Athens: The Areopagus, the Unknown God, and the Apostle from Tarsus

The Ancient City

By the time Paul of Tarsus walked into Athens, the city's political greatness lay some four centuries in the past. The Athens of Pericles — the naval empire, the democracy, the building programme that raised the Parthenon — belonged to the fifth century BC. Yet what Athens had lost in power it retained in prestige. It was the acknowledged intellectual capital of the Mediterranean world: the city of Socrates, Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Painted Stoa where Zeno founded Stoicism, and the Garden of Epicurus. Under Roman rule Athens held the privileged status of a free and allied city, exempt from direct provincial administration, honoured by emperors and visited by the sons of the Roman elite who came to complete their education (Scholarship).

The city Paul saw was compact — far smaller than Corinth or Ephesus — and extraordinarily dense with monuments. Ancient writers remarked on the sheer quantity of statues, shrines, and altars crowding its streets; the second-century travel writer Pausanias, who walked the same streets about a century after Paul, filled his account of Athens with its images of the gods and observed that the Athenians were more devoted to religion than other peoples (Scholarship). The Acropolis rose above the town crowned by the Parthenon and the colossal bronze Athena Promachos; below it spread the classical agora, and beside that the newer Roman market. The historian Livy described Athens as a city full of ancient renown, with many things worth seeing (Scholarship); its empire was long gone, but its name still commanded the reverence of the whole Greek-speaking world.

There is a pointed geographical irony in the encounter recorded in Acts. The geographer Strabo, writing within a generation of Paul's birth, ranked Tarsus in Cilicia above both Athens and Alexandria in the zeal of its citizens for philosophy and general education (Scholarship). When the apostle stood before the philosophers of Athens, he was not a provincial confronting an alien culture. He was a man raised in a city that considered itself Athens' rival in the very discipline for which Athens was famous — and, as his speech would show, he knew how to use its tools.

Paul in Athens (Acts 17:16-34)

Paul arrived in Athens alone, during his second missionary journey, c. AD 50-51 (Scholarship). He had been escorted south by sea from Berea after unrest cut short his preaching there, leaving Silas and Timothy behind with instructions to rejoin him quickly (Acts 17:14-15) (Scripture). Waiting for them, "his spirit was stirred within him, seeing the city wholly given to idolatry" (Acts 17:16, Douay-Rheims) (Scripture).

His method in Athens followed his pattern elsewhere, with one addition suited to the city. He reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and devout Gentiles, but also daily in the agora "with them that were there" (Acts 17:17) (Scripture) — the open marketplace debate that Socrates had made an Athenian institution. There he drew the attention of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. Some dismissed him with the Athenian slang term spermologos, a "seed-picker" or babbler of second-hand ideas; others, hearing of Jesus and the resurrection, wanted a fuller account (Acts 17:18) (Scripture).

They brought him to the Areopagus (Acts 17:19). The name — "hill of Ares," rendered in Latin tradition as Mars Hill — designated both a low rocky outcrop northwest of the Acropolis and the venerable Athenian council that had anciently met there. Whether Acts describes a formal hearing before the council or an informal address on the hill itself is debated; the council in this period concerned itself with, among other things, matters of religion and public teaching, so a semi-official inquiry is plausible (Scholarship).

The speech that follows in Acts 17:22-31 is the fullest example in the New Testament of Paul addressing a pagan intellectual audience. He begins not with Scripture, which his hearers did not know, but with their own city: "For passing by, and seeing your idols, I found an altar also, on which was written: To the unknown God. What therefore you worship, without knowing it, that I preach to you" (Acts 17:23, Douay-Rheims) (Scripture). Altars to "unknown gods" in and around Athens are independently attested by the second-century travel writer Pausanias and other ancient sources, though no altar with the exact singular inscription has been recovered (Scholarship).

From that starting point Paul proclaims a God who made the world and everything in it, who does not dwell in temples made by hands, who gives life and breath to all, and who has appointed the times and boundaries of the nations — themes that resonated deliberately with Stoic natural theology (Scholarship). He even cites Greek poetry: "as some also of your own poets said: For we are also his offspring" (Acts 17:28, Douay-Rheims) (Scripture). The line comes from the astronomical poet Aratus — a native of Soli in Cilicia, Paul's own home province, educated in the same intellectual world as Tarsus (Scholarship). The apostle from Tarsus quoted a Cilician poet to the Athenians.

The address turns on the resurrection of Jesus and a coming judgment (Acts 17:30-31), and at the word "resurrection" the audience divided: some mocked, some deferred — "We will hear thee again concerning this matter" (Acts 17:32) (Scripture). Yet the visit was not fruitless. "But certain men adhering to him, did believe: among whom was also Dionysius, the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them" (Acts 17:34, Douay-Rheims) (Scripture). Later tradition, reported by Eusebius on the authority of Dionysius of Corinth, makes Dionysius the Areopagite the first bishop of Athens (Tradition); a much later body of mystical writings circulated under his name is now recognised as the work of an anonymous author of c. AD 500 (Scholarship). Of Damaris nothing further is recorded, though her presence at such a hearing has prompted much discussion (Scholarship).

Acts records no persecution in Athens, no letter of Paul to an Athenian church, and no return visit. From Athens he went on to Corinth (Acts 18:1), where a very different, longer ministry awaited.

What Remains Today

Athens preserves the setting of Acts 17 with unusual completeness. The Areopagus itself — a bare hump of grey limestone immediately northwest of the Acropolis entrance — is freely accessible, its summit reached by rock-cut and modern steps worn slick by centuries of feet. A bronze plaque at its base carries the Greek text of Paul's sermon. From the top the visitor overlooks the ancient agora exactly as the apostle's audience would have done.

The classical agora, extensively excavated, is an archaeological park. The Temple of Hephaestus on its western edge, the best-preserved Doric temple in Greece, was already five hundred years old when Paul passed it. The Stoa of Attalos, rebuilt in the twentieth century on its original foundations, houses the agora museum. A short walk east lies the Roman agora with the octagonal Tower of the Winds, the commercial market of Paul's own day (Scholarship).

Above everything stands the Acropolis. The Parthenon, Erechtheion, and Propylaia — the "temples made with hands" within sight of which Paul declared that God dwells in no such temples — survive in ruin but in situ. No altar "to the unknown god" has been found, and the numerous small church dedications to Dionysius the Areopagite around the city, including the district named for him, reflect tradition rather than located remains (Tradition) (Scholarship).

Visiting Context

Athens is the capital of Greece, served by a major international airport and by the port of Piraeus, through which many travellers following Paul's route arrive or depart. The Acts 17 sites — Areopagus, agora, Acropolis — lie within a single walkable area beneath the Acropolis and can be seen together with the adjacent museums. The Greek Orthodox Church commemorates Dionysius the Areopagite on 3 October, and the Areopagus rock remains a customary place for reading Acts 17 aloud (Tradition).

For the traveller tracing the full arc of the apostle's life, Athens forms the philosophical counterpoint to its beginning: the road that led to the Areopagus began in Tarsus, the Cilician city that ancient writers ranked among the great homes of philosophy. Practical guidance for combining the Greek sites with Tarsus and the cities of Asia Minor is gathered in the pilgrimage guide, and the wider geography of the journeys is mapped in the atlas.