[Picture: Decorative chapter heading]
After a time Macedon and Achaia were made by the Romans into provinces,
each of which had a governor who had been one year in a magistrate's
office at Rome, and then was sent out to rule in a province for three or
for five years.
In 146, nearly a hundred years after the ruin of Corinth, Julius Caesar
built it up again in great strength and beauty, and made it the capital
of Achaia. As it stood where the Isthmus was only six miles across, and
had a beautiful harbour on each side, travellers who did not wish to go
round the dangerous headlands of the Peloponnesus used to land on one
side and embark on the other. Thus Corinth become one of the great
stations for troops, and also a mart for all kinds of merchandise, and
was always full of strangers, both Greeks and Jews.
The Romans, as conquerors, had rights to be tried only by their own
magistrates and laws, and these laws were generally just. They were,
however, very hard on subject nations; and, therefore, the best thing
that could happen to a man was to be made a Roman citizen, and this was
always done to persons of rank, by way of compliment--sometimes to whole
cities.
[Picture: View from Corinth]
Athens had never had a great statesman or soldier in her since the time
of Phocion, but her philosophers and orators still went on discoursing in
the schools, and for four hundred years at least Athens was a sort of
university town, where the rich young men from Rome, Carthage,
Alexandria, Asia Minor, and Syria came to see the grand old buildings and
works of art, and to finish their education. For though the great men of
Greece were all dead, their works, both in stone and in writing, still
remained, and were the models of all the world, and their language was
spoken all over the East. The Romans' own tongue, Latin, was used at
home, of course, but every gentleman knew Greek equally well, and all the
Syrians, Jews, and Egyptians who had much intercourse with them used
Greek as the language sure to be known--much as French is now used all
over Europe.
But there was an answer coming to all those strainings and yearnings
after God and His truth which had made those old Greek writings
beautiful. There is a story that one night a ship's crew, passing near a
lonely island in the AEgean Sea, sacred to the gods, heard a great
wailing and crying aloud of spirit voices, exclaiming, "Great Pan is
dead."
Pan was the heathen god of nature, to whom sacred places were dedicated,
and this strange crying was at the very night after a day when, far away
in Judaea, the sun had been darkened at noon, and the rocks were rent,
and One who was dying on a cross had said, "It is finished." For the
victory over Satan and all his spirits was won by death.
Some fifteen years later than that day, as Paul, a Jew of Tarsus, in Asia
Minor, with the right of Roman citizenship, and a Greek education, was
spreading the knowledge of that victory over the East--while he slept at
the new Troy built by Alexander, there stood by his bed, in a vision by
night, a man of Macedon, saying, "Come over and help us."
He went, knowing that the call came from God, and the cities of Macedon
gained quite new honours. Philippi, where he was first received, had a
small number of Jews in it, to whom he spake by the river side, but many
Greeks soon began to listen; and then it was that the evil spirits, who
spake aloud to men in heathen lands, first had to own the power of
Christ, who had conquered. A slave girl, who had long been possessed by
one of these demons, was forced at the sight of Paul and his companion
Silas to cry aloud, "These men are the servants of the Most High God,
which show unto us the way of salvation." She followed them about for
some days doing this, until Paul, grieved in the spirit, bade the evil
one, in JESUS' name, to leave her. At once the name of the Conqueror
caused the demon to depart; but the owner of the slave girl, enraged at
the loss of her soothsaying powers, accused the Apostle and his friend to
the magistrates, and, without examination, they were thrown into prison.
At night, while they sang praise in the dungeon, an earthquake shook it;
the doors were open, the fetters loosed, and the jailer, thinking them
fled, would have killed himself, but for Paul's call to him that all were
safe. He heard the Word of life that night, and was baptised; but St.
Paul would not leave the prison, either then or at the permission of the
magistrates, when they found they had exceeded their powers, but insisted
that they should come themselves to fetch him out, thus marking his
liberty as a Roman, so that others might fear to touch him. He had
founded a church at Philippi, in which he always found great comfort and
joy; and when he was forced to go on to Thessalonica, he found many
willing and eager hearers among the Greeks; but the Jews, enraged at his
teaching these, stirred up the mob, and not only forced him to leave that
city, but hunted him wherever he tried to stop in Macedon, so that he was
obliged to hurry into the next province, Achaia, and wait at Athens for
the companions whom he had left to go on with his work at Philippi and
Thessalonica.
[Picture: Parthenon and Erectheum]
While at Athens, the multitude of altars and temples, and the devotion
paid to them, stirred his spirit, so that he could not but speak out
plainly, and point to the truth. It seemed a new philosophy to the
talkers and inquirers, who had talked to shreds the old arguments of
Plato and Epicurus, and longed for some fresh light or new interest; and
he was invited to Areopagus to set forth his doctrine. There, in the
face of the Parthenon and the Acropolis, with philosophers and students
from all parts of the empire around, he made one of his greatest and
noblest speeches--"Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are
greatly religious. For as I passed through your city, and beheld how ye
worship, I found an altar with this inscription--'TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.'
Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship; Him declare I unto you."
Then, looking forth on the temples crowded on the rocks, he tried to open
their minds to the truth that the God of all dwells in no temples made
with hands, that all men alike are His children, and that, since living,
breathing, thinking man has sprung from Him, it is lowering His greatness
to represent Him by cold, dead, senseless stone, metal, or ivory. "He
bore with the times of ignorance," said Paul; "but now He called on all
men to turn to Him to prepare for the day when all should be judged, by
the Man whom He had ordained for the purpose, as had been shown by His
rising from the dead."
The Greeks had listened to the proclamation of one great unseen God,
higher than art could represent; but when Paul spoke of rising from the
dead, they burst into mockery. They had believed in spirits living, but
not in bodies rising again, and the philosophers would not listen. Very
few converts were made in Athens, only Dionysius, and a woman named
Damaris, and a few more; and the city of learning long closed her ears
against those who would have taught her what Socrates and Plato had been
feeling after like men in the dark.
At the merchant city of Corinth, Paul had greater success; he stayed
there nearly two years, and from thence sent letters to the
Thessalonians, who were neglecting their daily duties, expecting that our
Lord was about immediately to return. After Paul had left Corinth, he
wrote to that city also, first to correct certain evils that had arisen
in the Church there, and afterwards to encourage those who had repented,
and promise another visit. This visit, as well as one to his Macedonian
churches, was paid in his third journey; and when he had been arrested at
Jerusalem, and was in Rome awaiting his trial before the emperor, Nero,
he wrote to his friends at Philippi what is called the Epistle of Joy, so
bright were his hopes of his friends there.
St. Andrew also laboured in Greece, and was put to death in Achaia, by
being fastened to a cross of olive-wood, shaped like an X, where he hung
exhorting the people for three days before he died. When St. Paul was
released, he and the great evangelist St. John, and such of the apostles
as still survived, set the Church in order, appointing bishops over their
cities, and Dionysius of Athens became Bishop of Corinth, and St. Paul's
pupil from Antioch, Titus, was Bishop of Crete, and received an epistle
from Paul on the duties of his office. In process of time Christianity
won its way, and the oracles became silent, as the demons which spoke in
them fled from the Name of JESUS.
[Picture: Distant view of Parnassus]