The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism [1911] - Get a Free Blog

124 THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS.
ceived it without reserve and surrendered uncondi
tionally; 57 numismatics and archeology as well as
literature prove this. King Antiochus of Commagene,
for instance, who died 34 B. C, built himself a monu
mental tomb on a spur of the Taurus,
in which he
placed his horoscope, designed on a large bas-relief,
beside the images of his ancestral divinities. 58
The importance which the introduction of the Syr
ian religions into the Occident has for us consists
therefore in the fact that indirectly they brought cer
tain theological doctrines of the Chaldeans with them,
just as Isis and Serapis carried beliefs of old Egypt
from Alexandria to the Occident. The Roman empire
received successively the religious tribute of the two
great nations that had formerly ruled the Oriental
world. It is characteristic that the god Bel whom
Aurelian brought from Asia to set up as the protector
of his states, was in reality a Babylonian who had
emigrated to Palmy ra, 5 9 a cosmopolitan center ap
virtue of its location to be
parently predestined by
come the intermediary between the civilizations of the
Euphrates and the Mediterranean.
The influence exercised by the speculations of the
Chaldeans upon Greco-Roman thought can be asserted
positively, but cannot as yet be strictly denned. It
was at once philosophic and religious, literary and
popular. The entire neo-Platonist school used the
names of those venerable masters, but it cannot be
determined how much it really owes to them. A
selection of poems that has often been quoted since
the third century, under the title of "Chaldaic Oracles"*
combines the ancient Hellenic theories with a fantastic
* Aoyia Xa\da iKa.