Chapter I: The Conquests of Alexander

A glance at the map of Asia at the coming of Alexander will convince us that all but a corner of the world known to the ancients was then ruled by a single power. The Persian Empire, sprawling like a huge octopus over the centre of the continent, dominated it from its four capitals at the head of the Persian Gulf, and stretched without a break from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean. In its eastern provinces were comprised what is now Russian Turkestan from Krasnovodsk to Kashgar, with the Khanates and the Pamirs, all Afghanistan, Seistan, Baluchistan, the North-West Province, and part of the Punjab. On the western side of the Great Central Desert came the countries which we now call Persia and Turkey in Asia containing in themselves a territory half the size of the Continent of Europe, together with the rich province to the south of the Caucasus which has lately passed into the grip of Russia. From here one long tentacle had stretched across the Sinaitic Peninsula and had seized Egypt; and, although another had shrunk back hurt from its attack on Greece, it yet held positions on the Bosphorus and the Hellespont which formed a standing menace that the raid might be repeated. Apart from the Greek States which, as has been well said, the Great King found easier to control through their own venal orators than to conquer by his soldiers, there remained outside his sway only the trading republic of Carthage and the Italian cities just rising into prominence. Travellers’ tales, more than usually improbable and untrustworthy, were, indeed, told of great countries swarming with men and fabulous monsters lying beyond the African and Indian deserts on the southern, and the great ranges of mountains on the eastern, frontier of the Empire[30]; but these gave as little concern to its rulers as did the fringe of barbarian tribes, Cimmerians, Hyperboreans, Gauls, and Scyths, who filled up the space between the civilized world and the imaginary ring of waters which was called the Outer Ocean.

That this vast dominion should be loosely compacted was of the nature of things. The twenty or more provinces into which it was divided enjoyed a large measure of self-government, and had preserved, for the most part, their native laws and customs unaltered. Each of these divisions was ruled by a satrap who, like a Chinese viceroy, was allowed to maintain armies and even fleets of his own. But a check, imperfect no doubt but still existent, was exercised over his proceedings by the presence of a Royal Secretary in each satrapy, whose business it was to supervise the accounts, and to send up regular reports to the capital of the doings, of his coadjutor[31], while the troops were under the command of a general appointed directly by the Crown. From time to time, also, a Royal Commissioner called the King’s Eye visited the province with a strong guard to hear complaints and to see that all was in order[32]. The satrap, too, only held his post during his master’s pleasure, and was liable at any moment to be removed to another province, degraded, or put to death, on the strength of a simple letter bearing the Royal Seal; and the tribute which each satrapy had to pay to the Great King being settled at a fixed and known amount, there was less chance than under some similar systems of devolution that the satrap might squeeze out of his subjects a sum far greater than that which he transmitted to the Treasury[33]. Above all, the Persians were of Aryan stock, and early showed signs of the talent for governing older races which seems to have stuck to the Aryans throughout their history. They made excellent roads, and established swift running posts that did much to make communication easy between the most important parts of their empire; while, as the satraps’ standing armies were composed either of native Persians or hired mercenaries, the subject populations had an opportunity, rare enough in the ancient world, of peacefully developing their internal resources without constant fear of disturbance by foreign enemies, or forced participation in wars of aggression[34]. It was only when the word went forth from Babylon or Susa, Ecbatana or Persepolis, for the calling-out of the Ban of the whole Empire that the other than Persian subject of Artaxerxes or Darius had to join the levy of his satrapy, and, on orders given to him through an interpreter, to assist the Great King in crushing some rebellious satrap or repelling foreign invasion. At other times, he must have known him only as a kind of divinity, having power to throw down and to set up, to whom he might cry, not always in vain, against the oppression of his own immediate ruler. Those writers are no doubt justified who say that the government of the Persian Empire was to the humbler classes of Asiatics a great improvement upon any that had preceded it[35], and that the rule of the Great King never awoke the fierce resentment in its subjects aroused by the tyranny of the Semitic Assyrians, or of the Chaldeans who were, in great part, of Mongoloid blood [36]. It was doubtless the memory of this golden age, glorified as remembrances generally are by the lapse of centuries, that brought about the reaction to the Persian form of government and culture which we shall have to discuss later in the countries bled white by the Roman proconsuls.

Throughout this vast realm, Alexander’s coming brought about a change such as the civilized world has never seen before or since. Among the world-conquerors who have been hailed as heroes in after times, Alexander—surely the greatest individual known to history—stands distinguished by the loftiness of his aims and the swiftness with which they were attained. It is wonderful that a boy of twenty with an army that cannot have exceeded 50,000 men all told should succeed in overcoming practically the whole of Asia in less time than it took the British Empire with the third of a million to break down the armed resistance of a few thousand Boers. More wonderful is it that he should a little later contrive to transport a force of about 100,000, comprising infantry, cavalry and artillery, over the three thousand miles that separate Macedonia from Karachi, at the same time preserving such perfect communication with his base that he seems never to have remained for long without letters from Europe, while the stream of recruits that reached him from the same source must have been continuous and unchecked[37]. Such a feat which, with all the aid which steam and electricity can give us, would still tax to the utmost the powers of our greatest modern generals, becomes almost miraculous when we think that the greater part of his line of communications must have lain through recently subjugated lands, and that his own advance led him into countries unmapped and known only to him by the half fabulous tales of his enemies[38]. But the most astonishing thing about these exploits is that they were all performed with the conscious aim of making Asia Greek[39], and in this respect, as in all others, they were both original and successful. Everywhere that Alexander passed, he left behind him cities peopled by a mixture of his own veterans, of those camp followers which, then as now, have always stuck to a European army on the march, and of natives of the country either found on the spot or drawn from some other part of Asia; and the permanence of these foundations still bears witness to the foreseeing eye of their founder. Alexandria in Egypt, Candahar, Secunderabad, all preserve to this day the memory of his royal name, and the continued importance of Khojend, Samarcand, Herat, Merv, and Cabul out of the many other Alexandrias that he established on his conquering way show that his statesmanlike perception of the chief markets of the East was as sure as his strategical insight[40]. Nor did he neglect other means of carrying out the great design that he had at heart. In the great feast at Susa, which he celebrated on his return from India, the “marriage of Europe and Asia,” which had always formed his guiding idea, took visible shape. He had already wedded—it is said for love—the beautiful Roxana, a princess from Bactria in the Eastern (or Upper) Provinces of his new Empire[41], and now he took as a second consort Statira, the daughter of Darius, who, as the scion of the last native king of Persia, may be taken as the representative of its western centre. Nearly a hundred of his superior officers and some ten thousand of his humbler followers hastened to follow his example and to receive Asiatic brides with the rich dowries assigned them by the Conqueror[42]. Moreover the thirty thousand youthful recruits from his new conquests, whom he had ordered five years before to be trained in the Macedonian discipline and the Greek language, now arrived[43], and Alexander set to work with his usual energy to diffuse through his European army strong drafts of his Asiatic subjects in order to cement still further the alliance between the two Continents. Had he lived, it would have been a mixed army of Asiatics and Europeans that he would have led the following year to the conquest of the western world[44].

