Areopagus (Hastings' Dictionary)

The hUI of Mars is an eminence nearly due west of the Athenian Akro- polis, and separated therefrom by a low, narrow declivity. Here sat from the earliest antiquity the council of the Areopagus, at first a mainly judicial body composed of Eupatrid;e recruited annually from the retiring arehons.

After the Macedonian subjugation of Athens, and under the Roman rule, this council probably retained more authority within Attica than any other representative body, and references to it in later Attic inscriptions are numerous. The hill rises gradually from the W., but drops abruptly on N. and E. On the summit remain the benches cut out of the rock on which the Areopagites sat in the open air ({jirai$pioi 4StKa- CopTo, Pollux, viii. 118).

Sixteen worn steps cut in the rock lead to the summit ; and the two stones, called the ipyol \iSoi, the a(9os avatStlas 'of im- placability,' and v3i>(as 'of ill-doing,' still remain, on one and the other of which sat the accuser and the accused of murder. The council is termed in Inscr. Attic, iii. 714, ' the most holy,' to <reiJii>6TaTov (TuvfSpiov ; and to us the awful a.ssociations, which attached to the hill and to the cave of the Furies at its foot, made it a fitting background for St.

Paul's solemn declaration of a new faith in the unknown God. However, there is no reason to suppose that the curious idlers who led St. Paul tliither had any other end in view than to gain a quiet spot, far removed from the hum of the busy Agora below, where they might hear in peace what this newest of enthusiasts had to say. The state- ment of St. Luke, that the philosophers took St. Paul by the hand («Vi\ai3((,ucTOi, Ac 17'% cf. Ac 9-' 2313, also Mt.

14^', Mk 8'^^), is not appropriate to accusers bringing to trial a religious innovator. Nor, if the meeting which St. Paul addressed had been a judicial court, would it have dispersed in the way related ; some mocking, while others said, ' We will hear thee again of this matter.' There- fore Chrysostom's view, that St. Paul was formally arraigned before the Areopagite council, must be dismissed.

There is every reason, moreover, for believing that in Ac 17=^-'' we have the actual gist of what St. Paul said, and in tone it is not the defence of a man forcibly apprehended and put on his trial for blasphemy.* Standing on the Areopagus and facing N., St. Paul had at his feet the Theseion, and on his right hand the Akropolis, with its splendid temples intact. Such surroundings would fill with en- thusiasm every cultured Christian of to-day. Wherever St.

Paul turned, his glance must have fallen on the severe and lovely works of art which still adorned the decadent city. Thus a table was spread before him of which nineteenth century humanists are laboriously but thankfully gather- ing up the scattered crumbs. To St. Paul's Semitic imagination nothing of all this appealed. It was to him just gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man's device, the work of a period of ignorance at which God had mercifully winked.

For a fuller disquisition on this point, and for a description of the view of Athens from the Hill of Mars, see Conybeare and Howson, Life and Ep. of St. Paul, ch. X. F. C. Conybeaue. ARES ('Ape's), 1 Es 51". — 756 of his descendants returned with Zerub. : they coiTespond to the 775 (Ezr 2*) or 652 (Neh T'") children of Arab C^??) H. St. J. Tuackehay. ARETAS (Aram, .nnn, Gr.

'Aperas, more correctly 'ApfBas, as in the name of the famous bishop of Cajsarea Mazaca ; the analogy of ciperij probably influenced the commoner spelling). — 1. King of the ' .\rabians,' 2 Mac 5* (see below). 2. King of the Nabatajan Arabs, whose 'ethnarci' rvr gover- • See, however, Ramsay in Eirpoa. 5th Ser. U. 209 f., '261 f. AKETAS AKGOB 145 nor, apparently at the instance of the Jews (Ac gu.

M, fa^ [jis ^vjfg may ^ygH have been a proselj-te), was guarding the city of Damascus to capture {■niaai, 2 Co 1 1") and destroy (Ac 9) St. Paul. He escaped the ethnarch's hands by tlie aid of the disciples, who lowered him in a basket from a window in the wall. This was shortly after St. Paul's conversion, which event, rather than his escape from Damascus, would seem to be the terminus a quo of the juexd rpia. (r-q of Gal 1" (see Lightf. in luc).

