Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Corcyra.
The gallery
Votive Relief of the Alliance between Corcyra and Athens
Unknown (Attic workshop), 375 BC
This Classical Attic votive relief, now in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, commemorates the renewed alliance sworn between Athens and the island city of Corcyra (modern Corfu) in 375 BC. Personifications of the two allied states clasp hands beneath the protecting figure of Athena: the female figure on the relief is identified as Corcyra herself, the eponymous nymph of the island, here standing for her city as a political embodiment, though some readings name her Hera, the island's chief goddess. Corcyra was the naiad daughter of the river-god Asopus and the nymph Metope, carried off by Poseidon to the then-nameless island he afterwards called by her name, where she bore him Phaeax, ancestor of the Phaeacians. As the rare ancient image associated with this otherwise sparsely depicted nymph, the relief preserves her memory in the civic form her name eventually came to signify.