Destiny, however, is, as men would have said in those days, stronger than the immortal gods, and Alexander’s early death put an instant stop to all ideas of further conquest. It is idle, until we know the causes of things, to speculate on what might have been; but it seems probable that if Nearchus’ expedition had sailed, the Conqueror’s warlike plans would once again have proved to have been perfectly laid, that he would have crushed Carthage as easily as Thebes and Tyre, and that the Italian States would have received the same master as the Bactrians and Indians[45]. Yet so far as our immediate purpose is concerned, Alexander’s work was done once for all, and the policy typified as the marriage of Europe and Asia was perhaps as well served by his death as by his life. During Persian times, the Court of the Great King had always proved a magnet drawing to itself with irresistible force the ever-restless Greeks, and the road to Susa was trodden in turn by politicians like Alcibiades, leaders of mercenaries like Xenophon, and Greek philosophers, artists, and courtezans innumerable. The traffic in mercenaries alone must have been enormous when we find Greek troops forming the stiffening of those huge armies of Darius which Alexander overthrew at the Granicus, Issus, and Arbela[46]; while as for the other sex, Themistocles, when turning his back on his own country, could find no better or safer mode of approaching the Persian Court than in a closed litter supposed to be conveying a Greek woman to the harem of the Great King[47]. But when the century-long wars for the succession to Alexander broke out upon his death, there straightway appeared five courts where before there had been but one, and these were now ruled over by Greek and not by Persian kings. Mercenaries of all kinds were in urgent demand in every one of them, while the setting free of the millions in bullion and specie found by Alexander in the Persian capitals caused an outbreak of luxury like that which followed in Germany the payment of the French milliards. Soon every Greek who had strength, beauty, or talents to sell was on foot to seek his or her fortune in Asia, and with them went everywhere the petty Greek trader, as enterprising and as fearless in pursuit of gain as those countrymen of his whose booths Lord Kitchener saw set up on the field of Omdurman before the rout of the Mahdists was complete, and whose _locandas_ still greet one in the smallest villages on the Nile. The stream of fortune-hunters, now in full flood, quickly overflowed from the ancient capitals to the numerous Antigonias, Antiochias, Lysimachias, Nicomedias, and Seleucias which the new kings everywhere founded in imitation of their dead master, and even the most distant provinces began to receive their quota of Greek citizens and Greek culture. As has happened more than once in history, Asia woke suddenly from her sleep, and acquired a veneer of foreign manners in hardly longer time than it has taken Japan in our own days to adopt European armaments, teaching and dress. When the Parthians overcame Crassus, the Roman captives found the barbarian victors amusing themselves with the plays of Euripides[48]; while the Bactrian and Indian provinces, which the rise of the Parthian power cut off from the western part of Alexander’s Empire, conceived such a taste for Greek art that the statues of Buddha with which their capitals were afterwards decorated were carved according to Greek instead of Hindu canons[49]. The so-called Indo-Greek kings of these parts, the Euthydemi, Diodoti, and Eucratidae, of whom we know hardly more than the names, no more thought of using other than Greek designs and inscriptions for their coins than did the rulers of Pergamum or Antioch[50]. The generation that had seen Alexander face to face was hardly in its grave before the marriage of Europe and Asia had become a very real and pregnant fact.

The importance of this for the history of religions can hardly be exaggerated. Greek was spoken everywhere throughout Asia, and for the first time in the world’s history the inhabitants of the civilized part of the earth had a common tongue in which they could communicate their ideas to each other. No doubt the language spoken by the offspring of Greek colonists and their native spouses was not the tongue of Sophocles or of Demosthenes any more than it was “the strong-winged music of Homer”; but it was a better medium for the transmission of metaphysical theories than the founder of any world-religion has ever had at his disposal before or since. The missionaries whom modern nations send into the distant parts of the earth for the propagation of the Christian faith find one of their worst difficulties in the impossibility of rendering its doctrines into the languages of peoples at another stage of culture from themselves; but no such barrier between teacher and taught existed in the empire created by Alexander’s genius. The result of this possibility of intercommunication of ideas was at once apparent. Anxious to show that they too had a pedigree, the older nations of the world seized the opportunity to inform their new masters of their own history and traditions; and, as all history was in those days sacred history, they thus introduced to the Greeks their gods and their beliefs as to the divine governance of the world. The sacred books of the Chaldeans, of the Egyptians, of the Jews, and no doubt of many other peoples whose records are now lost to us, were translated into Greek; and thus the science of the history of religions was born. Writers like Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch are still our chief guides for the religions of the earliest populated parts of the ancient world; but how could these compilers have handed down to us the traditions they have preserved save for writers like Berossus, Manetho, and Philo of Byblus, who themselves wrote in Greek? Plutarch tells us that when he spent a year in Rome during the reign of Trajan, he did not find it necessary to learn Latin, his native tongue being apparently understood by everybody. One may wonder how much of the sayings and doings of the Founder of Christianity would have come down to us, had they not been first recorded in the κοινή or _lingua franca_ of the whole East[51].

