CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 3
“Of No Mean City”
1. The province of Cilicia
When paul was arrested during his last visit to Jerusalem (A.D. 57) and brought before the military tribune who commanded the auxiliary cohort in the Antonia fortress, the tribune imagined that he was an Egyptian agitator who had recently attempted some kind of coup in the neighbourhood of the city. Realizing his error when he heard Paul speaking idiomatic Greek, he asked who he was and received the reply, “I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city” (Acts 21:39).
Cilicia, the territory bordering the Mediterranean in South-East Asia Minor, comprised two quite different areas. There was the fertile plain in the east called Cilicia Pedias, between the Taurus range and the sea; the trade route from Syria to Asia Minor ran through it, crossing Mount Amanus by the Syrian Gates and crossing the Taurus range by the Cilician Gates into Central Asia Minor. To the west of that lay the rugged coastland of Cilicia Tracheia (Rough Cilicia), where the Taurus range comes down to the sea.
In Hittite records the Cilician territory is called Kizzuwatna; it was linked by treaty to the Hittite Empire and was later incorporated in it until the downfall of that empire c. 1200 B.C. In the Iliad the Cilicians are mentioned as allies of the Trojans: Hector’s wife Andromache was a Cilician princess.1 In the ninth century B.C. Cilicia fell under the control of the Assyrians, who called it Hilakku (probably the “Helech” of Ezekiel 27:11). From the early sixth century B.C. Cilicia was ruled by a succession of native kings bearing the dynastic title Syennesis; they continued to rule under the overlordship of the Persian Empire until c. 400 B.C., when they were replaced by satraps.2 In 333 B.C. Cilicia became part of the empire of Alexander, who won his decisive battle of Issus there in that year.3 After his death it was controlled by the Seleucids, although for a time the possession of part of the coast of Cilicia Tracheia was contested by the Ptolemies. When the Romans forced Antiochus III to give up most of his territory in Asia Minor (188 B.C.), Eastern Cilicia remained part of the Seleucid Empire for several decades more, but the breakdown of Seleucid control in the second half of the second century B.C. and the consequent exploitation of Cilicia Tracheia as a base for robbers and pirates led the Romans to take an increasingly direct part in the concerns of that area. Part of Western Cilicia became a Roman province in 102 B.C., and after Pompey’s brilliant victory over the pirates in 67 B.C. the whole of Cilicia was reduced to provincial status, with Tarsus as its capital. From about 25 B.C. Eastern Cilicia (including Tarsus) was united administratively with Syria, which had become a Roman province under Pompey in 64 B.C. Western Cilicia was allotted to a succession of client kings. When the last of these kings abdicated in A.D. 72, Eastern Cilicia was detached from Syria and united with Western Cilicia to form the province of Cilicia. For the whole of Paul’s lifetime, however, the area of Cilicia in which his native city stood was part of the united province of Syria-Cilicia, a situation implied in Paul’s statement that some three years after his conversion, following a brief visit to Jerusalem, he “went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia” (Galatians 1:21).
2. The city of Tarsus
Tarsus, the principal city of the fertile plain of East Cilicia, stood on the river Cydnus, about ten miles from its mouth, and some thirty miles south of the Cilician Gates (on the road between the modern towns of Mersin and Adana). It was a fortified city and important trade entrepôt before 2000 B.C. In the second millennium B.C. it is mentioned in Hittite records as a leading city of Kizzuwatna. It was destroyed during the incursions of the Sea Peoples c. 1200 B.C. and some time later was settled anew by Greeks. It was captured by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III in 833 B.C. and again by Sennacherib in 698 B.C. Under the Persians it was the capital of the client kingdom, and later of the satrapy, of Cilicia. It began to issue its own coinage in the fifth century B.C. In 401 B.C. Cyrus the Younger, with the Ten Thousand, spent twenty days in the city on his way east to claim the Persian crown, and exchanged gifts with King Syennesis, whose palace was in Tarsus.4
Alexander the Great saved the city from being fired by the retreating Persians in 333 B.C. Under his Seleucid successors it assumed the name of Antioch-on-the-Cydnus, a name which appears on its new coin issue in the reign of Antiochus IV (from 171 B.C. onwards). This new coin issue seems to coincide with a reorganization of the city’s constitution, which conferred on it a greater degree of municipal autonomy.5 In 83 B.C. it fell into the power of Tigranes I, king of Armenia, the ally and son-in-law of Mithridates VI, but passed into Roman hands as a result of Pompey’s victories, and became the capital of the province of Cilicia, while it retained its autonomy as a free city (67 B.C.). Cicero took up residence in the city during his proconsulship of Cilicia in 51–50 B.C. When Julius Caesar visited the city in 47 B.C. it adopted the name Iuliopolis in his honour. After Caesar’s death and the defeat of the anti-Caesarian party at Philippi in 42 B.C., Tarsus enjoyed the favour of Antony, who controlled Rome’s eastern provinces. It was there in 41 B.C. that the celebrated meeting between Antony and Cleopatra took place, when she was rowed up the Cydnus in the guise of Aphrodite:
From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthroned i’ the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.6
When Augustus ruled the whole Roman world, Tarsus enjoyed further privileges, including exemption from imperial taxation. In the later part of Antony’s domination of the Near East, and for some years after, Tarsus had suffered under the maladministration of a nominee of his named Boethus. Augustus entrusted the administration of the city to one of its most illustrious sons, Athenodorus the Stoic, who had been his own tutor. When Athenodorus returned to Tarsus, he expelled Boethus and his associates, and reformed the civic administration. It may have been at this time that a property qualification of 500 drachmae was fixed for admission to the roll of citizens.7 Athenodorus and his successor, Nestor the Academic (tutor of Marcellus, the nephew of Augustus), also exercised great cultural influence in Tarsus.
