Acts 17:16

Acts 17:16. His spirit was stirred up in him. The whole aspect of Athens was strangely repugnant to Paul; the great cities he was acquainted with, such as Antioch in the east and Thessalonica in the west, were busy commercial centres, full of life and energy, despising rather, while at the same time practising, idolatry. Indifferentism was what he had been combating, rather than anything like a fervid spirit of idolatry; but here he seemed in a different atmosphere, here idolatry was closely bound up with all the pleasures and the occupations of the citizen, was linked indissolubly with those memories of the past of which the people of Athens were so proud.

The comment of Renan, in the course of a splendid and lifelike picture of the Athens of the first century, on Paul's indignation at the idolatry of Athens, is singular: ‘Ah belles et chastes images, vrais dieux et vraies Déesses, tremblez, voici celui qui lèvera contre vous le Marteau. Le mot fatal est prononcé, vous êtes des idoles, l'erreur de ce laid petit Juif sera votre arrêt de mort.' It must be remembered that the brilliant sceptic never takes a fair view even from his own cheerless standpoint of Paul's character, and here, strangely enough, views him rather as an Iconoclast than as a denouncer of an impure and cursed worship.

The city wholly given up to idolatry. The Greek word rendered ‘wholly given up to idolatry' (κατει ́ δωλον) only occurs in this passage, but is formed after the analogy of other similar compounded words, such as κατάδενδρος, a place full of trees so as to be overgrown by them; κατύμπελος, a place full of vines. The word here would be translated more accurately, ‘full of idols.' The epithet certainly seems to have been singularly appropriate. Other writers, writing of Athens in a different spirit to Paul, could not help noticing this striking peculiarity in the city. Petronius remarks satirically how at Athens one could find a god easier than a man. Another writes how it was almost impossible for one to make his way through these idols. Pausanias states how Athens had more images than all the rest of Greece put together. Xenophon's expression is the strongest when he calls Athens ‘one great altar, one great offering to the gods' (θεοῑς καὶ ἀνάθημα). Livy's remark is also noteworthy: ‘In Athens are to be seen images of gods and of men of all descriptions and made of all materials.'