Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 17:16

"Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he beheld the city full of idols." — Acts 17:16 (ASV)

His spirit was stirred in him.—The verb is the root of the noun from which we get our “paroxysm,” and which is translated by “sharp contention” in Acts 15:39. Athens, glorying now, as it had done in the days of Sophocles (Œdip. Col. 1008), in its devotion to the gods, presented to him, even after seeing Tarsus and Antioch, a new aspect.

The city was full of idols: Hermes-busts at every corner, statues and altars in the atrium or courtyard of every house, temples and porticos and colonnades, all presenting what was to him the same repulsive spectacle.

He looked on the Theseus and the Ilissus, and the friezes of the Centaurs and Lapithæ on the Parthenon, as we look on them in our museums. But any sense of art-beauty which he may have had (and it was probably, in any case, only weak) was over-powered by his horror that men should bow down and worship what their own hands had made.

The beauty of form which we admire in the Apollo or the Aphrodite, the Mercury or the Faun, would be to him, in its unveiled nakedness, a thing to shudder at.

He knew too well what that love of sensuous beauty had led to in Greek and Roman life (Romans 1:24–27), when it had thrown aside what, to a Jew, were not only the natural instincts of purity but also the sanctions of a divine command (Genesis 9:22).