Chapter XXVII

. At this point attention will be directed to a few important cities.

=1. Athens=, the chief city of Attica, one of the least productive parts of Greece, is the far-famed mistress of the world’s culture and art. Emerging from obscurity in the seventh century before Christ, gaining a position of leadership in the Persian wars after 500 B. C., Athens established a considerable empire. In this period fell the age of Pericles, 460-429 B. C., when the artistic and literary genius of Athens reached a height never equaled in human history. Socrates was born here in 469 and lived till 399 B. C. Here Plato, who was born about 428, became a pupil of Socrates and afterward taught. Hither came Aristotle, after the year 367, to sit at Plato’s feet. Here from the age of Pericles the acropolis was crowned with those architectural creations that are at once the admiration and the despair of the world; (see Fig. 277). It stirs the imagination to think of Paul in such a city.

In the time of Paul, Athens was a Roman city, though still one of the great artistic and philosophical centers of the world. At a little distance from the acropolis on its northern side, a forum of the Roman period was laid bare in 1891; (see Fig. 272). Possibly this is the market-place in which Paul, during his stay there, reasoned every day with them that met him (Acts 17:17), though of this we cannot be certain, for, while this was a market-place in the Roman period, the older market of the Athenian people lay to the westward of it.

To the west of the acropolis lies the old Areopagus, or Mars’ Hill (Fig. 273), from which it was long supposed that Paul made the address recorded in Acts 17:22-31. Ramsay,[319] following Curtius, has made it probable that the address was delivered to the city-fathers of Athens, not because they were putting Paul to a judicial trial, but because they wished to see whether he was to be allowed to teach Christianity, which they took for a new philosophy, in the university of Athens--for Athens itself was a kind of university. It seems probable that the meetings of the city-fathers, who were collectively called the Areopagus (Acts 17:22), were held not on the top of the rock, but in the market-place. The Athenian altar “to an unknown god” is treated in Part II,