Here flourished the school of the younger Stoics, with its mixture of old Stoic, Orphic, and Platonic ideas. Here the ethical principles of that school were preached in a popular form, in street and market-place, by orators of the people. It was not at all necessary for Paul, brought up in the austerity of the Jewish religion of the Law, to visit the lecture-rooms of the Stoic teachers in order to gain a knowledge of Stoic views, for in Tarsus it was as though the air was filled with that doctrine. Paul was certainly acquainted with it. It sank so deeply into his mind, perhaps unknown to himself, that his epistles are full of the expressions and ideas of the Stoic philosopher Seneca, and to this are due the efforts which have been made to make Seneca a pupil of Paul's, or the reverse, to make Paul a pupil of Seneca's. A correspondence exists, which is admittedly a forgery, pretending to have passed between the two. Tarsus, in spite of its Eastern character, was a city saturated with Greek learning and ways of thought, but not these alone. The religious ideas and motives of the time found also a fruitful soil there. In Tarsus the Hittite Sandan (Sardanapal) was worshipped, a human being upon whom Dionysus had bestowed the godhead of life and fecundity, who was identified by the Greeks either with Zeus, or with Heracles, the divine "Son" of the "Father" Zeus. He passed as the founder of the city, and was represented as a bearded man with bunches of grapes and ears of corn, with a double-headed axe in his right hand, standing on a lion or a funeral pyre; and every year it was the custom for a human representative of the God, or in later times his effigy, to be ceremoniously burnt on a pyre. [323] But Tarsus was also at the same time a centre for the mystery-religions of the East. The worship of Mithras, in particular, flourished there, with its doctrine of the mystic death and re-birth of those received into the communion, who were thereby purified from the guilt of their past life and won a new immortal life in the "Spirit"; with its sacred feast, at which the believers entered into a communion of life with Mithra by partaking of the consecrated bread and chalice; with its conception of the magic effect of the victim's blood, which washed away all sins; and with its ardent desire for redemption, purification, and sanctification of the soul. [324] Paul was not unaffected by these and similar ideas. His conception of the mystic significance of Christ's death shows that; in which conception the whole of this type of religious thought is expressed, although in a new setting. Indeed, the expression (Gal. iii. 27), in which the baptized are said to have "put on" Christ, seems to be borrowed directly from the Mithraic Mysteries. For in these, according to a primitive animistic custom, the initiated of different degrees used to be present in the masks of beasts, representing God's existence