Carceral Corinth

One of the luxuries that I sacrifice when I’m abroad is keeping up with recent publications in my field. My reading tends to become decidedly less professional when I’m overseas. This is mostly because during the day I’m focused on the material culture and archival material in front of me, and in the evenings, I prefer to read to unwind from a busy day.

That said, I did take a bit of time to read a recent Hesperia article on carceral Corinth: Matthew D. C. Larsen’s “A Prison in Late Antique Corinth,” Hesperia 93.2 (2024), 337-379. The largest part of the article deals with a series of inscriptions found in the northwest shops of the city that indicate that this area was used as a prison in the Late Antiquity. The inscriptions, which were made in paving slabs presumably inside the prison cells, show that prisoners prayed not only for deliverance from their fate, but also that those who put them in prison suffer. I suspect that this is a sentiment as old as prisons themselves. 

The article draws on evidence from the turn of the 20th century excavation notebooks to show that the slabs derived from the pavement of the prison building and the material under these slabs confirms a broadly Late Roman date for this phase of the building. This is moderately interesting, although I would have enjoyed a more detailed description of the modifications of this building to accommodate this particular function. That said, I did enjoy the observation that officials would have moved prisoners through public spaces after they received their sentences in the city’s courts. It would seem that the “perp walk” has an ancient precedent.

I also wondered a good bit about the place of the prison in the city itself. It would appear that the prison occupied a prominent place along the north side of the ancient forum. While I admit to know understanding the condition and function of the Roman forum at the time that the prison functioned, the argument that the location of the prison in Late Antiquity may have invoked the memory of the location of the so-called captives facade in Corinth is appealing. In this construction, prisoners of the state would have become human embodiments of the power of the Roman Empire (or its local surrogate in the city officials in Corinth) to bring order to the unruly. Another intriguing observation is that the prison stood outside, but near to the city wall which Sanders argued ran along the eastern side of the forum. Thus that prison would have been outside of the public space of the Late Roman city, but it might have been in some kind of dialogue with the wall of the city. In an explicitly contemporary reading: the wall and the prison both represent tools for ordering space and society and often coincide.

The most interesting aspect of this article is nestled in the footnotes. The author is evidently working on a monograph titled Early Christians and Incarceration: A Cultural History. Larsen notes that the prison at Corinth is converted to a chapter in a later phase. The role that religious spaces play in bringing order to society has parallels with the role of prisons. The imposition of order through routine and clearly delineated spaces reinforced their moralistic character (at least of contemporary penitentiaries) to reform individuals. At the same time, it is interesting to observe that prisons produced confessors and martyrs whose defiance of authority led to their sanctification.