If so, the escape may have taken place at any point of time during the three years. If the escape itself is the point from which they are reckoned, the conversion can hardly lie far behind. How Damascus, a town within the Rom. prov. of Syria, came to be guarded by the officer of an Arab king, is a much-debated question. The most probable solution is the hypothesis of a temporary extension of the Arab kingdom to Damascus.

The facts are as follows : — The Nabataeans (iD3]) are possibly identical with the Nebaioth (nv3i) of O T (so Jos. Ant. I. xii. 4. The main difficulty is the unvarying distinctness of the final consonants o and n). They were prob- ably of Arab race, but used the Aram, language for writing and inscriptions (Noldeke in Scheukel, BL, 1872, s.v. Nabatiier, and in ZDMG xvii. 703 sqq., XXV. 122 sqq.) We first meet with them as a formidable power in connexion with the wars of Antigonus, B.C.

312, centred in the former Edomite stronghold of Sela (Nabat. ' Sal,' Gr. lUrpa, hence the name for their country, 'Apa/Sia ^ vphs t^ Uh-pi^ or ' Arabia Petraea '), whence their power gradually extended itself N. and S. Their first known iiiler is the Aretas of 2 Mac 5", with whom Jason y,&s imprisoned (^K\ei<r$els) or, per- haps, ' accused ' (adojiting the conjecture ^/tXTjffeJj), B.C. 169. A. is rupaffoi, not yet a recognised king.

A few years later the Nabatfeans appear as friendly to the Maccabaean party (1 Mac 5» 9*>). With the decay of the Gr. kingdoms of Syria and Egypt the Nabatieans increase in power ; about B.C. 105 their ' king ' Erotimus ' nunc Aegyptum nunc Syriara infestabat magnumque nomen Arabum viribus finitimorum exsanguibus fecorat ' (Trog. Pomp. ap. Justin, XXXIX. V. 5-6). By B.C. 85 A. lU. is master of Dama.scus ; to him belong the coins BaaMui 'Aph-ov 'tMWrjvos struck at Dama-scus (Schurer, HJP I. ii.

353, n. 11). He took the side of Hyrcanus against Aristobulus, B.C. 65-62, and in the latter year was attacked by Scaurus whom Pompey had left as lej^ate of Syria ; Scaurus obtained a nominal submission and a payment of money {.1 oa. Ant. XIV. v. 1 j JBJl. viii. 1). Damascus hadalrca<ly fallen into Rom. hands {Ant. XIV. ii. 3; BJ I. vi. 2), in which it remained, with the excep- tion to be noticed below, as part of the prov.

of Syria, but with certain liberties of its own (for proof in detail see Schiirer, n- 14, in part modifying Mommsen's important note. Provinces, Eng. tr. vol. ii. p. 148 sq.) A. III. was succeeded by Malchus (c. 60-28), Obodas II. (c. 28-9 B.C.), and A. IV. (c. 9 B.C.-A.D. 40), the subject of the present article. His original name was Aeneas, but he assumed the name of A. on taking the kingdom (Jos. Ant. XVI. ix. 4). In B.C.

4 he sends some unruly auxili- aries to aid the expedition of Varus against the Jews {BJ II. V. 1 ; Ant. XVII. x. 9). After A.D. 28 he attacked and defeated Herod Antipas, partly in revenge for the divorce of his daughter by the latter (see Heeodias, and Jos. Ant. xvill. v. 1, 2 ; the victory was transferred in Christian legend to Abgar of Ede.s.'ia ; Gutschniidt, Ktcine Schri/ten, iii. 31). Tiberius ordered Vitellius, propraetor of Syria, to chastise A. for this attack, but the news of Tiberiu.

s' death (A.D. 37) put an end to the ex- pedition (,Jos. ilAd. § 3). This brings us to the period of St. Paul's escape, VOL. I. — lO which was within 3 years ot his first vi.sit lo tlie Church at Jems., which latter again was within 14 years of the visit recorded in Gal 2. Taking the latter (against Ramsay's view, St. Paul the Traveller, but see Sanday in Expositor, Feb. and Apr. 1896) as identical with that of Ac 15, and working back with the data of the Ac from the arrival of Fkstus, A.D.

