The large mountainous island south of the Aegean, fifth-largest in the Mediterranean and seat of Europe's oldest civilisation — the Bronze-Age MINOAN palace-culture at Knossos, a thousand years before Homer, who called it the island of 'a hundred cities'. By Paul's day it was a Roman province (joined with Cyrenaica), prosperous, populous and, in Greek eyes, disreputable: 'to play the Cretan' meant to lie, and the island's own poet EPIMENIDES supplied the line quoted at Titus 1:12, 'Cretans are always liars'. ⚠ Paul reached it, on the traditional reading, after a release from his first Roman imprisonment — a mission Acts does not record — and left Titus behind to appoint elders 'in every town' (the Crete of Acts 27 is only a storm-tossed coastline on the voyage to Rome). Jews had long settled there. The congregations Titus was to organise were raw, and the island's reputation hard.