the gods and providence and the Stoical doctrine of the immortality
of the soul; for the great public ready to laugh, the Cynic Varro
hit the mark still more sharply with the flying darts of his extensively-
read satires. While thus the ablest men of the older generation
made war on the Stoa, the younger generation again, such as Catullus,
stood in no inward relation to it at all, and passed a far sharper
censure on it by completely ignoring it.

The Oriental Religions

But, if in the present instance a faith no longer believed in
was maintained out of political convenience, they amply made up
for this in other respects. Unbelief and superstition, different hues
of the same historical phenomenon, went in the Roman world
of that day hand in hand, and there was no lack of individuals
who in themselves combined both--who denied the gods with Epicurus,
and yet prayed and sacrificed before every shrine. Of course only
the gods that came from the east were still in vogue, and, as the men
continued to flock from the Greek lands to Italy, so the gods
of the east migrated in ever-increasing numbers to the west.
The importance of the Phrygian cultus at that time in Rome is shown
both by the polemical tone of the older men such as Varro and Lucretius,
and by the poetical glorification of it in the fashionable Catullus,
which concludes with the characteristic request that the goddess
may deign to turn the heads of others only, and not that
of the poet himself.

Worship of Mithra

A fresh addition was the Persian worship, which is said
to have first reached the Occidental through the medium of the pirates
who met on the Mediterranean from the east and from the west;
the oldest seat of this cultus in the west is stated to have been
Mount Olympus in Lycia. That in the adoption of Oriental worships
in the west such higher speculative and moral elements as they contained
were generally allowed to drop, is strikingly evinced by the fact
that Ahuramazda, the supreme god of the pure doctrine of Zarathustra,
remained virtually unknown in the west, and adoration there
was especially directed to that god who had occupied the first place
in the old Persian national religion and had been transferred
by Zarathustra to the second--the sun-god Mithra.

Worship of Isis

But the brighter and gentler celestial forms of the Persian religion
did not so rapidly gain a footing in Rome as the wearisome mystical host
of the grotesque diviniti