60, we time Gal 2 about the j'ear 51. ' Fourteen years ' previous, i.e. about 38, comes St. Paul's first visit to the Church of Jerus., and the three previous years again, viz. 38, 37, and 36, bring us to the time of his conversion, and cover the time of his escape from Damascus. At some time, then, during the three years in question, Dama-scus had come under A. It cannot have been long before, as there are coins of Damas- cus with the image and superscription of Tiberius down to A.D.

34 ; but there are none with those of Gains or Claudius. The image of Nero begins in 62-63. The inference is natural that the acces- sion of Gains marks the transfer. That A. could have seized it by force in the face of Vitellius is out of the question. But it is not improbable that it was granted to him by the new emperor. Gaius was not kindly disposed towards Herod Antipas, and would not be unlikely to grant a mark of imperial favour to his bitter enemy.

It is true that the deposition and banishment of Herod took place only in the summer of 39 (Schurer, I. ii. 36n.), a date scarcely early enough for St. Paul's escape from Damascus. But the grant to Agrippa of the tetrarchy of Philip and Lysanias, wiUi the title of king, appears to have been one of Caligula's first acts {Ant. XVIII. vL 10), and in 38 the emperor granted an Ituraean principality to Soemus (Dio Cass. lix. 12). A simLlar grant may well have been made to Aretas. A.

must have lived tUI about A.D. 40, as of the 20 dated Aretas-inscriptions of el-Hegr, two be- long to his 48th year, as also do certain coins. No other Nabataean king has left so rich a legacy of coins and inscriptions. On both, his stanuing title is Rakem-ammeh, ' lover of his people ' (the contra.st with the ^iXAXtjc of A. III. supr. is suggestive). Under him the NabaUean kingdom extended from the Euphrates to the Red Sea (cf. Jos. Ant. I. xii. 4).

By 62 Damascus had again been taken over by the Romans, and belonged to the province of Syria when, in 106, the Nabataean kingdom itself was added to the empire as the province of Arabia. What is greatly wanted is a coin (or coins) of Damascus between 37 and 54 A.D. Meanwhile, it should be noted that 2 Co 11" is our solitary' piece of positive evidence for Damascus having formed part of the Nabattean kingdom at any time after the Christian era.

The fact, as has been shown above, has an important bearing on Pauline chronology. The best collection and discussion of the evidence is in Schurer, HJP I. ii., esp. his indispensable Append, ii. on the Nabatasan kingdom, pp. 345- 302, to which the above article is prmcipally indebted. LiTBRATURK. — Sch0r«r Rives ample references to the lit. of the Nuliata>an kiti^'doiii. In more special relation to A. iv. see Ck-rntn, Chrontit. d. Paul. liriffe, fi 22 ; Conybeare atit) llowsoii, vol. 1. ch.

Iii. ftppendix ; EutinK', SabalUitcke ln»chr\ftfn atu Aratnen, Ijerlin, 1SS6 (contJUnini; a reconstructed liNt of klni,^ by von Outsi'hniidt) ; J. G. Heyne, djt Ethnarcha Aretits Arahujn reiju (Wiltcmb. \lbb); Anjfer, d temitorum in Aft. Apt). ralionA, pp. 173-182; Wiescler, rAr(mo/(»i/i>, pp. 167 17'>. and In PHK. m.p. Aretas; Meyer- Wendt on Acts, Hijit. f i n. \ Ruhdin, de Palattiiita et Arabia Fromneiit liomanit (!■*.').

Also, in addition to the rcforcnoei to the body of this articlu, see Akauu, Paul, Damascus, Nibaiotb, Etiinarch. A. Robertson. ARQOB (3i-)(<).— Apparently an officer of IVka hiah, kinjj of Israel, a.s.sa.ssinated by I'ekah together with the king his mostor and one Arieh 146 ARGOB ARGOB (2 K 15") ; 80 Ewald, Thenius, Keil, and most. Another explan.ation makes Argob and Arieh conspirators with Pekah. Probably the passage is corrupt. See Klostermann, who suggests the emendation vnsj nxc ys"!

^'^^ 'with his 400 warriors'; — by a sudden coup Pekah and his 50 surprise 400. C. F. BuRNEY.