A free speech tale
“He who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.”
― John Milton, Areopagitica
When Paul the Apostle first climbed the slopes of the Areopagus to give his sermon on the resurrection of Christ, he knew he would be breaking the law be preaching a foreign god on the hill of Athens.
Jesus had died on the cross some seventeen years ago, and Jewish residents had driven Paul out of Thessalonica and Berea, leaving him to travel Greece alone.
But upon arriving, he was dismayed upon finding thousands of Greek deities and monuments already inhabiting the city.
He walked under the shadow of the Acropolis, which overlooks the Areopagus, a rocky outcrop lying northwest of the city centre.
The word Areopagus takes its name from the god of war: ‘Aries’, and of the Greek word for rock, ‘Pagus’, making it literally: ‘the rock of Aries’.
The hill on which free speech was founded is therefore named after the very thing by which it survives: conflict, the basis of all free judiciary.
To the ancient Athenians, the hill was the court of the gods. It was said to be the hill where Ares was summoned to trial for the murder of Poseidon’s son Halirrothius, killed in revenge for raping the god of war’s daughter.
After exploring the city, Paul examined the many monuments that inhabited Athens, searching for ways to introduce the topic of Christ to Roman-occupied Greece.
Eventually, he stumbled upon a monument with the following inscription: AGNOSTOS THEOS (TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.) It was a god as old as any of the others, but one which had never been given a name.
The Athenians then took Paul to the Areopagus and asked him to justify his teachings.
“What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I announce to you,” said Paul, pointing in the direction of the monument where the unknown deity lay.
“The god who made the world and all things in it, he, being lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands. Neither is he served by men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath, and all things.”
The Areopagus council, and the locals of Athens, listened intently.
Aeschylus, an ancient Greek tragedian, spoke of the Areopagus in his play The Eumenides, where he describes a character hunted by the Furies (Greek female deities of vengeance) looking to punish him for killing his mother after the Trojan War.
Orestes, the man pursued by the Furies, was commanded to kill his mother by the Greek god Apollo. As the killing arose from a conflict between the Gods themselves, the Goddess Athena led Orestes to her own city where the Aropagus stood, to put him on trial and wait in judgement of a jury of twelve.
When the trial came to an end, Athena – the patron of Athens – cast the deciding vote and ruled that Orestes be spared.
The goddess of Athens then declared that all trials must henceforth be settled in court, rather than being carried out personally. She then changed the name of the Furies to “the Eumenides” – after whom the play is named – and recast them as gracious deities.
When Paul spoke atop the Areopagus, most Athenians would have understood this introduction to a new god by allusion to Aeschylus’ play.
Just as the Furies were turned by Athena into the Eumenides, so too was the Christian God not a new god to the ancient Greeks, but rather the god the Greeks already worshipped as the “Agnostos Theos”: the Unknown God.
Because the trials under the Areopagus were adjudicated by the gods themselves, no human could question its authority:
“This is the only tribunal which no despot, no oligarchy, no democracy, has ever dared to deprive of its jurisdiction in cases of murder, all men agreeing that in such cases no jurisprudence of their own devising could be more effective than that which has been devised in this court.”
- Demosthenes, Against Aristocrates (352 BC)
Paul, like Orestes and Aries himself, was acquitted, as he was found not to be preaching of a foreign god, but of one already familiar to the Athenians. Paul’s teaching would convert Dionysius the Areopagite, a judge at the council, to Christianity.
The hill where the first Areopagite Council began, and where homicide trials in the ancient world were heard, would be the birthplace of Christianity in Greece, where it would survive – even under Ottoman rule – for the next two-thousand years.
His sermon became famous in the ancient world, and is one of the footholds that Christianity used to place itself in-line with ancient Greek though and culture. This intellectual argument would make its way through Thomas Aquinas’ moral teachings until it reached Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a narrative poem which married Aquinas’ teachings with the philosophical outlook of the Greek and Roman poets.
The idea of free speech would hibernate in the pages of Dante throughout the middle ages, until the renaissance saw a rediscovery of classic Greek and Roman thought.
The enlightenment soon followed, and it was only then when the Areopagus, and its connection to freedom of speech, would find prominence.
John Milton, writer of Paradise Lost and part of the government which overthrew the English monarchy, would use the hill’s history as the crux of his defence of free speech, producing his book Areopagitica.
In its essence, the book argues the censors of ancient Athens, based at the Areopagus, had not practiced the censoring on speech that was being called for in the English Parliament.
“Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.”
― John Milton, Areopagitica (1644)
The book remains among history's most influential and impassioned defences of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, laying the foundations for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.
The three Johns of free speech, they could be called.
Through Milton’s work, and others like it, the principal of free speech was embedded into England's Bill of Rights in 1689, which legally established the constitutional right of freedom of speech in Parliament, remaining in effect to this day, as well as The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted during the French Revolution in 1789, and, finally, into the first amendment of the US Constitution.
The council which determined justice on the Areopagus existed long before democracy. As part of the trial, it was the accused’s right to express themselves and speak freely before being judged by the gods.
Its judges, while ancient, exerted power not to serve themselves but to restore balance and justice to those compelled by the gods to act. This belief survived into the Roman judicial system, and by extension into the Western world.
It is through Athenian law, the law formed on the Areopagus, that Athenian democracy itself developed. The Council of the Areopagus formed the basis of Solon’s laws, which would eventually put justice into the hands of a democratic body, where any citizen could serve on a jury.
In other words, it is free speech and free expression which led to free and fair elections.
Drako, the first recorded legislator of Athens, (our word, Draconian, comes from him) was the first to give the right to vote to the Hoplites, the warriors of Greece, so that only those who bore arms were eligible to vote.
Once Drako’s war was over, he tried to rescind the right to vote from the Hoplites.
Those who were granted freedoms would not have them taken away, however. Soon, once war became such a necessity that the majority of Athenians had to fight, so too did the majority of free, male Athenians gain the right to participate in democracy.
When a Spartan army occupied the city and tried to disband the government and expel seven hundred families, the Athenians – led by the lawgiver Cleisthenes who promised them representation - rose up against them and drove them out. Thus, democracy began, as Athenians would not let their rights be rescinded.
Freedom of expression and free thought, just like democracy, was under threat since its very inception.
The rock of Aries is an appropriate birthplace for the principle of free speech, as every generation must fight anew to preserve free speech, against those who would seek to rescind it.
Francis Kett