There were, however, other ways in which Alexander’s conquests prepared the way for a religion which could make appeal to men of every nation and language. Nothing is more difficult for those brought up in a monotheistic faith, with its inbred contempt for the worshippers of many gods, than to realize how the ancients regarded the Divine. The peoples of classical antiquity seem to have everywhere believed in the gods of their neighbours as absolutely as they did in their own, for they imagined that their deities had, like men, only a limited sphere of action, or, to put it scientifically, were subject to the same conditions of space as their worshippers. Thus, the Syrians thought that Yahweh of Israel was a mountain god, who could not help his people when fighting in the plains[52], and the Philistines believed that the ark in which he lived would bring prosperity or disaster to the place in which it happened to be for the time being[53]. This is almost an exact parallel to the tale of the prince of Bactria, whose daughter was freed from demoniacal possession by an image of the Egyptian god Khonsu sent into Asia _ad hoc_, whereupon he decided that it would be wise to keep so powerful a god in his own country, and did so until frightened by a dream into sending the statue back[54]. But such ideas, however natural they may be to isolated or backward peoples, soon lost their hold upon the acute and logical Greeks, when they came into contact with civilized nations having pantheons differing widely from their own. The philosophers, indeed, by dint of hard reasoning on the subject, had formed before the time of Alexander a conception of the Supreme Being which does not differ materially from that of the educated Christian of the present day. “Loyal,” says Pater, “to the ancient beliefs, the ancient usages, of the religions of many gods which he had found all around him, Socrates pierces through it to one unmistakable Person, of perfect intelligence, power, and goodness who takes note of him[55]”; and the same thing might be said with even greater certainty of the deductions of Aristotle[56], whose declared monotheism caused him to be adopted in the Middle Ages as one of the Doctors of the Church. But there is no reason to believe that such lofty conceptions ever influenced in the slightest the beliefs of the common people, who alone count for anything in the evolution of the organized body of beliefs and practices which we call a religion. Socrates so successfully concealed his opinions in this respect from everybody but Plato, that the clear and practical mind of Xenophon seems to have never seen in him anything but a polytheist[57]: and that Aristotle’s monotheistic teachings were not intended for the common herd may be judged from the correspondence, whether actual or imaginary, between him and Alexander himself, in which the hero reproaches his former tutor for having published doctrines which should only be taught by word of mouth, and learns in reply that his metaphysical theories would be unintelligible save to those whom he had himself instructed in philosophy[58].

It is evident, therefore, that the great mass of Alexander’s subjects, whether Asiatics, Egyptians or Greeks, would require something more than the sublime theorizing of the philosophers before their religious ideas could be turned in the direction of monotheism. Nine hundred years before, Amenhotep IV of Egypt had indeed been led by his adoration of the material sun to put forward a religious reform which had as its principal feature the proclaiming abroad that there was only one God, in whose sight all mankind was equal; but the sole effect of this premature attempt to elevate the religion of his people was the loss of the external possessions of Egypt, and the posthumous branding of his own memory as that of a criminal. Possibly, too, the Hebrew Psalmists and Prophets had formed a like conception of the Deity when they asserted that among the gods there was none like unto Yahweh[59]; but that this idea seldom penetrated to their hearers is plain from their incessant denunciation of these last for “whoring after” other gods. The mere announcement of the unity of God had therefore in itself an insufficient attraction for the masses, and for the doctrine to be popular they had to be led to it by other ways than those of argument or authority. Now Aristotle noted with his usual shrewdness of observation that the form of religion in a state generally follows with fair closeness that of its temporal government[60], so that men will be more inclined to believe in what the Greeks called “monarchy,” or the active rule of One First Cause, if they live under a despot or absolute king than if they are members of a democracy. But when did the world either before or after his time see such a beneficent and godlike despot as Alexander? The robber-kings of Assyria had been accustomed to sweep across Western Asia leaving behind them, as they boasted in their inscriptions, a trail of vassal rulers impaled or flayed alive, of burnt cities, and of plundered peoples. The Persians, as has been said, had more idea of the rights of their inferiors, and did not regard their subject territories as mere fields for exploitation; but the life of sensual luxury into which their kings sooner or later subsided had its natural outcome in harem intrigues and assassinations which deprived the central power of a great part of its otherwise effective control over its satraps. But Alexander was in this, as in all other respects, the perfect type of the benevolent master who thinks more of his servants’ welfare than of his own personal gratification. Neither his mother Olympias, domineering and masterful as she was, nor his first mistress Barsine the widow of Memnon, nor his wife Roxana of whom he is said to have been enamoured, nor the Persian princess Statira to whom he gave his hand out of policy, could boast that they ever influenced by one hairsbreadth the direction of his sovereign will. As for his justice, the swift punishment that he measured out on his return from India to those of his officers whom he found guilty of oppression and malversation showed that under his far-seeing eye there would be none of those abuses of delegated power from which the satrapial system had suffered under his predecessors[61]. Modern historians have sometimes called him cruel; but in political matters severity is often the truest mercy, and the blood that he shed at Thebes and in Bactria probably saved a hundred times the number of lives which unchecked rebellion would have made it necessary to sacrifice; while the accidental and unpremeditated death of Clitus may well be pardoned to one who found not only his dignity as man but his royal authority wantonly outraged by a friend whom he had distinguished by exceptional marks of kindness. In every other respect his record is stainless. Although opposed at every step of his short career by orators and demagogues who saw in him the only obstacle to their unrestrained plunder of the fatherland, no legend has survived to his dishonour. On the contrary, all that we hear of him shows us for the first time in the world’s history a conqueror who was at the same time a just and wise ruler, merciful to his fallen foe, scorning even in war to take mean advantage[62], and chivalrous to the weak to a degree that his age could neither understand nor imitate[63]. And with all this, he united in his own person those superficial advantages which have always been quick to win for their possessor the devotion of the mob. To a talent for generalship which neither Hannibal, Caesar, nor any modern general has equalled, he joined a personal bravery which often reached the level of recklessness and was always to be found in the forefront of the hottest battle. Whether we see him charging at the head of the Companion cavalry in the three great battles with Darius, pursuing with a handful of his guard the routed Persian army after Arbela, or first over the wall at Mooltan, Alexander is always performing these feats of hardihood which in a leader strike more than anything the imagination of his soldiers. Add to this a generosity which made him willing to strip himself of his possessions to enrich his friends, a personal delight in that pomp and pageantry which forms the most direct road to the hearts of the proletariat, and a form, face and figure so distinguished that their one defect was for centuries after imitated by all who wished to be thought models of manly beauty[64], and we can no longer wonder that his contemporaries looked upon him as more than human. This wise and provident ruler of the world that he had conquered was at the same time a youth beautiful as Apollo, chivalrous as Bayard, clean as Galahad. Is it surprising that his name alone of all the conquerors of the East has endured through all changes of creed and culture, that the fierce chiefs of the Central Asian tableland still boast of him as their progenitor, and that the whole Mahommedan world still hold him the king of the believing Genii? No Caesar, Attila, or Genghiz Khan has ever thus impressed the imagination of future ages[65].

