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

60 THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS.
Another agent in favor of this imported religion was,
as we have stated above, the fact of its official recog
nition. This placed it in a privileged position among
Oriental religions, at least at the beginning of the
imperial regime. It enjoyed a toleration that was
neither precarious nor limited; it was not subjected
to arbitrary police measures nor to coercion on the
part of magistrates
; its fraternities were not continu
ally threatened with dissolution, nor its priests with
expulsion. It was publicly authorized and endowed,
its holidays were marked in the calendars of the pon
tiffs, its associations of dendrophori were organs of
municipal life in Italy and in the provinces, and had
a corporate entity.
Therefore it is not surprising that other foreign re
ligions, after being transferred to Rome, sought to
avert the dangers of an illicit existence by an alliance
with the Great Mother. The religion of the latter fre
quently consented to agreements and compromises,
from which it gained in reality as much as it gave up.
In exchange for material advantages it acquired com
plete moral authority over the gods that accepted its
protection. Thus Cybele and Attis absorbed a majority
of the divinities from Asia Minor that had crossed the
Ionian Sea. Their clergy undoubtedly intended to es
tablish a religion complex enough to enable the emi
grants from every part of the vast peninsula, slaves,
merchants, soldiers, functionaries, scholars, in short,
people of all classes of society, to find their national
and favorite devotions in it. As a matter of fact no
other Anatolian god could maintain his independence
side by side with the deities of Pessinus. 2*
We do not know the internal development
of the