TARSUS (Ταχάς). - A city of Cilicia (Acts 22:3), on a plain, once fertile, irrigated by the Cydnus, which in ancient times ran through the built-up area and near which the synagogue was probably located (ibid. 16:13). At T. St. Paul was born (ibid. 9:11 etc.), spent his youth, and returned for a time after his conversion, that is, until Barnabas came to look for him to bring him to Antioch (ca. 43 A.D.), from which the apostolic journeys began (ibid. 11:25).
T. is one of the most ancient cities of western Asia whose history is known. Already mentioned (Tarzi) on the black obelisk of Shalmaneser III (mid-9th century B.C.), the homeland of certain Homeric heroes, it followed the fortunes of the region amid the succession of hegemonies and the convergence of influences from various Eastern civilizations. It is named in Judith (Vulg. 2:13; Tharsis; Gk. 2:23 'Ράσσις) among the cities conquered by Holofernes (Persian era); at the time of Alexander's conquest a satrap resided there; afterward it belonged to the Seleucids. Because of certain measures of Antiochus IV, which must have entailed fiscal burdens or the abolition of certain privileges, there was a revolt: Antiochus himself went to put it down (2 Macc. 4:30-31) and perhaps on that occasion granted recognition to a Jewish colony already residing there. In the new organization given to Asia Minor and Syria by Pompey after the conquest (64 B.C.), Cilicia was a province in its own right and T. its capital.
Then begins the era of the city's greatest splendor, which lasted more than a century: the triumvir Mark Antony, who had met Cleopatra for the first time in the waters of the Cydnus, declared it a "free city" and granted privileges to particular groups of citizens, still recognized and even extended later by the emperors. If the right of Roman citizenship that St. Paul enjoyed was hereditary, or of a "tribe," rather than personal, its origin is perhaps to be connected with one of these concessions.
In St. Paul's time the city, in its deepest configuration, preserved the forms of life, the cults, the customs of an Eastern center, as hints in Dio Chrysostom (Tarsica prior orat., 33, 47) suggest. Its external appearance and its cultural and civic organization, however, were those of a great Hellenistic polis. A school flourished there which, according to the enthusiastic testimony of Strabo (XIV, 5, 13-14), had nothing to envy in centers such as Athens and Alexandria. From that school came men famous for their culture, such as Athenodorus, one of the best representatives of Stoicism and a friend of Augustus (who later sent him as governor to T. to remedy the misgovernment of his predecessor Poetus, "a bad poet and a bad citizen": Strabo, ibid.), and Nestor, also a Stoic, summoned by Augustus to Rome as tutor to Marcellus. The cosmopolitan character of T. was especially nourished by the active contribution of merchants, who had made a port in a small lagoon formed by the Cydnus, from which they set out for the inland markets.
Today the city (22,000 inhabitants) lies without importance on a plain partly silted up and partly dotted with the marshes left by the muddy Cydnus. No particular memories relating to the Apostle remain there.
Bibliography2 works
Giovanni Rinaldi