Thus Alexander’s coming gave an enormous impulse to that monarchical principle of government which from his time onward was to reign supreme for nearly two thousand years. Philosophers and sophists hastened to declare that democracy—as was indeed the fact—had proved itself incapable of governing, and that in the rule of one man was to be found the natural order of things and the only security for a well-ordered State[66]. Every one of the Diadochi or Successors of Alexander hurried in turn to assume the diadem, and Rome had no sooner contrived to crush her rival republic of Carthage than she too fell under the sway, first of dictators whose power was admittedly despotic, and then of emperors whose constitutional limitations were about the same as those of Alexander. That this was certain in time to react upon the universal conception of the Divine, followed directly from the law underlying religious phenomena which had been enunciated by Aristotle: but, before this could make way among the Greeks, thus suddenly promoted to the position of the ruling race, it was necessary that their own gods should be assimilated to those of their eastern fellow-subjects, or in other words, should be shown to be the same divinities under different names. Now, a movement with this object, even before Alexander’s coming, had been set on foot in Greece itself, and was in fact the natural outcome of the ideas as to the origin and governance of the universe brought there by the philosophers of Ionia[67]. It was all very well for the masses—then as now, much given to pragmatism or the reduction of every abstract idea to its most material and practical expression—to believe that the power of every god was limited to an area of so many square feet surrounding his image or sanctuary; but how could such a notion be held by philosophers who had sought out the causes of things, by travellers who had visited neighbouring countries in pursuit of knowledge, or by soldiers who had fought there, and had found it necessary to pay reverence to gods other than their own? It is said that in naturalistic religions like those of Greece, there is always a tendency to consider as identical divinities with the same or like characteristics—to consider for instance all gods with solar attributes as but different forms of the sun-god—and the Greeks of the fourth century B.C. had thus taken many foreign gods into their pantheon. It was, as Socrates found out to his cost, an offence to bring the worship of new gods into the city; but the difficulty was got over by the theory that the foreign divinity was only another form of some god already worshipped by the citizens[68], and by keeping his cult as private as possible. Later, when the popularity of the new deity seemed to be assured, an oracle of Delphi was generally secured authorizing the adoption of his worship under the name of his nearest Greek analogue, and in this way many foreign worships were brought into Athens itself[69]. Bendis, the moon-goddess of Thrace, had there from early times a temple or Bendideion[70], and the Syrian Adonis was publicly wailed for in the city when Alcibiades was setting out for Sicily[71]. This, too, was the more natural because the Greeks always acknowledged that their older divinities originally came to them from foreign parts. The myths in which the traditions of their origins were preserved gave Crete or Asia Minor as the birthplace of Zeus, an island in the Aegean as that of Apollo and Artemis, and the whole scene of the earthly trials of Demeter and Persephone was laid partly in Eleusis and partly in Asia[72]. As for Africa, Herodotus boldly asserts that the “names” of almost all the gods worshipped by the Greeks came from Egypt[73], and, although this is certainly not literally true, it gave him an excuse for identifying all the Egyptian deities of whom he had any knowledge with the Greek divinities whom he thought they resembled. But when Alexander’s conquests had made the different subject nations really acquainted with each other’s religion, the process of _theocrasia_ or the fusion of one god with another received an impulse that carried it beyond all bounds[74]. The divinities of Asia Minor were naturally the first to be taken into the Greek pantheon, especially by the Athenians, always mindful of their Ionian kinship; and the many-breasted goddess of Ephesus, Cybele of Pessinus with her consort Atys or Attis, and the Sidonian Astarte, were all worshipped in Greece after identification with different Greek deities in the manner that had served to naturalize the “Thracian” or Thessalian Dionysos, and the (probably) Egyptian Hermes[75]. As we shall see later, the Phrygian Sabazius and the Cretan Zagreus had already preceded them in secret, and Persian, Jewish, and perhaps Indian gods were to follow. From Greece, the passion for _theocrasia_ spread both eastward and westward. The Greek kings of Upper India found it necessary to identify on their monuments the gods of their native subjects with the divinities of Homer[76], and those of the Central Provinces and of Asia Minor did the same with such effect that it is almost impossible for us to distinguish their many Artemises, Aphrodites, and different forms of Zeus from the gods worshipped under similar names in ancient Greece[77]. As for the West, the Romans, even before they became the masters of the world, took over the Greek pantheon _en bloc_ by the simple process of calling their own Italian deities by Greek names; and if we still speak of Zeus as Jupiter, Athena as Minerva, Ares as Mars, and Hermes as Mercury, it is by reason of the syncretism brought into fashion by Alexander’s conquests.

Neither must we forget that the deification of Alexander during his lifetime brought an entirely new conception of the Divine into the European world. The divinization of the king was indeed no new thing in Egypt, where the Pharaoh from the earliest times was looked upon after his enthronement as the living form of the sun-god Horus; but to the religious ideas of the Greeks it was evidently a surprising shock. The distinguishing attribute of a Greek god was his deathlessness or incorruptibility; and although heroes like Theseus and Heracles were fabled to have become immortal and therefore fit subjects for worship, this was only because they were in the natural way the progeny of the gods themselves, and as such were taken into heaven by their fathers after death and the purging away of their mortal nature[78]. Alexander, on the other hand, demanded from the Greeks as from his other subjects divine honours during his life, and these were accorded to him with servile readiness by the governments of Athens and other Greek city-states, the Spartans not excepted[79]. What he meant exactly by this demand it would be hard to say, because his supposed sonship to Amen on which it was ostensibly based, was, as Sir Gaston Maspero has shown, merely the form by which, on a change of dynasty, the priests of Amen were accustomed to legitimize the accession to the throne of a king who could show no right thereto but force[80]. It is evident, too, that Alexander did not himself take his deification very seriously, since he allowed its propriety to be discussed before him at a wine-party[81]; and his apologists, Arrian and Plutarch, are possibly well-founded when they declare that it was a mere political device to secure the grudging obedience of his Macedonian countrymen[82]. But his successors in this matter went far beyond him. Ptolemy and Arsinoe, without any pretence of divine descent, were proclaimed “Saviour-gods” for their Greek as well as for their Egyptian subjects quite apart from any identification of themselves with Horus or any other native deity. Antigonus, when claiming to be the _strategos_ or generalissimo of the whole Empire, was hailed as a god, which drew from the rough old king a repartee more pointed than decent[83]. So, too, was his son, Demetrius the City Taker, although at the time of his deification he had not even an independent kingdom of his own, but was merely ruling Greece as the viceroy of his father. And the barriers between the Divine and the human being thus broken down, men’s minds soon became so familiar with the idea that they not only thought men might become gods, but declared that the gods were only deified men. The Athenians in the hymns that they sang to Demetrius declared that he was the only true god, and that the others were either asleep or too far off to be taken into account, or were not really gods at all[84]. But it is not with impunity that the religious ideas of a people can be thus suddenly and violently affronted. Within a few years from Alexander’s death, Cassander’s friend and envoy Euhemerus put forward, with the aid of a literary fraud something like that of Psalmanazar, the theory that all the gods worshipped by the Greeks had once been kings or at least distinguished men and women upon earth[85]—a doctrine that was received with as much enthusiasm in the Rome of the Republic as it once evoked in our own days among the followers of Herbert Spencer[86]. Later, the Epicurean philosophy, with its happy gods neither interfering with nor caring about the doings of mankind, came to the assistance of this rather crude atheism. Although the Stoic philosophers in their turn tried to introduce a more lofty idea of the Deity, it was probably not until late Roman times that they ever obtained anything like a grip on the people. Whether for good or ill, it is certain that the Greeks after Alexander’s death never returned to the simple faith in their national gods which had sufficed for their forefathers.

