--Romans 11:33-36.
Now unto the King eternal, incorruptible, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.
--I Timothy 1:17.
VIEW OF ANTIOCH, WHERE THE DISCIPLES WERE FIRST CALLED CHRISTIANS.
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood and used by special permission.
There was everything in the situation and circumstances of this city to make it a place of concourse for all classes and kinds of people. By its harbor of Seleucia it was in communication with all the trade of the Mediterranean; and, through the open country behind the Lebanon, it was conveniently approached by the caravans from Mesopotamia and Arabia. It united the inland advantages of Aleppo with the maritime opportunities of Smyrna. It was almost an Oriental Rome, in which all the forms of the civilized life of the Empire found some representative.
At the rugged bases of the mountain, the ground was leveled for a glorious street, which extended for four miles across the length of the city, and where sheltered crowds could walk through continuous colonnades from the eastern to the western suburb. The whole was surrounded by a wall, which, ascending to the heights and returning to the river, does not deviate very widely in its course from the wall of the Middle Ages, which can still be traced by the fragments of ruined towers. This wall is assigned by a Byzantine writer to Tiberius, but it seems more probable that the Emperor only repaired what Antiochus Epiphanes had built.
