Athens was also a very religious city, provoking the apostle Paul’s comment that Athenians “seem to be more given to the fear of the deities than others are.” (Ac 17:22) According to the historian Josephus, the Athenians were ‘the most pious of the Greeks.’ (Against Apion, II, 130 [12]) The State controlled religion and encouraged it by paying for public sacrifices, rites, and processions in honor of the gods. Idols were to be found in temples, in public squares, and on the streets, and people regularly prayed to the gods before engaging in their intellectual feasts or symposiums, political assemblies, and athletic contests. In order not to offend any of the gods, the Athenians even built altars “To an Unknown God,” to which fact Paul refers in Acts 17:23. Second-century geographer Pausanias confirms this, explaining that while he was traveling along the road from Phaleron Bay harbor to Athens (perhaps traversed by Paul on his arrival) he noticed “altars of the gods named Unknown, and of heroes.”​—Description of Greece, Attica, I, 4.

Paul was taken to the Areopagus, but whether he spoke before the court known as the Areopagus cannot be definitely stated. Some say that in Paul’s day the court itself was no longer meeting on the hill but in the agora.

Paul’s eloquent testimony before these learned men of Athens is a lesson in tact and discernment. He showed that, instead of preaching about a new deity, he was preaching about the very Creator of heaven and earth, and he tactfully made reference to the “Unknown God,” whose altar he had seen, and he even quoted from Phænomena by Aratus, a Cilician poet, and from Hymn to Zeus by Cleanthes. (Ac 17:22-31)