Albert Barnes Commentary Acts 18:1

"After these things he departed from Athens, and came to Corinth." — Acts 18:1 (ASV)

CHAPTER 18

After these things. After what occurred at Athens, as recorded in the previous chapter.

Came to Corinth. Corinth was the capital of Achaia, anciently called Ephyra, and was situated on the isthmus that divides the Peloponnesus from Attica. The city itself stood on a little island; it had two ports, Lechaeum on the west and Cenchrea on the east. It was one of the most populous and wealthy cities of Greece and, at the same time, one of the most luxurious, effeminate, proud, ostentatious, and dissolute.

Lasciviousness here was not only practised and allowed, but was consecrated by the worship of Venus; and no small part of the wealth and splendour of the city arose from the offerings made by licentious passion in the very temples of this goddess. No city of ancient times was more profligate.

It was the Paris of antiquity; the seat of splendour, and show, and corruption. Yet even here, notwithstanding all the disadvantages of splendour, gaiety, and dissoluteness, Paul entered on the work of establishing a church; and here he was eminently successful. The two epistles he later wrote to this church show the extent of his success; and the well-known character and propensities of the people will account for the general drift of the admonitions and arguments in those epistles.

Corinth was destroyed by the Romans 146 years before Christ; and during the conflagration, several metals in a fused state, running together, produced the composition known as Corinthian brass. It was later restored by Julius Caesar, who planted in it a Roman colony. It soon regained its ancient splendour and soon relapsed into its former dissipation and licentiousness. Paul arrived there in A.D. 52 or 53.