Gregorian calendar, which was first proposed in the sixteenth century, dealt with this problem by dropping some calendar days, in order to realign the calendar and the equinox times. Subsequently, the Gregorian calendar drops three Leap Year days across every four centuries.

Surprisingly, the Julian calendar remained in use in some countries as a civil calendar into the twentieth century, but it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar in nearly all countries. The Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches have replaced the Julian calendar with the Gregorian calendar, but the Orthodox Church (with the exception of Estonia and Finland) still uses the Julian calendar for calculating the dates of moveable feasts. Some Orthodox churches have adopted the revised Julian calendar for the observance of fixed feasts, while other Orthodox churches retain the Julian calendar for all purposes. The Julian calendar is still used by the Berber people of North Africa, and on Mount Athos.

Figure 1.2. The diolkos

On the horizon Ni­canor could just see the diolkos, the rutted road that began at the western port and headed across the isthmus. Though they almost looked like ants from this distance, Nicanor knew that what he saw gleaming in the sun were the bare-backed slaves dragging a small boat on a sledge the two miles across the isthmus on the diolkos, a short-cut that avoided the sail around the whole of Greece to get to the Aegean Sea. While he was in Roma he had heard the rumor that the new emperor, young Nero, had ambitious plans for Isthmia, including the digging of a ship canal through the two miles of the isthmus. That ought to upset Poseidon a bit, not to mention the merchants who made their fortune hiring out teams of men and sledges for hauling boats.

Figure 1.3. The Corinth Canal

Figure 1.4. A Roman-era stone sarcophagus from Sinop, Turkey. Its side contains a relief of a merchant ship and a harbor boat.

Standing in the bow of the Romulus and Remus, a medium-sized grain freighter some one hundred feet long, Nicanor clung to the rigging that ran down to the prow. He could now begin to make out the details of the temple of Aphrodite on the huge Acropolis hovering over the bustling city of Corinth, a city that had become the hub of the Roman province of Achaia. The city had come a long, long way since it was largely destroyed by the Roman general Mummius over two centuries prior. Who could have guessed that the Roman soldiers who were mustered out of the army and given land would simply blend in with the largely Greek culture here? True enough, they had imposed their own legal system as an overlay on the culture. But you could hardly tell the Romans from the Greeks anymore. They had intermarried, they all dressed in the same style, and the Romans had adopted the Greek dining and festival customs. Despite Latin being the language of the courts, the language on the streets for everyone was Greek.

Nicanor was only twenty-seven years old, but already he had begun to make a decent living as the freedman of a man on the rise in Corinth—Erastos was himself the offspring of a Greek mother and a Roman centurion who had mustered out in Roman Corinth during the reign of Augustus. But Erastos had a secret, a secret he did not want spread abroad as it would ruin his chances to become aedile, the office that included the tasks of being the city treasurer and public works supervisor. Erastos had become part of a new religious cult in town that met privately only in people’s homes.

A CLOSER LOOK

The Destruction and Romanization of Corinth

In 146 B.C. the Roman general Mummius destroyed the ancient city of Corinth, leaving only the ancient temple of Apollo standing. According to reports, the women and children were sold into slavery, and the statues, paintings and works of art were seized and shipped to Rome. Corinth was then mostly reduced to ashes. What arose thereafter was a city largely designed on a Roman plan and serving Roman legal and military purposes. Even so, the native Greek culture and language remained dominant, not least because the Romans were outnumbered in the region by native Greeks. Latin was the language of the law, the courts and official public inscriptions, though Greek seems to have been used for most everything else. Everyone could speak Greek, and perhaps most could also use Latin. Some Jews from the East would have also been able to use Hebrew and Aramaic.

Corinth remained largely depopulated for about one hundred years after the destruction by General Mummius. It was Julius Caesar in about 44 B.C. who made ancient Corinth into the Roman colony city of Corinth, Colonia Laus Iulia Corinthiensis. The Romans in general were recyclers—they used the ancient Greek designs in rebuilding the city, though the organization and street plan varied a little from the ancient city. The city Paul and Erastos knew had had a stable and growing character for over a century. Indeed, by the 50s, the town, with its two ports and active slave market, had become the epicenter of trade going both east and west in the middle of the Mediterranean.

Not surprisingly, Roman colony cities favored Romans when it came to matters of property and justice. Roman soldiers were mustered out into such colony cities (Philippi was another Roman colony city), and there was a dominant Roman layer of society at the top of the social and governmental structure in Corinth. Since Paul appears to have been a Roman citizen, and Erastos certainly was since he could run for the office of aedile, these two men had certain natural and legal advantages in a Roman colony city. This is probably why Paul’s legal case with the Jewish leaders was thrown out of court.

Nicanor, whom Erastos trusted implicitly, had actually been present at one of these meetings, and it was most strange. What sort of religion met under cloak of darkness in a home, and without priests, temples or sacrifices? And then there was all that singing and apparently some kind of prophesying, and then a sort of fervent speech in a language Nicanor had never heard before or since. It had given him chills when he heard it, and he wondered if the participants had given way to the sort of mania one associated with the oracle at Delphi after she had chewed the sacred leaves.

He knew, of ...