ld. We can
imagine how powerful the religious influence of that country on the Syrian
paganism must have been.

That influence manifested itself in various ways. First, it introduced new
gods. In this way Bel passed from the Babylonian pantheon into that of
Palmyra and was honored throughout northern Syria.[54] It also caused
ancient divinities to be arranged in new groups. To the primitive couple of
the Baal and the Baalat a third member was added in order to form one of
those triads dears to Chaldean theology. This took place at Hierapolis as
well as at Heliopolis, and the three gods of the latter city, Hadad,
Atargatis and Simios, became Jupiter, Venus and Mercury in Latin
inscriptions.[55] Finally, and most important, astrolatry wrought radical
changes in the characters of the celestial powers, and, as a further
consequence, in the entire Roman paganism. In the first place it gave them
a second personality in addition to their own nature. The sidereal myths
superimposed themselves upon the agrarian myths, and gradually obliterated
them. Astrology, born on the banks of the Euphrates, imposed itself in
Egypt upon the haughty and unapproachable clergy of the most conservative
of all nations.[56] Syria {124} received it without reserve and surrendered
unconditionally;[57] numismatics and archeology as well as literature prove
this. King Antiochus of Commagene, for instance, who died 34 B. C., built
himself a monumental tomb on a spur of the Taurus, in which he placed his
horoscope, designed on a large bas-relief, beside the images of his
ancestral divinities.[58]

The importance which the introduction of the Syrian religions into the
Occident has for us consists therefore in the fact that indirectly they
brought certain theological doctrines of the Chaldeans with them, just as
Isis and Serapis carried beliefs of old Egypt from Alexandria to the
Occident. The Roman empire received successively the religious tribute of
the two great nations that had formerly ruled the Oriental world. It is
characteristic that the god Bel whom Aurelian brought from Asia to set up
as the protector of his states, was in reality a Babylonian who had
emigrated to Palmyra,[59] a cosmopolitan center apparently predestined by
virtue of its location to become the intermediary between the civilizations
of the Euphrates and the Mediterranean.

The influence exercised by the speculations of the Chaldeans upon
Greco-Roman thought can be asserted pos