Mars' Hill.

Paul's sermon.

field we picked our way, a walk of a few minutes only, to the foot of Mars' Hill. Sixteen steps cut in the solid rock lead us to a hewn platform in the same rock, where sat the famous council of the Areopagus. In the darkness of night, in the open air, under the canopy of heaven, where they could not see the criminal or be seen themselves except by the gods, these stern old judges held their court on this hill of Mars. Here Socrates was tried and condemned. Up these steps the great Apostle was led, and on this spot, the tribune where the speaker stood, we suppose Paul was standing when he addressed the men of Athens in that majestic discourse which assailed their paganism, and unfolded to them the knowledge of the only living and true God. Standing as nearly as we could upon the spot where he stood, I opened the Bible and read his discourse, delivered from the same place more than eighteen hundred years ago. Several friends, ladies and gentlemen, had joined us now, and a little group stood in silence and fixed attention, listening to the words of the great Apostle. It is impossible to feel the full force of that sermon without understanding the locality in which it was delivered. Before the speaker was this Acropolis, shining with the splendor of the most beautiful temples, and enriched with the most costly shrines the world ever saw. Around him lay the proud city of Athens, with all its learning and art, yet plunged in the gross darkness of paganism; and no wonder that the spirit of the Apostle was stirred to point to these temples, and with his trumpet-voice

Tomb of Socrates.

His death.

to tell them that the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands. We compared these allusions in his discourse with the objects still near us, and drew new lessons from the illustrations thus forced upon our attention. My friends urged me while in Athens to preach a sermon on Mars' Hill to the English residents, but I confess that I shrunk from preaching in Paul's pulpit.

We then travelled across the fields to the hill, in the side of which is a dungeon

hewn out of a solid rock, and tradition, without any dispute, assigns to this place the imprisonment and death of Socrates. We entered the low door and could barely stand upright under the vaulted roof. A hole in the top of it might admit air, and served also for the introduction of food, which the keepers could let down to the prisoner. In this dungeon he drank the hemlock, and died: the purest of heathen philosophers, and a man whose principles make a nearer approach to the religion of the Bible, than any one's who has lived and died without it.

COKPATHC

BUST OF SOCRATES.

Leaving the dungeon of Socrates, we came over to the PNYX, the tribune on which the Grecian orators stood to address the gathered thousands of Athens. A rock had been smoothed off for a platform, and at its base was a wide area, which may have been inclosed within a wall; but here in the open air the

I*

people were accustomed to listen to the eloquence of such men as Demosthenes and Pericles, and to decide by a popular vote those great questions on which the fate of empires hung.

Demetrius led us still further on to a sloping rock, worn very smooth, and we are told that the Grecian ladies were accustomed to slide down this inclined plane on their backs, as a certain cure for sterility. Our Greek guide, in his white skirt, showed us how the slide was made, by performing the experiment. These were sights enough for one day. For many successive days they were continued. Sometimes we

wandered again over these same ruins and remains, meditating in this sepulchre of a dead city, and over these monuments of a noble and departed race.

In the great square in front of the Capitol, I met the King and Queen riding on horseback, and dressed in full Greek costume. Otho, son of the old king of Bavaria, has a strong German look, which his costume, adopted to please the Greeks, does not conceal. They were attended by a suite of half a dozen gentlemen, and were out for an airing in the afternoon. The King is not popular. He is a foreigner; the Greeks are a proud people, with little or nothing to

Pride of the people.

Race-course.

be proud of, and they chafe more and more under the idea of being ruled by an imported prince. If they should form an extensive conspiracy on the know-nothing principle of American nativism, they may overturn the government one fine morning. Nothing but English and French influence keeps it up now, and a government that can not stand alone, is not likely to stand long.

The next day Demetrius led us out of the city to the ancient stadium, or race course. In a vale with the hills rising gently on both sides, where spectators in uncounted thousands might sit or stand and survey the contests, we found the evident marks of the old running ground. The sloping hillsides were once lined with white marble seats, now all gone. But here the chariots and horsemen and footmen had contended, after months of training, princes not disdaining, as in the Olympic games, to enter the lists, if they might have princes for their competitors. Two of our young friends pitted themselves against one another, and set off to perform the course, but broke down and gave it up before they were half-way around. An ancient carriage-way leads up by a tunnel to the hill above, and by this subterranean passage, when the race was over, the competitors might retire.

Nearer to the city is the temple of Jupiter Olympus, the greatest building that was ever reared in Athens. It was begun by Pisistratus, 500 B.C., and never completed till under Hadrian, A.D. 150. And now there stands a host of unsupported sixteen Co

rinthian columns, perhaps sixty feet high: beautiful columns they are, and sublime in their naked grandeur. The gathered soil of twenty centuries has been removed, and the white marble floor is now exposed to the light of heaven, and in the midst of those perfect monuments of the past, we trod the courts of the temple of Jupiter, as the worshippers did for centuries before Christ was born. About two years ago one of these columns fell, and now lies prone ("as the tree falleth so it lieth") in fifteen separate blocks, besides the capital and pedestal-a glorious ruin-an emblem of Greece; more suggestive as it lies than those still