Old Corinth held one of the earliest stone temples in Greece, seven of whose columns still stand, cut from a single block each and usually assigned to Apollo. Above the city rises the Acrocorinth, and on its summit stood a sanctuary of Aphrodite. Strabo reports that the goddess owned a thousand sacred prostitutes, a line that has coloured every popular account of the city since; modern scholarship has largely dismantled the claim, which rests on a small number of literary sources with an interest in Corinthian excess and finds no support in the archaeology.
The sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on the north slope of the Acrocorinth is better attested and more revealing, with dining rooms cut in terraces where small groups ate in the goddesses' presence, and votive deposits of miniature vessels and figurines. A sanctuary of Asklepios in the lower city produced a well known collection of terracotta body parts, arms, legs, breasts, eyes, left by people asking for or acknowledging a cure.
Nearby stood the sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia, host to the Isthmian Games, one of the four crown festivals of the Greek world. Rome destroyed Corinth in 146 BCE and refounded it as a colony a century later, settled largely with freedmen, so the city Paul knew was Roman in law and administration, Greek in cult, and full of people who had arrived recently from somewhere else.