TARSO (Ταχάς). — City of Cilicia (Act. 22:3), on a once-fertile plain irrigated by the Cydnus, which formerly crossed the inhabited area and near which the synagogue was probably located (ibid. 16:13). St Paul was born at T. (ibid. 9:11, etc.), spent his youth there, and returned for some time after his conversion, until Barnabas came to seek him out in order to take him to Antioch (ca. 43 A.D.), from which the apostolic journeys began (ibid. 11:25).
T. is one of the oldest cities of Asia Minor whose history is known. Already mentioned (Tarzi) on the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (mid-ninth century B.C.), and 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; Greek 2:23 'Ράσσις) among the cities conquered by Holofernes (the Persian period); at the time of Alexander’s conquest a satrap resided there; later it belonged to the Seleucids. As a result of certain measures adopted by Antiochus IV, which were to entail increased taxation or the abolition of certain privileges, a revolt broke out: Antiochus himself went to suppress it (II Mach. 4:30-31), and perhaps on that occasion he granted recognition to a Jewish colony that was already residing there. In the new organization imposed on Asia Minor and Syria by Pompey after the conquest (64 B.C.), Cilicia became a province in its own right and T. its capital.
The period of the city’s greatest splendor began, lasting for more than a century: the triumvir Mark Antony, who had first encountered Cleopatra in the waters of the Cydnus, declared it a “free city” and granted particular groups of citizens certain privileges, which were still recognized and subsequently even enlarged by the emperors. If the Roman citizenship enjoyed by St Paul was hereditary, or belonged to his “tribe,” rather than personal, his origin may perhaps be connected with one of these grants.
In St Paul’s time, in its deepest configuration the city retained the forms of life, cults, and customs of an Eastern center, as is suggested by passages in Dio Chrysostom (Tarsica prior orat., 33, 47). 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. That school produced men renowned for their culture, such as Athenodorus, one of the finest 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, whom Augustus summoned to Rome as tutor to Marcellus. The cosmopolitan character of T. was especially fostered by the active participation of merchants, who had established a port in a small lake formed by the Cydnus, from which they traveled to the inland markets.
Today the city (22,000 inhabitants) lies without importance on a plain partly covered with sand and partly dotted with marshes left by the muddy Cydnus. No particular memories relating to the Apostle remain there.