it finally opened to water traffic. Demetrius Poliorketes, King of the Macedonians, was the first person to start excavations for the canal in 307 BC but he was talked out of it by Egyptian engineers who said that different sea levels each side of the land would cause flooding in nearby islands if it was opened up.

The next big push was by the Emperor Nero in 66 AD who used 6,000 Judean slaves to dig out the canal. They dug a trench 40 metres wide and 3,300 metres long before Nero was called back to Rome.

He was sentenced to death in 68 AD and worked stopped on the canal.

Nothing much happened until 1687 when the Venetians, who had occupied the Peloponnisos, began digging again. But the Turks, in their occupation of Greece, forced the Venetians out of the country and work stopped on the canal again.

It was not until Ferdinand de Lesseps, who built the Suez Canal, visited the site in 1869 that serious excavations were considered. The work resumed in earnest in April, 1882, and the canal was finally opened in July, 1893.