The colony at Potidaia, sometimes transliterated as Potidaea, was settled by the Corinthians about 600 B.C. (Bérard, p. 68) in a strategic location on the narrowest part of the Chalkidikian peninsula's westernmost finger. This sub-peninsula, known as Pallene in ancient times, is now called Kassandra. Like its mother-city Corinth, Potidaia occupied an advantageous position on a narrow isthmus, and built a canal to speed sea voyages around the peninsula.

In antiquity, Potidaia's region, Macedonia, was able to support a larger population than other regions in Greece owing to its continental climate, more like that of eastern Europe than the rest of Greece. The Macedonian terrain allowed for cereals cultivation and livestock grazing; further south, the Chalkidikian peninsula had a more Mediterranean climate, and a landscape covered with olive groves, orchards, and forests rich in timber for ships.

Valuable information about classical city planning and commerce has been unearthed at Potidaia's neighboring city, Olynthus, which was the powerful capital of the Chalkidic League. Because Olynthus was utterly destroyed by Philip of Macedon in 348 B.C. and mostly left abandoned afterward, modern excavations revealed a wealth of artifacts and buildings which offer us a vivid picture of mid-4th century life. Amazingly, one house, known as A v 10 for its location on the city's grid of streets, even contained an inscription which served as a receipt for the house's sale, along with its storeroom and olive-press, to a man named Dionysius, for 5300 drachmas.

Olynthus: house A v 10
From Olynthus, vol. 8 pl. 95

Chalkidiki, with its numerous promontories, provided many excellent harbors, but dangerous sailing as well. When the Persians invaded Greece, their king, Xerxes, ordered his army to dig a canal across the narrowest part of Chalkidiki's easternmost Akte peninsula (now the site of the Mount Athos monasteries). Herodotus concludes that Xerxes' canal was a monument to his power, and not strictly necessary for transporting his ships, which could have been dragged across the narrow isthmus.

Map showing the colonies of Corinth, including Potidaia

The Potidaians built a treasury at Delphi "to show their piety to the god" Apollo, according to Pausanias (Description of Greece, 10.11.5). Though the remains have been identified, just behind the Treasury of the Athenians, little is known of the building's history.

...when Artabazus had besieged Potidaea for three months, there was a great ebb-tide in the sea which lasted for a long while, and when the foreigners saw that the sea was turned to a marsh, they prepared to pass over it into Pallene. When they had made their way over two-fifths of it, however...there came a great flood-tide, higher, as the people of the place say, than any one of the many that had been before. Some of them who did not know how to swim were drowned, and those who knew were slain by the Potidaeans, who came among them in boats. The Potidaeans say that the cause of the high sea and flood and the Persian disaster lay in the fact that those same Persians who now perished in the sea had profaned the temple and the image of Poseidon which was in the suburb of the city. Herodotus, Histories, 8.129.1

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