Chapter XI: Preface

1 We are indebted for more than one useful suggestion to our colleagues Messrs. Charles Michel and Joseph Bidez, who were kind enough to read the proofs of the French edition.

2 An outline of the present state of the subject will be found in a recent volume by Gruppe, _Griechische Mythologie_, 1906, pp. 1606 ff., whose views are sharply opposed to the negative conclusions formulated, with certain reservations, by Harnack, _Ausbreitung des Christentums_, II, pp. 274 ff. Among the latest studies intended for the general reader that have appeared on this subject, may be mentioned in Germany those of Geffcken (_Aus der Werdezeit des Christentums_, Leipsic, 1904, pp. 114 ff.), and in England those of Cheyne (_Bible Problems_, 1904), who expresses his opinion in these terms: "The Christian religion is a synthesis, and only those who have dim eyes can assert that the intellectual empires of Babylonia and Persia have fallen."--Very useful is the new book of Clemen, _Religionsgeschichtliche Erklärung des Neuen Testaments_, Giessen, 1909.

3 _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 342, n. 4; see the new texts commented on by Usener, _Rhein. Museum_, LX, 1905, pp. 466 ff.; 489 ff., and my paper "Natalis Invicti," _C. R. Acad. des inscr._, 1911.

4 See page 70. Compare also _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 341. The imitation of the church is plain in the pagan reform attempted by the emperor Julian.

5 See Harnack, _Militia Christi_, 1905.

6 I have collected a number of texts on the religious "militias" in _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 317, n. 1. Others could certainly be discovered: Apuleius, _Metam._, XI, 14: _E cohorte {214} religionis unus_ (in connection with a mystic of Isis);--Vettius Valens (V, 2, p. 220, 27, Kroll ed.): [Greek: Stratiôtai tês heimarmenês]; (VII, 3, p. 271, 28) [Greek: Sustrateuesthai tois kairois gennaiôs]. See Minucius Felix, 36, § 7: _Quod patimur non est poena, militia est._--We might also mention the commonplace term _militia Veneris_, which was popular with the Augustan poets (Propertius, IV, 1, 137; see I, 6, 30; Horace, _Od._, III, 26, and especially the parallel developed by Ovid, _Amor._, I, 9, 1 ff., and _Ars amat._, III, 233 ff.)--Socrates, in Plato's _Apologia_ (p. 28 E), incidentally likens the philosophic mission imposed on him by the divinity to the campaigns he waged under the orders of the archons, but the comparison of God with a "strategus" was developed especially by the Stoics; see Capelle, "Schrift von der Welt," _Neue Jahrb. für das klass. Altert._, XV, 1905, p. 558, n. 6, and Seneca, _Epist._, 107, 9: _Optimum est Deum sine murmuratione comitari, malus miles est qui imperatorem gemens sequitur_.--See now also Reitzenstein, _Hellenistische Mysterienreligion_, 1910, p. 66.

7 See _Rev. des études grecques_, XIV, 1901, pp. 43 ff.

8 This has been clearly shown by Wendland in connection with the idea of the [Greek: sôtêria], _Zeitschrift für neutest. Wiss._, V, 1904, pp. 355 ff. More recently he has thrown light on the general influence of Hellenistic civilization on Christianity (_Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur in ihren Beziehungen zum Judentum und Christentum_, Tübingen, 1908). A first attempt to determine the character of Hellenistic mysteries is to be found in Reitzenstein's _Hellenistische Mysterienreligion_, 1910.