This is a point that it is important to remember, because without it, it is hard to understand the passion for innovation in religious matters which seems for the next three centuries to possess unchecked sway over mankind. It appeared as if Alexander, who indeed had made all things new, had set free the gods of the ancient world to wander from one end of his Empire to the other, and the desire to proselytize appears for the first time in the world’s history. Buddhism must have been prevalent in India for nearly a century before Alexander; but when it became the religion of the state in the reign of Asoka, grandson of that Chandragupta or Sandracottus who had talked with Alexander face to face, the Indian king boasted that he had sent out missionaries for the propagation of his new faith to the courts of Antiochus of Syria, Ptolemy of Egypt, Antigonus of Macedonia, Magas of Cyrene and Alexander of Epirus[87]. Whether the Indian missionaries ever reached the kings to whom they were sent may be doubted, and it is certain that these last did not pay the attention to them that Asoka claims; but it is quite possible that to the impulse given by such missions may be attributed some of the practices of the Jewish sect of the Essenes, and perhaps the monastic seclusion affected by certain worshippers of the Alexandrian god Serapis[88]. But if Buddhism could thus find its way westward from so distant a country as India, how much more must this have been the case with the other Oriental religions with which the Greeks had already some slight acquaintance, and which, as we shall see in the sequel, poured into Europe in such a flood that Juvenal compared it to the Orontes emptying itself into the Tiber. That the Greeks, ever eager for some new thing, were quick to avail themselves of the new ideas thus thrust upon them was only to be expected. But this rage for novelty was too violent to be content to follow the slow process of assimilation or _theocrasia_ which was prevalent before Alexander. Religious associations for the worship of foreign gods were formed in which we may, if we like, see the first germs of the Christian Church[89]. In these each member had to pay a subscription towards the expenses of the cult, and the office-bearers instead of being appointed by the State were either taken from the members in rotation or chosen by lot. That these confraternities, as we should now call them, were at first composed of natives of countries other than Greece is shown by their clustering in the port of the Piraeus as the quarter where foreigners naturally congregated[90]; and their male members for the most part consisted of slaves, freedmen, and stranger merchants, who thus found a meeting-place in what was to them a foreign country. Their worship too was secret or rather was confined to members of the confraternity only, while its correctness of form was preserved by means of written books or rituals, thereby presenting many points of resemblance to that of the later Gnostics. But the superstitious, and especially the women who were always in Greece much addicted to _theoxenia_ or the reception of strange gods, were early attracted by them, and they soon spread to every great city in the Empire. Thus we see for the first time in history bodies of men and women banded together, irrespective of nationality and social rank, for the purpose of religious observances, and religion becoming recognized as the affair of the individual rather than of the state, while each member of the association was directly interested in its extension. In this way, the Greeks became worshippers not only of their own sufficiently numerous deities but of those of well nigh the whole East as well. Their inscriptions show that Persian, Phrygian, and Lydian gods were worshipped by these associations, together with a whole crowd of Semitic deities among whom, if M. Cumont is right, there may even have been included the God of Israel[91].

The influence that these confraternities exercised in familiarizing the minds of the Greek citizens with the religious practices and tenets of foreign countries must have been very great. Every such association had a temple of its own, in which it offered sacrifices to its own particular god. But, after providing for this, the greater part of the subscriptions went in providing a periodical banquet at which its members could meet for social intercourse, and to which they were no doubt sometimes allowed to bring guests. But at these gatherings, as apparently at all others of the confraternity, all were equal, and there were no distinctions of rank. Moreover, in addition to the foreign members for whom the institution was originally designed, they must early have begun to admit Greeks; and these were generally, though not always, persons who were in the first instance led to them by a leaning to foreign superstitions, and particularly to that orgiastic ritual with which the worship of the Asiatic gods was generally associated in Greek minds. It is noteworthy that among the Greek names inscribed upon the stelae containing the lists of members that have come down to us, those of women are far more numerous than those of men. Yet they seldom seem to have been of the highest class in their own community, and it is difficult to conceive of a Greek matron leaving her gynaeceum to take part with slaves and freedmen in nocturnal feasts or orgies. Among those whom we know otherwise as belonging to these confraternities are Phryne the celebrated courtezan, Tryphera and Aristion, who followed the same manner of life[92], and Glaucothea the mother of Æschines and a perfume-seller, a trade then considered as disreputable as in the reign of Louis XIV[93]. On the other hand, it seems to follow from what Plutarch says, that King Philip of Macedon first saw and loved Olympias, mother of Alexander, at a meeting of one of these confraternities[94], and it is possible that outside Greece proper they lost something of their disreputable associations.

It must not be supposed, however, that these associations concerned themselves entirely with what we now call religion. The state, in cities like Athens, regarded them with great jealousy, and did its best to prevent them from forming a hierarchy by stipulating that their officers should only hold office for a year. This naturally prevented any continuity of policy such as a corporation like the priesthood of Amen could pursue, and set their chiefs upon making hay while the sun shone. Ignorant and degraded as most of their members were, and generally engaged in the pursuit of gain, it is not astonishing that they should thus have lent themselves to the worst and most dangerous because most profitable superstitions. The priests and especially the priestesses of the confraternities were always ready to lend themselves to the practices of divination and magic, to the sale of love-philtres and poisons[95], the interpretations of dreams and miraculous cures. To these charlatans came everyone who wanted his or her fortune told, or who wished to get rid of a rival, or to obtain the favour of a disdainful lover, or was simply tormented with idle fears or by some bodily disease incurable by regular means.

