The Iononian to Aegean by road....

[Imperial Dave]

https://greekreporter.com/2025/05/20/diolkos-stone-road-ships-ionian-aegean/

Hard work....

[Ian61]

Thanks Dave, I enjoyed the animated film explaining how it all worked. Have sailed up and down the canal in the past but didn't know much about this.

[Imperial Dave]

One of the better reports

[Cantabrigian]

If you owned a reasonable fleet of cargo ships, it would make more sense to just keep some of them on one side of the isthmus, and some on the other.  You have to off-load the cargo and carry it across in any case, so why bother moving the ships back and forwards?  Even if you only own one ship, if you're based in Corinth you can probably come to some arrangement with another Corinth based ship-owner on the other side of the isthmus.

I tend to think it either tells us something unexpected about how trade worked in the ancient world, or it was only used for military ships.