View article

Around the middle of the last century, the classical archaeologist Oscar Broneer sat down to describe the dire later history of the Roman city of Corinth. In excavations across the ancient site over the previous fifty years, Greeks and Americans had frequently encountered destruction contexts dating to the later 4th century along with vestigial late antique and medieval reoccupation of earlier Roman remains. Summing up the patterns he observed across the site, Broneer did not mince his words. Roman Corinth, he concluded, suffered “overwhelming disaster and material decay, reflecting a general exhaustion and deterioration of the creative ability of the people.” For Broneer,“the invading Goths under Alaric delivered the coup de grace to this unhappy period of twilight of Classical Corinth… In the early Christian period and during the first centuries of the Byzantine Empire, many of the classical buildings continued to be used, but the ruins of that era bear the marks of material dilapidation, artistic decline and civic helplessness”(Broneer 1954, 159).

Broneer’s dire assessment of the fate of the ancient city in Late Antiquity combined his interpretation of stratigraphic contexts in Corinth and the common, mid-twentieth century practice of reading excavated contexts through the lens of late ancient writers. Contemporary scholars, after all, were familiar with those 4th to 6th century historians, poets, and bishops who wrote about the devastating effects of the raids of Heruli, Visigoths, Avars, and Slavs in Corinth, and the destructive earthquakes that allegedly overturned all of Greece. For Broneer and other classicists of his generation, narrating the dramatic rapid …