“The set of charlatans and market-men who hang about and wait round
the altars of the Great Mother and Serapis; and who manufacture
oracles either out of their own heads or by haphazard out of certain
books for the benefit of house-slaves and silly women”

is the contemptuous way in which Plutarch describes these impostors[96]. Yet even in this way much was doubtless done to spread the knowledge of foreign religions; for many must have resorted to the foreign temples for magic or divination who would never have thought of joining the association by which they were maintained, and in magic it is always the least known gods and those worshipped by the races of lowest culture who are thought to be the most powerful. Moreover, many of these associations in time purified themselves by a sort of process of elimination from these undesirable accessories, and, so soon as they succeeded in attracting the adhesion of a sufficient number of respectable people, managed to get the god they were formed to worship enrolled among the native deities of the state or city. It was in this way that foreign gods like Serapis and Mithras, from being the divinities of a handful of foreign slaves, merchants or hostages, came, as we shall see, to occupy the highest places in the national worship of the Roman Empire. Thus Lucian tells us the story of the impostor Alexander of Abonoteichos, who with the help of a tame serpent with a cardboard mask gave himself out as the priest of an incarnation of Asklepios the Greek god of healing, and founded an association for its worship in Nicomedia in Bithynia. Later, he persuaded one Rutilianus, a man of consular rank who seems to have had influence at the Court of Marcus Aurelius, to join him in the propagation of his new cult and even to marry his daughter[97]. But the worship that he thus set up must have afterwards been recognized by the city of Nicomedia, for we find the representation of its god Glycon upon a Nicomedian coin of the time of the Emperor Gordian, the husband of Tranquillina[98].

It was apparently in these associations that the new spirit now manifest in the religion of the ancient world began to take organized shape. Among the Persians and Egyptians the priests were officers of state living on the property of their several corporations, and therefore with a natural leaning, except in the rare cases where their privileges or property were threatened by the Crown, against all innovations and interference with the established order of things. Among the Greeks, both in Hellas itself and in her colonies oversea, the priests with a very few exceptions were chosen from the native-born citizens at large either for their personal beauty, or for the wealth which enabled them to give in honour of the gods magnificent pageants and other festivals[99]. In no case did they regard themselves as having any teaching or pastoral mission, and were in no way interested in increasing the number of the worshippers of the god to whose service they were elected for a short term. Hence, their chief preoccupation was to keep strictly to precedent in the celebration of the public acts of worship entrusted to them, and they would have looked with horror on any alteration of the traditional rites. But in the associations founded for the worship of foreign gods, affairs were conducted on utterly different lines. There seems to have been a healthy spirit of emulation among the successive holders of the priestly office, for the vote of thanks inscribed on marble and displayed in the temple for the admiration of the confraternity was the distinction most sought after by them, and the deprivation of it was the most serious penalty exacted for dereliction of duty[100]. In order to obtain these rewards, it is plain that the officers had to carry out to the full the Apostolic injunction to be all things to all men, and there is actually a case on record where a priestess is praised because during her term of office she has offended nobody. This complaisance seems to have extended itself from the officials to the deities worshipped, who seem often to have been quite willing to fulfil a double office, and to appear as Aphrodite or Astarte to the Syrian and as Cybele to the Phrygian members of the association[101]. By these means, they made it possible for several nationalities to belong to the same association.

There was probably, however, a more intellectual side to this spirit of accommodation. All, or nearly all, of these associations celebrated mysteries or sacred dramas based on the same lines as the Eleusinian and setting forth, it would seem, the passion, death, and resurrection of some god. These plays, when we consider the relatively slender number of the initiates and the limited means at their disposal, must generally have been acted with maimed and abbreviated rites in which a good deal was left to the imagination of the beholder. But this very fact must have set the always curious and inquisitive Greeks upon enquiry into the nature and origin of the scenes thus indicated rather than acted, and this in its turn must have led to many discussions and explanations of the gods there portrayed. For such conversations, too, there must have been far greater opportunities in the case of those _thiasi_, _orgeones_, or _erani_ (as these associations were called), where members were few and in the habit of meeting each other daily than with the Eleusinian rites which were celebrated only once or twice a year and then in the presence of a huge crowd dispersed immediately after to the different parts of the Hellenic world. It is hardly putting it too strongly to say that anything like propagandism must have been confined to the smaller societies.

To sum up, then, Alexander united the whole civilized world for the first time under a single head and gave to it a common language and culture. By the natural gifts of his extraordinary personality, he at the same time set before it a perfect model of kingship and thus ensured the persistence of the monarchical principle for two millenia. This, his conscious work, had a direct effect on the evolution of monotheism, while in other respects his conquests proved the turning point in the history of religions. By breaking down the barriers which racial and lingual divisions had hitherto set up between different nations of the earth, these conquests led to a great fusion of the religions hitherto professed by them, and thus opened the door to the world-religions which were afterwards to share between them his vast Empire. Before his coming we see the ancient world divided into separate communities each with its own pantheon and forms of worship and neither knowing nor caring greatly about those of its neighbours. But immediately after, all this is changed. The interchange of ideas between East and West has thrown the different religions of the world as it were into a melting-pot, in which the germs of a different grouping of the human race are dimly visible. The spirit of proselytism is abroad, and man now wants to impress his own ideas of the Divine upon his fellows. Above all, we see the beginning of those great associations of mankind for religious purposes which are henceforth to be the principal factors in the world’s history, and whose evolution has continued unchecked down to the present day. All those that followed Alexander were in this respect nothing more than his conscious or unconscious imitators. The great princes and generals who after his death parted his Empire among them, and the Romans who gradually ate up the fragments left to these princes’ effete descendants, could but carry on the work set on foot by the Great Conqueror. As Mr Hogarth has said, very little that he did was ever undone, and for good or ill, he has taken his place among the immortals[102]. Thus, from the scientific point of view, there is none among the forerunners of Christianity who did more to prepare and make ready its way than Alexander.

Footnote 30:

Such as the Arimaspi or one-eyed inhabitants of Russia, about whom
Herodotus (Bk III. c. 116) quotes the legend that they stole gold from
its griffin guardians, and those _myrmeces_ or great ants whom
Megasthenes (Strabo, Bk XV. c. 1, § 44) and other writers describe as
digging for gold on the Thibetan frontier—a story of which more than
one rationalistic explanation has been suggested.

Footnote 31:

Rawlinson’s _Herodotus_ (1862 edition), II. p. 462 for authorities.

Footnote 32:

Maspero, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l’Orient_, Paris, 1904, p.
706. Rawlinson, _op. cit._ p. 463, thinks this practice lapsed early,
but Xenophon seems clear that it was in force in his time
(_Cyropaedia_, Bk VIII. c. 6).

Footnote 33:

He was probably allowed a reasonable sum for the maintenance of his
court and government; but if he exceeded this, was liable to severe
punishment. This appears from the execution by Alexander, on his
return from India, of the satraps who had been guilty of extortion. He
seems to have purposely preserved the Persian laws and customs on this
point unaltered.

