city streets, doubtless finding a ready market in a place with a transient population of sailors and businessmen. This teeming first-century city has a remarkably contemporary feel to it. Intellectually alert, materially prosperous yet morally bankrupt, it anticipates the post-modern West by two thousand years, for its predominant theme was the reckless cultivation of the self. Most of us will know people who would have felt at home there. Certainly the first readers of this epistle would have faced