Acts 17:15

Paul at Athens, 15-34.

Acts 17:15. Brought him unto Athens. The once famous centre of Greek thought and culture, long the dominant power among the varied states of which ancient Greece was made up, whose name and influence at one time was all-powerful in so many rich and flourishing cities round the Mediterranean coast, in Asia as well as in Europe, had become after many vicissitudes a simple provincial city of the province of Achaia in the Empire. Rome, in memory of its past splendid history, had accorded it the privileges above discussed (Acts 17:6) of ‘a free city' (urbs libera). The general appearance of Athens in the time of Paul must still have been imposing; but long and desolating wars had passed over Athens and Attica. Its old fortifications were in ruins; its commerce had deserted its port; its streets were comparatively empty. There was no life or energy left among her people. Athens, in the days of Paul, preserved nothing but her undying memories and the stately buildings almost, it would seem, imperishable which she had erected in the days of her splendour. The ‘long walls' so well known in history, which once made the busy commercial Piraeus and Athens one great city, were already in ruins; but the great monuments which the skill and wealth of the old Athenian people had built remained very much as in old times. One fact seems to have made a strange impression upon St. Paul coming from Berea and its bright life and the busy commerce of wealthy Thessalonica.

In this quiet still city of memories, wherever he turned he beheld statues of deified heroes, and temples, and sanctuaries of gods. Every god in Olympus, we read, found a place in the ‘Agora.' The very public buildings in that city of the dead were sanctuaries. The record house was a temple of the mother of the gods. The council house held statues of Apollo and Jupiter, with an altar of Vesta. The theatre at the base of the Acropolis was consecrated to Bacchus, where the very marble seats were inscribed each with the official name of the priest to whom it was assigned. In truth, this Athens which Paul visited seemed a city of temples whose citizens were the priests. Never, in the long and eventful story of the City of the Violet Crown, as Aristophanes termed it, was Athens so empty of all life as it was at that particular juncture. Its ancient splendour and opulence had completely disappeared after Scylla had swept away its wealth and destroyed the last remains of its old independence. Athens fell lower and lower, owing the scanty remains of privileges to a sentiment of pity for her in her deep degradation.

The great schools which, after she had lost her power in some way, maintained her reputation in the days of Augustus and his immediate successors were rivalled, if not surpassed, by those of Marseilles, Rhodes, and Rome, and other centres of learning and thought. The revival of Athens as the great seat of culture in the Empire, only dates from the time of Nerva. Athens was in the period of its greatest depression when Paul well describes his impression of the famous city: Lifeless, quiet, without trade, a city neither of merchants nor soldiers, full of lifeless objects of adoration, temples and statues, altars and shrines, he saw the city wholly given up to idolatry.