one of these private chapels. Her cult does not seem to
have become a state affair until the beginning of the third century
A.D., when Caracalla, who had extended Roman citizenship to all the
inhabitants of the provinces, gave a similar citizenship to all the
foreign deities resident in Rome. It is a curious coincidence that this
action of Caracalla's occurred just about the same year A.D. in which
the breakdown of the _pomerium_ for state cults had occurred B.C. For
the present, however, that is to say in the first century B.C., the
state retained her dignity, though the resultant unorthodox character of
the cult increased its power and influence, and made it more subversive
to morals than the Magna Mater was.

An even more interesting instance, both of the popularity of sensational
foreign cults and of the struggle of the state religion against them, is
found in the case of the Egyptian goddess Isis. The spread of Isis
worship into the Greek, and consequently also into the Roman world,
began relatively early. In the third century Isis and her companion
Serapis were well established on the island of Delos; and in the second
century we find traces of their worship in Campania, especially at
Pompeii and Puteoli. This last-named place, the seaport Puteoli, the
modern Pozzuoli, outside of Naples, was probably the door through which
Isis and her train came into Italy. Puteoli was the chief port for
Oriental ships, including Egypt, and it also had commercial relations
with Delos. At this later date it supplied Rome with gods in somewhat
the same way that Cumae, in the same neighbourhood, had done centuries
before. So far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, an apparently
trustworthy tradition traces the private cult back to the time of Sulla;
and it certainly cannot have been introduced much later than this time,
because in B.C. 58 it had became so prominent and so offensive to the
authorities of the state that they destroyed an altar of Isis on the
Capitoline. Apparently Isis was no exception to the general law of
growth by persecution, because in the course of the next decade the
state found it necessary to interfere no less than three times, _i.e._
in B.C. 53, 50, and 48. Finally the policy of suppression proved so
ineffectual that it was decided to try the opposite extreme, and to see
what could be done by state acknowledgment and state control, and so the
Triumvirs, Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus, in B.C. 43 decreed t