[169] That period of retirement at Tarsus may have been utilised by St. Paul in studying classical literature and Greek philosophy by way of preparation for that life's work among the Gentiles, to which he was appointed at his conversion.
[170] There are frequent notices of the altars to the unknown gods in ancient Greek writers: as in Pausanias, _Description of Greece_, vol. i., p. 2 (Shilleto's translation); _Life of Apollonius_, by Philostratus, vi., 3; Lucian's _Philopatris_, 29. See, however, for exhaustive discussions of this point, and the whole subject of the topography of ancient Athens, Lewin's _St. Paul_, vol. i., p. 242; Farrar's _St. Paul_, ch. xxvii., and Conybeare and Howson's _St. Paul_, vol. i., ch. x. Spon and Wheeler were travellers of the seventeenth century, whose works on this subject are important as showing Athens as it existed before modern changes. Some of the reports of travels in Greece, made by eminent scholars in the same century, and now very little known, may be found in the early volumes of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
[171] St. Paul shows that he could sympathise with the true element in pantheistic stoicism by his famous words which have a certain pantheistic ring, but still a very different one from that of the Stoics: "In Him we live and move and have our being."
St. Paul does not finish with this. He has not yet exhausted all his message. He had now dealt with the intellectual errors and mistakes of his hearers. He had around him and above him, if he could but see the magnificent figure of Athene, the pride and glory of the Acropolis, with its surrounding temples, the most striking proofs how their intellectual mistakes had led the wise of this world into fatal and degrading practices. In the course of his argument, having shown the nearness of God to man, "In Him we live and move and have our being," and the Divine desire that man should seek after and know God, he quoted a passage common to several well-known poets, "For we are also His offspring."[172] This was sufficient for St. Paul, who as we see, in all his Epistles, often flies off at a tangent when a word slips as it were by chance from his pen, leading him off to a new train of ideas. We are the offspring of God. How is it then that men can conceive the Godhead, that which is Divine, to be like unto those gold and silver, brass or marble statues, even though wrought with the greatest possible skill. The philosophers indeed pretended to distinguish between the Eternal Godhead and these divinities and images innumerable, which were but representations of his several characteristics and attributes. But even if they distinguished intellectually, they did not distinguish in practice, and the people from the highest to the lowest identified the idol with the deity itself, and rendered thereto the honour due to God.[173]
[172] These words are directly and literally taken out of the _Phænomena_ of Aratus, a Greek poet of Cilicia and a fellow-countryman of the orator. He was absolutely correct, however, in saying "certain of your own poets," as the same sentiment is found in a hymn to Jupiter, composed by the Stoic philosopher and poet Cleanthes, a poem which will be found with a Latin version in Cudworth's _Intellectual System_. Cleanthes was the immediate successor of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. His words therefore would have the more weight with his disciples three centuries later. He died, like a Stoic, of hunger, aged eighty, and a statue was erected to him by the Roman Senate in his native place Assos, a town of Æolis in Greece. See for more about Cleanthes and Aratus, Fabricius, _Bibliotheca Græca_, or Smith's _Dict. Greek and Rom. Biog._
[173] As it was with the ancient image worshippers, so is it with the modern. The excuses made for the pagans in ancient times are exactly the same as those made for the image worshippers of the eighth and later centuries: see the article on Iconoclasm in the _Dict. Christ. Biog._