The population of Cilicia, as might be expected from its having been from time immemorial the great arena of the nations of the Orient and the Occident, has always been of the most cosmopolitan character. In ancient times Medes and Persians, Assyrians and Babylonians, Scythians and Hittites foregathered here, sometimes bent on the purpose of commerce but more frequently on the prosecution of war and conquest. To-day we find here Syrians and Arabians, Greeks and Armenians, Kurds and Ansaryii, Turkomans and Osmanlis, and representatives from divers parts of Africa and Europe. Was it this heterogeneous character of the Cilicians which gave rise to their widespread reputation for perfidy and untruthfulness and that led to the proverb _Cilix haud facile verum dicet_? Knowing the complex character of its inhabitants, one is not surprised to learn that the gods and idols of the Cilicians were as manifold as the people themselves and that their worship exhibited all the promiscuity of the divers nations from whence they came. Baal and Astarte, Isis, Ishtar, and Osiris had their altars alongside those of Mars and Mercury, Zeus and Aphrodite. There was, indeed, a time--just before the advent of the world’s Redeemer--when it could be said that Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, was, in very truth, the pantheon of paganism. During the zenith of its glory, Cilicia was one of the most densely populated countries in the world. But it has long since so fallen from its high estate that, like the lands of the Nile and the Euphrates, it is a region of ruins. So great indeed have been the ravages of time and warring mortals that “ruins of cities, evidently of an age after Alexander, yet barely named in history, at this day, astonish the adventurous traveler by their magnificence and elegance.”[203] Mopsuestia, which once counted two hundred thousand inhabitants, was an archbishopric and for a time the capital of the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia, now numbers less than a thousand. Anazarbas, which was the home of the poet Oppian and Dioscorides who, “during fifteen centuries was an undisputed authority in botany and _materia medica_, has long since been level with the ground.” Nor is this all. Of many places mentioned by Cicero, when he was proconsul of Cilicia, even the sites are unknown.