Corinth
Corinth did have a naval tradition, and she had experience of administering distant colonial possessions, places like her colonies in north-west Greece, for instance Ambracia or in the northern Aegean, but Corinth had been too close to Sparta for too long to be able to contemplate defying or superseding her; and from the point of view of the other Greek states she lacked the ideological magnetism exerted by Athens or by Sparta, whose agoge (military training and discipline) was not just an effective repressive device, but was thought of in many quarters as somehow admirable in a positive way. The city site is in the foreground, dominated by the remains of the sixth-century B.C. Temple of Apollo. In the distance to the south rises the citadel, Acrocorinth, linked by long walls to the city in the fourth century B.C. It is the most impressive of the acropoleis of mainland Greece. (Boardman, 1986)