TARSUS (Ταρσός). - A city of Cilicia (Acts 22:3), situated in a plain, once fertile, watered by the Cydnus, which anciently flowed through the inhabited area and near which the synagogue was probably located (ibid., 16:13). Tarsus was the birthplace of St Paul (ibid., 9:11, etc.), where he spent his youth and returned for a time after his conversion, until Barnabas came to seek him out to take him to Antioch (c. AD 43), from where the apostolic missions began (ibid., 11:25).
Tarsus is one of the oldest cities in Asia Minor whose history is known. Already mentioned (as Tarzi) in the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (mid-9th century BC), it was the homeland of some Homeric heroes and followed the fortunes of the region through successive hegemonies and the confluence of influences from various Eastern civilizations. It is named in Judith (Vulg., 2:13; Tharsis; Gr., 2:23; 'Ράσως') among the cities conquered by Holofernes (Persian period); at the time of Alexander’s conquest a satrap resided there; later it belonged to the Seleucids. Because of certain measures by Antiochus IV, which were to entail tax increases or the abolition of certain privileges, a revolt broke out: Antiochus himself went to suppress it (2 Macc. 4:30-31) and perhaps on that occasion granted recognition to a Jewish colony already residing there. In the new organization of Asia Minor and Syria given by Pompey after his conquest (64 BC), Cilicia became a separate province with Tarsus as its capital.
The period of Tarsus’s greatest splendour began, lasting for more than a century: the triumvir Mark Antony, who had first met Cleopatra on the waters of the Cydnus, declared it a ‘free city’ and granted special privileges to certain groups of citizens, which were later confirmed and even expanded by the emperors. If St Paul’s Roman citizenship was of family or ‘tribal’ origin rather than personal, his ancestry may perhaps be connected with one of these concessions.
At the time of St Paul, the city in its deepest configuration retained the ways of life, cults and customs of an Eastern centre, as hints from Dio Chrysostom suggest (Tarsica prior orat., 33, 47). Instead, its outward appearance and cultural and civic organization were those of a great Hellenistic polis. A school flourished there which, according to the enthusiastic testimony of Strabo (XIV, 5, 13-14), was in no way inferior to centres such as Athens and Alexandria. From this school emerged men renowned for their learning, such as Athenodorus, one of the finest representatives of Stoicism and a friend of Augustus (who later sent him to govern Tarsus to remedy the misrule of his predecessor, Poetus—‘a bad poet and a bad citizen’: Strabo, loc. cit.), and Nestor, also a Stoic, whom Augustus summoned to Rome as tutor to Marcellus. The cosmopolitan character of Tarsus was especially nourished by the active participation of merchants, who had created a port in a small lake formed by the Cydnus, from which they traded with inland markets.
Today the city (pop. 22,000) lies in obscurity in a plain partly silted up and partly covered by the marshes left by the muddy Cydnus. No particular reminders of the Apostle remain.