According to the geographer Strabo, writing probably in the early years of the first century A.D., the people of Tarsus were avid in the pursuit of culture. They applied themselves to the study of philosophy, the liberal arts and “the whole round of learning in general”—the whole “encyclopaedia”—so much so that Tarsus in this respect at least surpassed even Athens and Alexandria, whose schools were frequented more by visitors than by their own citizens. Tarsus, in short, was what we might call a university city. Yet people did not come from other places to study in its schools: the students of Tarsus were natives of the city, who frequently left it to complete their education elsewhere and rarely returned to it.8 Athenodorus was one of those who left it, but in later years he did return.
A less flattering picture of Tarsus than Strabo’s is given by Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius (the Neopythagorean sage). According to Philostratus, Apollonius, who was born early in the Christian era at Tyana in Cappadocia, went to Tarsus at the age of fourteen to study under the rhetorician Euthydemus. He was much attached to his teacher, but was dismayed to find the general atmosphere of Tarsus not at all conducive to study, for the people were addicted to luxury, levity and insolence, and “paid more attention to their fine linen than the Athenians paid to wisdom”. So he left Tarsus for a more congenial environment.9
This account should not be taken too seriously, however; in this work Philostratus was a romancer rather than a serious biographer and, writing about A.D. 200, he was probably influenced by Dio Chrysostom, who in two orations delivered early in the second century A.D. had castigated the Tarsians for their lack of moral earnestness.10
The prosperity of Tarsus was based on the fertile plain in which it stood. Linen woven in Tarsus from the flax which grew in the plain is repeatedly mentioned by ancient authors (like Philostratus). Reference is made also by Roman writers to a local material called cilicium, woven from goat’s hair, from which were made coverings designed to give protection against cold and wet.
When Paul claimed to be “a citizen of no mean city”, he plainly had good cause to describe Tarsus thus. If his words mean (as they appear to do) that his name appeared on the roll of citizens of Tarsus, this would indicate that he was born into a family which possessed the citizenship. The property qualification for citizenship, laid down perhaps by Athenodorus, has been mentioned already. Dio Chrysostom implies that by organizing itself thus as a timocracy, Tarsus debarred linen-workers and other tradespeople from citizenship, but there seems to be no reason why some tradespeople might not have qualified for it on the strength of their property, Paul is said by Luke to have been a “tent-maker” (skēnopoios), by which we may understand that he was engaged in the manufacture of wares from the local cilicium, but he appears to have belonged to a well-to-do family.
Questions about his Tarsian citizenship have arisen more from his being a Jew than from his being a tent-maker. The citizen body, as in other cities of the Greek type, was presumably organized in tribes or phylai. Since the common life of the tribe or phylē involved religious ceremonies which would have been offensive to Jews, it has been suggested that the Jewish citizens of Tarsus were enrolled in a tribe of their own, solemnized by ceremonies of the Jewish religion. This may indeed have been so, although we have no explicit evidence to this effect. In many Gentile cities Jewish settlers lived as resident aliens, but in some, such as Alexandria, Cyrene, Syrian Antioch, Ephesus and Sardis, they enjoyed citizen rights, and they could well have done so as a distinct group in Tarsus.11