The University of Wisconsin.
Notes to Introduction.
[1] This summary of M. Cumont's chapter is quoted from my review of the first edition of Les religions orientales in Classical Philology, III, 4, p. 467.
[2] Die Religion der Römer, p. 116. For the significance of the pagan faiths, see an essay on "The Ancient Religions in Universal History," American Journal of Philology, XXIX, 2. pp. 156-171.
PREFACE.
In November, 1905, the Collège de France honored the writer by asking him to succeed M. Naville in opening the series of lectures instituted by the Michonis foundation. A few months later the "Hibbert Trust" invited him to Oxford to develop certain subjects which he had touched upon at Paris. In this volume have been collected the contents of both series with the addition of a short bibliography and notes intended for scholars desirous of verifying assertions made in the text.[[1]] The form of the work has scarcely been changed, but we trust that these pages, intended though they were for oral delivery, will bear reading, and that the title of these studies will not seem too ambitious for what they have to offer. The propagation of the Oriental religions, with the development of neo-Platonism, is the leading fact in the moral history of the pagan empire. May this small volume on a great subject throw at least some light upon this truth, and may the reader receive these essays with the same kind interest shown by the audiences at Paris and Oxford.
The reader will please remember that the different chapters were thought out and written as lectures. They do not claim to contain a debit and credit account of what the Latin paganism borrowed from or loaned to the Orient. Certain well-known facts have been