L'orgoglio di Corinto: identità e tradizioni locali tra Oriente e Occidente da Omero a Pindaro

Corinthian mythological tradition is to be taken as an identitarian discourse, rooted in the needs of the local community, and especially of the agonistic élites striving for fame at a Panhellenic level, and for power within the polis. Alatas, Sisyphos, Medea, Bellerophon, Pegasus, and the stories about the mythical past of the city, then, find a place in the framework of the Corinthian intentional history. Local mythology is much more the result of the appropriation of elements belonging to Thessaly and Boiotia than a legacy of an ‘Aeolic’ past, and the stories told about the Dorian ‘conquest’ are in fact foundation myths strictly related to collective identity and to the great public festival of the Hellotia. The last section of the article discusses the mythological complex of Bellerophon, Pegasus, Chimaira aiming to find the traces left by ‘Orientalizing revolution’ on Corinthian imaginary. There are reasons to assume that those myths both reflected and expressed the place of archaic Corinth between East and West.