Soli was an ancient city and port in Cilicia

Cilicia

In antiquity, Cilicia was the south coastal region of Asia Minor, south of the central Anatolian plateau. It existed as a political entity from Hittite times into the Byzantine empire...

, in present day Turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

, a part of Mezitli

Mezitli

Mezitli is a municipality and district governorate in Greater Mersin, Turkey. Mersin is one of 16 metropolitan centers in Turkey with more than one municipality within city borders...

 municipality which in turn is a part of Greater Mersin

Mersin

-Mersin today:Today, Mersin is a large city spreading out along the coast, with Turkey's second tallest skyscraper , huge hotels, an opera house, expensive real estate near the sea or up in the hills, and many other modern urban...

. It was a colony of Rhodes

Rhodes

Rhodes is an island in Greece, located in the eastern Aegean Sea. It is the largest of the Dodecanese islands in terms of both land area and population, with a population of 117,007, and also the island group's historical capital. Administratively the island forms a separate municipality within...

, founded c. 700 BC. Soli was destroyed in the 1st century BC, and rebuilt by Pompey the Great. Thereafter, it was called Pompeiopolis (not to be confused with the Pompeiopolis

Pompeiopolis

Pompeiopolis was a Roman city-state in ancient Paphlagonia, situated today in the Taşköprü district, Kastamonu, Turkey. The exact location is 45 km north of Kastamonu, to the north of Taşköprü, in the valley of the Gökırmak...

 in Paphlagonia

Paphlagonia

Paphlagonia was an ancient area on the Black Sea coast of north central Anatolia, situated between Bithynia to the west and Pontus to the east, and separated from Phrygia by a prolongation to the east of the Bithynian Olympus...

). The word solecism

Solecism

In traditional prescriptive grammar, a solecism is something perceived as a grammatical mistake or absurdity, or even a simply non-standard usage. The word was originally used by the Greeks for what they perceived as mistakes in their language...

 is derived from Soli, since the dialect of Greek spoken there was considered by Athenians to be a corrupted form of Attic Greek

Attic Greek

Attic Greek is the prestige dialect of Ancient Greek that was spoken in Attica, which includes Athens. Of the ancient dialects, it is the most similar to later Greek, and is the standard form of the language studied in courses of "Ancient Greek". It is sometimes included in Ionic.- Origin and range...

.

Aratus of Soli

Aratus

Aratus was a Greek didactic poet. He is best known today for being quoted in the New Testament. His major extant work is his hexameter poem Phaenomena , the first half of which is a verse setting of a lost work of the same name by Eudoxus of Cnidus. It describes the constellations and other...

 was a famous Hellenistic poet.