That bare lump of rock sitting just below the entrance to the Acropolis is the Areopagus, and your brain is going to file it as a viewing platform. It was a courtroom.
The Areopagus is the oldest court in Athens, and it is a hill with nothing on it. No building, no benches, no roof. The elders sat on the stone, in the open air, and tried murders. Nothing else, homicide only, and that was the entire jurisdiction.
The rock itself is limestone worn to a shine. Two and a half thousand years of feet have polished the top of it closer to glass than stone. That's why there's a steel staircase bolted to the side now, and why people come down it a good deal more carefully than they went up.
Athenian myth says the first defendant tried here was Ares. The god. He'd killed a son of Poseidon who had attacked his daughter, and the other gods convened on this rock to hear it out and acquitted him. The court was named after the defendant. Imagine a legal system so old that its founding case is a mu
rder trial of the god of war, and he walked.
But the thing I actually want to tell you about this hill involves a plague and some sheep.
The tradition goes that Athens was dying of an epidemic and nothing was working. Sacrifices, prayers, the lot. The city concluded it had offended a god, but couldn't work out which one, so it sent to Crete for a holy man called Epimenides. His solution was live
