s of the statement
made by this second-rate compiler, and it has been claimed that the
transformation in question took place under the Antonines. This is
erroneous. The testimony of inscriptions corroborates that of the Byzantine
writer.[13] In spite of his love of archaism, it was Claudius who permitted
this innovation to be made, and we believe that we can divine the motives
of his action.

Under his predecessor, Caligula, the worship of Isis had been authorized
after a long resistance. Its stirring festivities and imposing processions
gained considerable popularity. This competition must have been disastrous
to the priests of the _Magna Mater_, who were secluded in their temple on
the Palatine, and Caligula's successor could not but grant to the Phrygian
goddess, so long established in the city, the favor accorded the Egyptian
divinity who had been admitted into Rome but very recently. In this way
Claudius prevented too great an ascendency in Italy of this second stranger
and supplied a distributary to the current of popular superstition. Isis
must have been held under great {56} suspicion by a ruler who clung to old
national institutions.[14]

The Emperor Claudius introduced a new cycle of holidays that were
celebrated from March 15th to March 27th, the beginning of spring at the
time of the revival of vegetation, personified in Attis. The various acts
of this grand mystic drama are tolerably well known. The prelude was a
procession of _cannophori_ or reed-bearers on the fifteenth; undoubtedly
they commemorated Cybele's discovery of Attis, who, according to the
legends, had been exposed while a child on the banks of the Sangarius, the
largest river of Phrygia, or else this ceremony may have been the
transformation of an ancient phallephory intended to guarantee the
fertility of the fields.[15] The ceremonies proper began with the equinox.
A pine was felled and transferred to the temple of the Palatine by a
brotherhood that owed to this function its name of "tree-bearers"
(_dendrophori_). Wrapped like a corpse in woolen bands and garlands of
violets, this pine represented Attis dead. This god was originally only the
spirit of the plants, and the honors given to the "March-tree"[16] in front
of the imperial palace perpetuated a very ancient agrarian rite of the
Phrygian peasants. The next day was a day of sadness and abstinence on
which the believers fasted and mourned the defunct god. The twenty-fourth
bore the sign