Geography

​The topography of the city, from what Hieronymus and Eudoxus and others have said, and from what we ourselves have recently seen since its restoration by the Romans, is as follows. A high mountain with a vertical height of about three and a half stadia, and an ascent of as much as thirty stadia, ends in a sharp peak; it is called Acrocorinth, and its northern part is the most precipitous, under which lies the city on a table-like flat site, right at the very foot of the Acrocorinth. Now the circumference of the city itself used to be forty stadia, and it was fortified with walls as far as it was unprotected by the mountain; and this enclosing wall also included the mountain itself, the Acrocorinth, wherever it was possible to admit fortification, and as we went up, the ruins of the wall-line were visible; so that the entire perimeter came to about eighty-five stadia. From the other sides the mountain is less steep, yet it rises high from there too and is conspicuous all around. Now the peak has a small temple of Aphrodite, and below the peak is the spring Peirene, which has no outflow but is always full of clear and drinkable water. And they say that from here and from certain other subterranean veinlets the spring at the foot of the mountain is pressed out and flows down into the city, so that it is sufficiently supplied with water from it. There is also an abundance of wells in the city, and they say there are some on the Acrocorinth too, though we ourselves did not see them. At any rate, when Euripides says: ‘I am come, having left Acrocorinth, washed on all sides, the sacred hill, the city of Aphrodite,’ the word ‘washed on all sides’ must be taken either as referring to the depths, since wells and subterranean channels run through it, or we must assume that in ancient times Peirene welled up to the surface and watered the mountain. And here, they say, Pegasus was caught by Bellerophon while drinking—the winged horse that sprang from the neck of Medusa when her head was cut off; and they say that the same horse also caused the Hippocrene (Horse’s Spring) to rise on Helicon by striking with his hoof the rock that lay beneath. Below Peirene is the Sisypheum, which preserves no small remains of a temple or palace built of white stone. And from the summit, looking towards the north, one can see both Parnassus and Helicon, high mountains covered with snow, and the Crisaean Gulf lying below both of them, enclosed by Phocis, Boeotia, Megaris, and by the Corinthian and Sicyonian territories on the opposite side of the strait from Phocis. Towards the west—but above all these lie the so-called Oneia Mountains, extending to Boeotia and Cithaeron from the Scironian Rocks, and from the road that runs along them towards Attica.