So matters stood when Cilicia became a Roman Province in 104 B.C.  The city fell into the hands of the barbarian Tigranes twenty years later, but Gnaeus Pompeius re-established the Roman power, and with it the dominance of Hellenism, in 63.  Augustus turned Cilicia into a mere adjunct of Syria; and the pride of Tarsus received a check.  Nevertheless, the Emperor showed great favour to the Tarsians, who had sided with Julius and himself in the civil wars.  Tarsus was made a ‘libera civitas,’ with the right to live under its own laws.  The leading citizens were doubtless given the Roman citizenship, or allowed to purchase it.  Among these would naturally be a number of Jews, for that nation loved Julius Caesar and detested Pompeius.  But Hellenism could not retain its hold on Tarsus.  Dion Chrysostom, who visited it at the beginning of the second century A.D., found it a thoroughly Oriental town, and notes that the women were closely veiled in Eastern fashion.  Possibly this accounts for St. Paul’s prejudice against unveiled women in church.  One Greek institution, however, survived and flourished—­a university under municipal patronage.  Strabo speaks with high admiration of the zeal for learning displayed by the Tarsians, who formed the entire audience at the professors’ lectures, since no students came from outside.  This last fact shows, perhaps, that the lecturers were not men of wide reputation; indeed, it is not likely that Tarsus was able to compete with Athens and Alexandria in attracting famous teachers.  The most eminent Tarsians, such as Antipater the Stoic, went to Europe and taught there.  What distinguished Tarsus was its love of learning, widely diffused in all classes of the population.

St. Paul did not belong to the upper class.  He was a working artisan, a ‘tent-maker,’ who followed one of the regular trades of the place.  Perhaps, as Deissmann thinks, the ‘large letters’ of Gal. vi. 11 imply that he wrote clumsily, like a working man and not like a scribe.  The words indicate that he usually dictated his letters.  The ’Acts of Paul and Thekla’ describe him as short and bald, with a hook-nose and beetling brows; there is nothing improbable in this description.  But he was far better educated than the modern artisan.  Not that a single quotation from Menander (1 Cor. xv. 33) shows him to be a good Greek scholar; an Englishman may quote ’One touch of nature makes the whole world kin’ without being a Shakespearean.  But he was well educated because he was the son of a strict Jew.  A child in such a home would learn by heart large pieces of the Old Testament, and, at the Synagogue school, all the minutiae of the Jewish Law.  The pupil was not allowed to write anything down; all was committed to the memory, which in consequence became extremely retentive.  The perfect pupil ’lost not a drop from his teacher’s cistern.’  At the age of about fourteen the boy would be sent to Jerusalem, to study under one of the great Rabbis; in St. Paul’s case it was