Footnote 34:

This is the opinion of Rawlinson, _op. cit._ pp. 460 _sqq._

Footnote 35:

Rawlinson, _op. cit._ p. 464; Winwood Reade, _Martyrdom of Man_, 1910,
p. 56; Sayce, _Ancient Empires of the East_, 1884, pp. 250, 251;
Maspero, _op. cit._ p. 721.

Footnote 36:

Oppert, _Le Peuple et la Langue des Mèdes_, Paris, pp. 17 _sqq._;
Maspero, _op. cit._ p. 559, n. 11.

Footnote 37:

Sir Thomas Holdich, in his excellent book _The Gates of India_ (p.
104), says that when he defeated the Aspasians or Yusufzai in the
Kuner Valley he sent the pick of their cattle back to Macedonia to
improve the native breed. Arrian, _Anabasis_, Bk IV. c. 25, however,
in quoting the story from Ptolemy, says only that Alexander “wished to
send them” to till the soil. It seems impossible that they could have
survived the journey before the days of steamships. Still more
incredible is the story in Plutarch, _Life of Alexander_, c. L. that
when Alexander was at Prophthasia (probably Farrah in Seistan), he
received some grapes grown on the coast of Greece. But such stories,
although coloured by age, may serve to show how perfect his
communications were always thought to have been.

Footnote 38:

Holdich, _op. cit._ _passim_, says that he must have had information
from Persian sources, and that his route must have been laid
beforehand. Sir Thomas’ opinion, as that of a soldier as well as a
student, is entitled to much respect. Yet the instances of Genghiz
Khan and other Oriental invaders are perhaps against any such
necessity.

Footnote 39:

Freeman, _Historical Essays_, 1873, second series, pp. 192, 193.

Footnote 40:

Khojend was probably Alexandria _eschata_ or the furthest (East).
Samarcand, of which the ancient name was Maracanda, is said by Baber
to be a foundation of Alexander’s. Herat was Alexandria Ariana, and
Merv probably Alexandria Margiana, while Cabul seems to have been
Ortospana. Among the other Alexandrias which have retained their old
importance are Alexandria Arachosiana or Candahar, Alexandria
Caucasiana or Begram, and Alexandria Sogdiana or Hyderabad. See J. W.
McCrindle, _Invasion of India by Alexander the Great_, 1896, pp. 36
_sqq._, and Droysen, _Histoire de l’Hellénisme_, (French edition),
Paris, 1883, I. pp. 408 _sqq._

Footnote 41:

Droysen, _op. cit._ p. 481.

Footnote 42:

See last note. The second marriage is dramatically described by
Droysen, _op. cit._ I. pp. 638, 639. Cf. Arrian, _Anabasis_, Bk VII.
c. 4; Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. LXX.

Footnote 43:

Arrian, _op. cit._ Bk VII. c. 6; Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. LXXI. Cf.
Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. 646.

Footnote 44:

Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. 660. It was probably the fear of this
mixture that caused the quarrel between him and his Macedonians at
Opis. See Arrian, _op. cit._ Bk VII. c. 8; Plutarch, _Alexander_, c.
LXXI.

Footnote 45:

Droysen, _op. cit._ II. p. 34. Mahaffy, _Alexander’s Empire_, 1887, p.
38, thinks that the Romans could never have withstood Alexander’s
cavalry and siege artillery, although he notes that Livy patriotically
decided otherwise.

Footnote 46:

Droysen, _op. cit._ I., pp. 186, 240, 333. There were 30,000 Greek
mercenaries fighting on the side of Darius at Issus, and 4000 of these
remained faithful till his death. _Ibid._ I. p. 368.

Footnote 47:

Plutarch, _Themistocles_, c. XXVI.

Footnote 48:

Plutarch, _Crassus_, c. XXXIII. The play acted was the _Bacchae_, and
a Greek tragic actor, one Jason of Tralles, had been imported for the
principal part. In the essay _De Alex. fortitudine_, I. c. 5, Plutarch
says that no sooner had Alexander subdued Asia than Homer became a
favourite reading-book, and Persian, Susianan, and Gedrosian boys
learned to chant the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides.

Footnote 49:

Droysen, _op. cit._ III. pp. 244, 255.

Footnote 50:

Sylvain Lévi, “Bouddhisme et les Grecs,” _Revue de l’Histoire des
Religions_, 1891, p. 2; Percy Gardner, _Catalogue of Bactrian and
Indian Coins in British Museum_. Arts other than the plastic also
received attention. Amitrochates, son of the famous Chandragupta or
Sandracottus, wrote to Antiochus (Soter?) to buy him some sweet wine,
dried figs, and a sophist. He received the other commodities, but was
told that it was not lawful to sell sophists in Greece. See Athenaeus,
_Deipnosophistae_, Bk XIV. c. 67 quoting Hegesander.

Footnote 51:

Droysen, _op. cit._ III. p. 66. Cf. the _Omnis Oriens loquitur_ of St
Jerome _Prol. ad Epist. ad Galatas_; and Deissmann, _New Light on the
New Testament_ (English edition), 1907, p. 30.

Footnote 52:

1 Kings xx. 23.

Footnote 53:

1 Sam. iv. 6, 7.

Footnote 54:

Maspero, “La Fille du Prince de Bakhtan” in _Contes Populaires de
l’Ancienne Égypte_, Paris, p. 159.

Footnote 55:

Pater, _Plato and Platonism_, 1901, pp. 85, 86.

Footnote 56:

Aristotle, _Metaphysica_, Bk XI. c. 6.

Footnote 57:

Xenophon, _Memorabilia_, Bk I. c. 1, § 1-5.

Footnote 58:

Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. VII.

Footnote 59:

So F. H. Woods, _The Hope of Israel_, Edinburgh, 1896, p. 205, where
he speaks of the religion of the Prophets and Psalmists, as “giving,
on the whole, by far the most perfect and, as compared with other
ancient literature, practically a unique example of monotheism.” Yet
as Winwood Reade points out, Solomon must have thought there were
other gods than Yahweh, because he worshipped other gods; _op. cit._
_supra_, p. 201.

Footnote 60:

Aristotle, _Politica_, Bk I. c. 2, § 7. Cf. Max Müller, _Religions of
India_ (Hibbert Lectures), 1880, p. 292.

Footnote 61:

Arrian, _op. cit._ Bk VI. c. 27.

Footnote 62:

See his repudiation of the night attack advised at Arbela: οὐ κλέπτω
τὴν νίκην, “I steal no victory!” Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. XXXI.

Footnote 63:

Plutarch, _op. cit._ c. XXI. and c. XXX.

