A long, forlorn, uncomfortable way.
Mopsuestia, which was formerly one of the largest and most flourishing cities of Cilicia, was fabled to have been founded during the Trojan war by Mopsus, the son of Manto and Apollo, while Adana, the most important commercial center on the Sarus and the Bagdad Railway, owes its name, legend has it, to Adam, its fabulous founder.
A notable feature of the history of Cilicia is the number of crowned heads who died or found their last resting place within its borders. Constantius, the son of Constantine, died of fever at Mopsucrene, near Tarsus, while marching against his nephew and rival, Julian the Apostate. It was to Tarsus that the embalmed body of the Apostate Emperor, who had been transfixed by a Persian javelin beyond the Tigris, was brought for burial. It was in Tarsus that Maximinus, the last of the great persecutors of the Church, preceding Constantine the Great, died in the greatest agony of a frightful disease—a visitation, according to many, for his barbarous persecutions of the Christians and for his horrible blasphemies against their Lord and Savior. It was, we are informed by Strabo, at Anchiale, the port of Tarsus, where were entombed the mortal remains of the celebrated Assyrian ruler known to the Greeks as Sardanapalus. On his monument was a stone statue beneath which was the famous epitaph—attributed to the Assyrian monarch himself—which, as rendered by Byron in his tragedy “Sardanapalus,” ran:
Sardanapalus,
The King and son of Ancyndaraxes
In one day built Anchiale and Tarsus.
Eat, drink and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip.[201]
Asurbanipal, according to this inscription which was supposed to express in a few words the guiding principles of this life, evidently belonged to that class of Europeans who are seemingly becoming daily more numerous of whom the poet speaks in the words:
Esse aliquos manes et subterranea regna
Vix pueri credunt.[202]