xpression in
sumptuous allegories[16] or humbled itself before the omnipotence of the
infinite, poems of which only a few stoic effusions celebrating the
creative or destructive fire, or expressing a complete surrender to divine
fate can give us some idea.[17]

But everything is gone, and thus we lose the possibility of studying from
the original documents the internal development of the pagan religions.

We should feel this loss less keenly if we possessed at least the works of
Greek and Latin mythographers on the subject of foreign divinities like the
voluminous books published during the second century by Eusebius and Pallas
on the Mysteries of Mithra. But those works were thought devoid of interest
or even dangerous by the devout Middle Ages, and they are not likely to
have survived the fall of paganism. The {13} treatises on mythology that
have been preserved deal almost entirely with the ancient Hellenic fables
made famous by the classic writers, to the neglect of the Oriental
religions.[18]

As a rule, all we find in literature on this subject are a few incidental
remarks and passing allusions. History is incredibly poor in that respect.
This poverty of information was caused in the first place by a narrowness
of view characteristic of the rhetoric cultivated by historians of the
classical period and especially of the empire. Politics and the wars of the
rulers, the dramas, the intrigues and even the gossip of the courts and of
the official world were of much higher interest to them than the great
economic or religious transformations. Moreover, there is no period of the
Roman empire concerning which we are so little informed as the third
century, precisely the one during which the Oriental religions reached the
apogee of their power. From Herodianus and Dion Cassius to the Byzantines,
and from Suetonius to Ammianus Marcellinus, all narratives of any
importance have been lost, and this deplorable blank in historic tradition
is particularly fatal to the study of paganism.

It is a strange fact that light literature concerned itself more with these
grave questions. The rites of the exotic religions stimulated the
imagination of the satirists, and the pomp of the festivities furnished the
novelists with brilliant descriptive matter. Juvenal laughs at the
mortifications of the devotees of Isis; in his _Necromancy_ Lucian parodies
the interminable purifications of the magi, and in the _Metamorphoses_
Apuleius relat