In the long list of men produced by Tarsus, or who added luster to its name as teacher of students, were the two Athenodori, one of whom had been the tutor of Julius Cæsar and the other the friend of Cato and the instructor of Augustus. These were Stoics. Among the Academicians was Nestor, who was the preceptor of Marcellus, the son of Octavia, sister of Augustus. Other eminent men of Tarsus, mentioned by Strabo, were the philosophers, Archimedes and Antipater, the latter of whom was highly praised by Cicero, and who, next to Zeno, was considered as the most eminent of the Stoics. There were also Strabo, the great geographer, the grammarians Diodorus and Artemidorus, and the poets Dionysides and Aratus, from whose poem, “Phænomena,” St. Paul quoted the pregnant words, “For we too are His offspring,” in his epochal address to the Athenians on the Areopagus. According to Strabo, Rome was full of learned men from Tarsus, in whose schools, as has been well said, was taught in its completeness the whole circle of instruction, the systematic course from which we get our word “encyclopædia.”[208] But the flowering of so many ages of preparation in philosophy and religion was the great “Apostle of the Gentiles.” The selection of his birthplace seems to have been providential. Sir William Ramsay is so convinced of this that he writes “that it was the one suitable place that has been borne in on the present writer during long study of the conditions of society and geographical environment of the Cilician lands and cities.... Its peculiar suitability to educate and mould the mind of him who should in due time make the religion of the Jewish race intelligible to the Græco-Roman world, and raise that world up to the moral level of the Hebrew people and the spiritual level of ability to sympathize with the Hebrew religion in its perfected stage, lay in the fact that Tarsus was the city whose institutions best and most completely united the oriental and the western character.... Not that even in Tarsus the union was perfect; that was impossible so long as the religion of the two elements were inharmonious and mutually hostile. But the Tarsian state was more successful than any of the other of the great cities of that time in producing an amalgamated society, in which the oriental and the occidental spirit in union attained in some degree to a higher plain of thought and action. In others the Greek spirit, which was always anti-Semitic, was too strong and too resolutely bent on attaining supremacy and crushing out all opposition. In Tarsus the Greek qualities and powers were used and guided by a society which was on the whole more Asiatic in character.”[209]