male
deity Attis; the Egyptian pair Isis and Serapis; Atayatis or the Syrian
goddess, the chief female divinity of North Syria; a number of Syrian gods
(Ba'als) named from the site of their Syrian shrines; and finally Mithra,
a deity whose cult had long formed a part of the national Iranian
religion. Towards all these cults the Roman state displayed wide
toleration, only interfering with them when their orgiastic rites came
into conflict with Roman conceptions of morality. But in spite of this
toleration it required a long time before the conservative prejudices of
the upper classes of Roman society were sufficiently undermined to permit
of their participation in these foreign rites. For one hundred years after
the introduction of the worship of the Magna Mater Romans were prohibited
from enrolling themselves in the ranks of her priesthood. A determined but
unsuccessful attempt was made by the Senate during the last century of the
republic to drive from Rome the cult of Isis, the second of these
religions to find a home in Italy, and in 42 B. C. the triumvirs erected a
temple to this goddess. Augustus, however, banished her worship beyond the
_pomerium_. But this restriction was not enforced by his successors, and
by 69 A. D. the cult of the Egyptian goddess was firmly established in the
capital. The various Syrian deities were of less significance in the
religious life of the West, although as we have seen Elagabalus set up the
worship of one of them, the Sun god of Emesa, as an official cult at Rome.

The Oriental cult which in importance overshadowed all the rest was
Mithraism, one of the latest to cross from Asia into Europe. In
Zoroastrian theology Mithra appears as the spirit who is the chief agent
of the supreme god of light Ormuzd in his struggle against Ahriman, the
god of darkness. He is at the same time a beneficent force in the natural
world and in the moral world the champion of righteousness against the
powers of evil. Under Babylonian and Greek influences Mithra was
identified with the Sun-god, and appears in Rome with the title the
Unconquered Sun-god Mithra (_deus invictus sol Mithra_). Towards the close
of the first century A. D. Mithraism began to make its influence felt in
Rome and the western provinces, and from that time it spread with great
rapidity. Mithra, as the god of battles, was a patron deity of the
soldiers, who became his zealous missionaries in the frontier camps. His
cult was also regard