FIRST CENTURY 3
Rome was flooded with the professors of alien faiths. Morning and evening the servants of Isis, with shaven heads and white linen tunics, follow the gong of the sistrum to the temple of the goddess for choral song. As soon as spring has melted the ice of the Tiber, they dive three times daily into the stream in order to cleanse their sinful bodies; or they crawl on their knees across the Field of Mars to appease the angry divinity.
So also did the Phrygian processions move toward their Holy of Holies on the Palatine, bearing the silver image of the great mother Cybele, or the pine enshrouded like a corpse which signifies Attis, her dead lover. Thus also did the Syrians, busy merchants in their Roman shops and passionate worshippers in their chapels, participate in the strange cults honouring their god Baal. And so did Romans and alien folk gather at the table of the astrologers outside the Circus Maximus, where fortunes were read from a globe or a planetarium for patrons who did not need to feel ashamed since Caesar, Augustus and Tiberius had come here, too.
What was it that attracted Rome to these cults, mysteries and abstruse teachings of the East? Many abandoned their gods in the same spirit in which the marriage tie may be broken for a mistress' sake. These religious services offered something to the imagination. Out of the wealth of myths and teachings every one could take that which satisfied his own need; and the light of a new life, of a higher reality and of a dawning eternal existence of man mystically renewed, reborn, shone irresistibly through the grey mist of the everyday. Religious forms offered might be manifold, but the mood of the people who sought them out was prevailingly one yearning for the soul's salvation now and after death.
In the dirtiest quarter of the city, beyond the Tiber, the Jews had their Ghetto. Doubtless it had been there a good two hundred years. Pompey, the conqueror of Jerusalem, had brought back hosts of cap- tives, and had freed them after his triumphal return. Roman policy was more favourable to them than was public opinion. While there were no pogroms like that which broke out in Alexandria in 38 A.D., the Jew was a stock figure for ridicule on the comic stage, and the poets from Horace to Juvenal made him the butt of their satire. Nevertheless some looked with different feelings on these bankers,
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