l these factors offended the grave decency that a
Roman was wont to {82} maintain in the presence of the gods. The innovators
had every defender of the _mos maiorum_ for an adversary.

In the second place, this religion had been founded, supported and
propagated by the Ptolemies; it came from a country that was almost hostile
to Italy during the last period of the republic;[26] it issued from
Alexandria, whose superiority Rome felt and feared. Its secret societies,
made up chiefly of people of the lower classes, might easily become clubs
of agitators and haunts of spies. All these motives for suspicion and
hatred were undoubtedly more potent in exciting persecution than the purely
theological reasons, and persecution was stopped or renewed according to
the vicissitudes of general politics.

As we have stated, the chapels consecrated to Isis were demolished in the
year 48 B. C. After Caesar's death, the triumvirs decided in 43 B. C. to
erect a temple in her honor out of the public funds, undoubtedly to gain
the favor of the masses. This action would have implied official
recognition, but the project appears never to have been executed. If Antony
had succeeded at Actium, Isis and Serapis would have entered Rome in
triumph, but they were vanquished with Cleopatra; and when Augustus had
become the master of the empire, he professed a deep aversion for the gods
of his former enemies. Moreover, he could not have suffered the intrusion
of the Egyptian clergy into the Roman sacerdotal class, whose guardian,
restorer and chief he was. In 28 B. C. an ordinance was issued forbidding
the erecting of altars to the Alexandrian divinities inside the sacred
enclosure of the _pomerium_, and seven years later Agrippa extended this
prohibitive regulation to a radius of a thousand paces around the {83}
city. Tiberius acted on the same principle and in 19 A. D. instituted the
bloodiest persecution against the priests of Isis that they ever suffered,
in consequence of a scandalous affair in which a matron, a noble and some
priests of Isis were implicated.

All these police measures, however, were strangely ineffectual. The
Egyptian worship was excluded from Rome and her immediate neighborhood in
theory if not in fact, but the rest of the world remained open to its
propaganda.[27]

With the beginning of the empire it slowly invaded the center and the north
of Italy and spread into the provinces. Merchants, sailors, slaves,
artisans, Egypti