chools were the teachers of philosophy. Naturally if Rome
had been another Greece she would have worked back from these later
forms to the truer, purer spirit, but Rome was not Greece, and no
thoughtful man ever pretended that she was. In the third century before
Christ Greece began actively to influence Rome; before that time
Hellenic influence had been confined largely to the effects on religion
produced by the Sibylline books, and to the effects on society caused by
the presence of Greek traders. But now Greek thought as embodied in the
literature began to affect Roman thought, and to bring into being a
literature based on Greek models. Three centuries of Sibylline oracles
had produced for Rome the pathological religious condition of the Second
Punic War, when she did not think twice before breaking down the
religious barrier which had hitherto separated the national from the
adopted elements in her religion, and at the same time unhesitatingly
reached out to Asia Minor for an Oriental cult, masquerading in Greek
colours, and placed on the Palatine the Great Mother of Pessinus. From
this time on two influences were steadily at work which shaped the
history of Roman religion in the two remaining centuries till the close
of the republic: one, mythology, directly affecting the forms of the
cult and the beliefs concerning the individual gods; the other,
philosophy, attacking the whole foundation of religious belief in
general.

Greece gave her gods to Rome when she herself was weary of them, she
gave her the tired gods, exhausted by centuries of handling, long ago
dragged down from Olympus, and weary with serving as lay-figures for
poets and artists, and being for ever rigged out in new mythological
garments, or jaded with the laboratory experiments of philosophers who
tried to interpret them in every conceivable fashion or else to do away
with them entirely. It is no wonder that it did not take the Romans more
than a century to come to the end of these gods, to find that the only
one among them who could satisfy their religious desires was the least
Greek of them all, the Magna Mater, and having found this to go forth to
take to themselves more like unto her, in a word, to crave the
sensational cults of the Orient. And the philosophy which Greece gave
Rome was no better than the mythology. It is not strange that human
thought experienced a reaction after a century which contained both
Plato and Aristotle, but it is a pi