The life and work of St. Paul

298 THE LIFE AND WOBK OP ST. PAUL.
and still more indifferent to the renal intrusions which Athenian servility
had conceded to Roman self-importance. A glance would have boon more
than enough for Greek statues decapitated to furnish figures for Roman
heads, or pedestals from which the original hero had been displaced to
make room for the portly bulk and bloated physiognomy of some modern
Proconsul. Some Jew might take a certain pride in pointing out to him
the statues of Hyrcanus, the Asmonaean High Priest, and of that beautiful
Berenice before whom he little thought that he should one day plead his
cause. 1 But his chief notice would be directed to the bewildering multipli-
city of temples, and to the numberless " idols " which rose on every side.
Athens was the city of statues. There were statues by Phidias, and Myron,
and Lysicles, and statues without number of the tasteless and mechanical
copyists of that dead period of the Empire ; statues of antiquity as venerable
as the olive-wood Athene which had fallen from heaven, and statues
of yesterday ; statues colossal and diminutive ; statues equestrian, and erect,
and seated; statues agonistic and contemplative, solitary and combined,
statues of wood, and earthenware, and stone, and mar-
plain and coloured ;
ble, and bronze, and ivory, and gold, in every attitude, and in all possible
combinations ; statues starting from every cave, and standing like lines of
.sentinels in every street. 2 There were more statues in Athens, says Pausanias,
than in all the rest of Greece put together, and their number would
be all the more startling, and even shocking, to St. Paul, because, during
the long youthful years of his study at Jerusalem, he had never seen so
much as one representation of the human form, and had been trained to
regard it as apostasy to give the faintest sanction to such violations of God's
express command. His earlier Hellenistic training, his natural large-heartedness,
his subsequent familiarity with Gentile life, above all, the entire
change of his views respecting the universality and permanence of the Mosaic
Law, had indeed indefinitely widened for him the shrunken horizon of Jewish
intolerance. But any sense of the dignity and beauty of Pagan art was impossible
to one who had been trained in the schools of the Rabbis.3 There was
nothing in his education which enabled him to admire the simple grandeur of
the Propylsea, the severe beauty of the Parthenon, the massive proportions of
the Theseum, the exquisite elegance of the Temple of the Wingless Victory.
From the nude grace and sinewy strength of the youthful processions portrayed
on frieze or entablature, he would have turned away with something
of impatience, if not with something even of disgust. When the tutor of
Charles the Fifth, the good Cardinal of Tortosa, ascended the Papal throne
Under the title of Adrian the Sixth, and his attendants conducted him to the
Vatican to show him its splendid treasures of matchless statuary, his sole
1 Jos. Antt. xix. 8, 5.
2 "Athenae simulacra Dcorum hominumque habcntes omul genere et materiae et
artium insignia " (Liv. xlv. 27).
3 The reader will recall the censure passed on Gamaliel for having merely entered a
bath in which was a statue of Aphrodite (in/ra, p. 705).