place like a stranger, he owns that he is a stranger, trees and flowers cannot teach him, men can; so he stays with men in the city. Gratuitous description of scenery in prose was a trick of the rhetorical school; and what survives of such attempts makes the reader content that there is so little. If we follow Socrates’ example and ask what men had to teach in the city, we learn that long before the Roman times Tarsus was a centre of Greek culture.1 Strabo, who wrote or compiled his geography about