The life and work of St. Paul

ST. PAUL AT ATHENS. 297
him from Boroea, and a still longer period before Timothy could come from
Thessalonica ;
and during those days of weary and restless longing there was
little that he could do. It is probable that, when first he was guided by his
friends to his humble lodging, he would have had little heart to notice the
sights and sounds of those heathen streets, though, as he walked through the
ruins of the long walls of Themistocles to the Peiraic gate, one of the brethren,
more quick-eyed than himself, may have pointed out to him the altars bearing
the inscription, 'AFNnSTOlS 0EOI2, 1 which about the same time attracted the
notice of Apollonius of Tyana, and were observed fifty years afterwards by
the traveller Pausanias, as he followed the same road. 2 But when the brethren
had left him having no opportunity during that brief stay to labour with his
own hands he relieved his melancholy tedium by wandering hither and
3
thither, with a curiosity largely mingled with grief and indignation.*
The country had been desolated by the Eoman dominion, but the city still
No Secundus Carinas had as yet laid his
retained some of its ancient glories.
greedy and tainted hand on the unrivalled statues of the Athens of Phidias.
It was the multitude of these statues 5 in a city where, as Petronius says, it
was more easy to meet a god than a man, which chiefly absorbed St. Paul's
attention. He might glance with passing interest at the long colonnades of
shops glittering with wares from every port in the j3Egean ; but similar scenes
had not been unfamiliar to him in Tarsus, and Antioch, and Thessalonica.
He might stroll into the Stoa Poecilo, and there peer at the paintings,
still bright and fresh, of Homeric councils of which he probably knew
nothing, and of those Athenian battles about which, not even excepting
Marathon, 6 there is no evidence that he felt any interest. The vast
with it
enlargement of his spiritual horizon would not have brought
any increase of secular on the level of even
knowledge, and if
the Gamaliels of
Paul stood in these respects
his day, he knew little or
nothing of Hellenic story. 7 And for the same reason he would have been
indifferent to the innumerable busts of Greeks of every degree of emin-
ence, from Solon and Epimenides down to recent Sophists and Cosmetae,
1 Pausan. I. i. 4 ; Hesych. s, v. , 'Ayvwr** fleet : v. infra, p. 301).
2 They lay on the road between the Phaleric port and the city, and St. Paul may
possibly have landed at Phalerum, the nearest though not the most frequented harbour
for vessels sailing from Macedonia.
* Acts xvii. 23, Sitp\oi^fvot u ivaffaapuv ra (Te^atrfj-ara viiaJv.
4 Id. 16, Tropwfvi/tfTO TO Tri/eOfia O.VTOV. Cf. 1 Cor. Xlii. 5, mi n-apo^vVtrat, "is not
exasperated."
5 Petron. Sat. 17.
Mr. Martineau, after remarking that modern lives of St. Paul have been too much
of the nature of " illustrative guide-books, so instructive, that by far the greatest part of
their information would have been new to St. Paul himself," adds that "in
the_ vicinity
of Salamis or Marathon he would probably recall the past no more than a Brahmin would
in travelling over the fields of Edgehill or Marston Moor" (Studies in Christianity,
p. 417).
7
Nothing in the Talmud is more amazing than the total absence of the geographic,
chronological, and historic spirit. A genuine Jew of that Pharisaic class in the midst of
which St. Paul had been trained, cared more for some pedantically minute halacha, about
the threads in a tsttstth, than for all the Pagan history in the world.
11