When Paul arrived in 51 CE, Athens was a small city, about 20,000, far smaller than Corinth at 100,000, and well past its prime. Still, for prominent Greeks and Romans, it was a center of learning and the philosophical pursuit of truth. The Golden Age of Athens had been in the 5th century BCE during the rule of Pericles (b.495, d.429) who transformed Athens into an imperial city at the expense of other Greek city-states. Growing in power after repulsing the first Persian invasion at Marathon in 490, Athens' powerful navy dominated the Aegean Sea and Pericles built the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, and the Propylaea on the Acropolis with tribute money he extracted from the client states of the Athenian empire. Internally, he reformed the constitution to further democracy and promoted Greek drama to its greatest expression with the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Other notables of the time included Thucydides and Herodotus, famous historians, Hippocrates, the patron saint of the medical profession, and Socrates, the philosopher, who refined his method in the Agora. Thus, Athens became the center of literature and art, philosophy and rhetoric, science and architecture in the ancient world.

Other city-states, especially Sparta, who had delayed the Persian army at Thermopylae in 480, envied Athenian dominance under Pericles. During the disastrous Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BCE), and a deadly plague during the war, Athens declined as a cultural center. After its defeat by Sparta in 404 BCE, although it regained its independence a year later, it never quite reached the same prominence as a world center of artistic and intellectual endeavor. In the unstable period following the war, Socrates was condemned to death (399) for questioning the traditional gods and thus corrupting the youth, a martyr to the freedom of reason. As the 4th century BCE progressed, Plato, Socrates' pupil, established his Academy (385) and Aristotle, Plato's student and Alexander's teacher, founded the Lyceum (335). Other philosophers, including Demosthenes and Isocrates, made rhetoric a fine art during this same time. It was, indeed, a Classic Period.

Athens lost its independence as a free-standing city-state in 338 BCE, when Philip of Macedonia took advantage of the political disunity in Greece and established control over the region. Later, in 215 BCE, Rome began to interfere in Greek affairs and, in 146 BCE, after a war that destroyed Corinth, Greek territories, including Athens, fell under direct Roman rule. Athens maintained good relations with the Romans until 86 BCE, when Sulla sacked it for supporting one of Rome's enemies. For such disloyalty, the Romans destroyed many of its monuments and left all of central Greece, including Delphi, in ruins.