Ebook St. Paul in Asia Minor

The words by which St. Paul describes his own birth place might well be used of it without any exaggeration. He was indeed a citizen of "no mean city." It was conspicuously, in the language of ancient geographers and historians, the greatest, the most illustrious of the cities of Cilicia. At the time of the expedition of the Ten Thousand Greeks, of which Xenophon has given us the record (B.C. 400), it was populous and flourishing, and its history carries us back to a yet more remote antiquity. It shared with Anchiale the honour of being immortalized in the famous epitaph attributed to Sardanapalus, the last of the Assyrian kings, and which told how he,

The son of Anacyndaraxes,
In one day built Anchiale and Tarsus.
Eat, drink, and love: the rest's not worth a fillip.