Footnote 64:

The wry neck or, in Mr Hogarth’s words, “the famous inclination of his
beautiful head towards the left shoulder” was imitated by dandies as
late as the time of Severus. For authorities see Hogarth, _Philip and
Alexander of Macedon_, 1897, p. 278, n. 2.

Footnote 65:

Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. 218 and p. 479, n. 1. Major P. H. Sykes
lately found an inscription in Khorassan to Sulayman Shah who reigned
from 1667-1694 A.D. containing the words “His audience-chamber is the
Sun; his Army the Stars; his authority is like Alexander’s,” _Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society_, 1910, pp. 1152, 1153.

Footnote 66:

Bouché-Leclercq, _Hist. des Lagides_, Paris, t. I. p. 130, n. 2,
points out that there was hardly a philosopher during the next three
centuries who did not write a treatise Περὶ τῆς βασιλείας.

Footnote 67:

A parallel movement seems to have taken place in Babylonia, where all
the gods were at one period identified with Marduk or Merodach. See
Pinches, “Religious Ideas of the Babylonians,” _Transactions of the
Victoria Institute_, 1893, p. 10.

Footnote 68:

Maury, _Histoire des Religions de la Grèce Antique_, Paris, 1857, III.
p. 73.

Footnote 69:

Demosthenes, _v. Midias_, p. 53; Herodotus, Bk VII. c. 189. Such gods
were called by the peculiar epithet of πυθόχρηστοι. See inscription
from Smyrna quoted by Rayet, _Revue Archéologique_, 1877, pp. 115-128.

Footnote 70:

Xenophon, _Hellenica_, Bk II. c. 4.

Footnote 71:

Plutarch, _Alcibiades_, c. CXVIII. Cf. Aristophanes, _Lysistrata_, ll.
387 _sqq._

Footnote 72:

Homeric _Hymn to Demeter_, _passim_.

Footnote 73:

Herodotus, Bk II. c. 50.

Footnote 74:

Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. 698.

Footnote 75:

See Maury, _Rel. de la Grèce_, t. III. cc. 15, 16. Aristophanes,
_Horae_ fragment 1 of Didot, and _Aves_, l. 874, is practically the
earliest witness for their introduction into Athens. Cf. the Scholiast
upon the last passage quoted, for their identification with Greek
deities. M. Paul Foucart, _Les Associations Religieuses chez les
Grecs_, Paris, 1873, pp. 57 and 85, shows the great rush of foreign
gods into Attica after the Persian War and the mode in which their
worship was propagated.

Footnote 76:

Percy Gardner, _Catalogue of Coins_, etc., _passim_. Goblet
d’Alviella, _Ce que l’Inde doit à la Grèce_, Paris, 1897, p. 73, notes
that these coins reproduce “the usual type of the classical divinities
Hercules, Dionysos, Poseidon, Helios, Pallas, Artemis, Niké.”

Footnote 77:

Droysen, _op. cit._ III. p. 73.

Footnote 78:

Callisthenes appears to have used this argument against the
deification of Alexander during his lifetime, Arrian, _Anabasis_, Bk
IV. c. 11. Cf. Budge, _Pseudo Callisthenes’ History of Alexander the
Great_, Cambridge, 1889, Bk III. c. 19, p. 135; Plutarch, _Pelopidas_,
c. XVI.

Footnote 79:

Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. 668.

Footnote 80:

Maspero, “Comment Alexandre devenait Dieu.” _Annuaire de l’École des
Hautes Études_, Paris, 1897; _id._ _Ét. Égyptol._ t. VI. pp. 286
_sqq._

Footnote 81:

Mr Hogarth, _Philip and Alexander_, pp. 197 _sqq._, rightly points out
that he never instituted any cult of himself, as did Demetrius
Poliorcetes.

Footnote 82:

Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. XXVIII.; Arrian, _Anabasis_, Bk VII. c. 29.

Footnote 83:

Plutarch, _de Is. et Os._ c. XXIV.; _id. Apophthegmata Antigon_. 7.
Cf. Droysen, _op. cit._ II. p. 295. Mr Tarn in his _Antigonos
Gonatas_, Oxford, 1913, p. 251, would transfer the story to his
grandson, but his reasoning is not convincing.

Footnote 84:

Athenaeus, _Deipnosoph_. Bk VI. c. 62.

Footnote 85:

Droysen, _op. cit._ III. p. 22 and note 2.

Footnote 86:

Euhemerus’ work was one of the first Greek books to be translated into
Latin. See Cicero, _De Nat. Deor._ c. 42.

Footnote 87:

Droysen, _op. cit._ III. p. 341, n. 3. Rhys Davids, _Buddhist India_,
1903, p. 298, thinks it possible that the missions although duly
recorded on stone were never sent.

Footnote 88:

See Chapter II _infra_.

Footnote 89:

Foucart, _Les Associations Religieuses_, etc., pp. 66-84. Cf. Maury,
_Rel. de la Grèce_, II. p. 427. The composition of hymns was
peculiarly the care of these associations; Foucart, _op. cit._ p. 114.

Footnote 90:

Foucart, _op. cit._ p. 85.

Footnote 91:

Franz Cumont, “Hypsistos,” _Revue de l’Instruction publique en
Belgique_, 1897, pp. 5-6; _id._ _Les Religions Orientales dans le
Paganisme Romain_, Paris, 1906, p. 155 and note.

Footnote 92:

Foucart, _Ass. Rel._ pp. 135, 136, 158.

Footnote 93:

See Chapter IV _infra_.

Footnote 94:

Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. II.

Footnote 95:

See Foucart, _op. cit._ p. 158, for the cases of Ninos and Theoris,
priestesses who were condemned for such traffic.

Footnote 96:

Plutarch, _Pythian Responses_, c. XXV.

Footnote 97:

Lucian, _Alexander or Pseudomantis_, _passim_. The story is well
summarized by Sir Samuel Dill, in _Nero to Marcus_, pp. 473 _sqq._

Footnote 98:

Léon Fivel, “Le Dieu Glycon à Nicomédie,” _Gazette Archéol._ 1879, p.
186.

Footnote 99:

Maury, _Rel. de la Grèce_, II. pp. 418 _sqq._ Cf. Döllinger,
_Judenthum und Heidenthum_ (English edition), I. p. 214.

Footnote 100:

Foucart, _Ass. Rel._ pp. 33-35.

Footnote 101:

_Id._ _op. cit._ pp. 150, 151.

Footnote 102:

Hogarth, _Philip and Alexander_, pp. 277, 282. Cf. Bouché-Leclercq in
Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. vii.