Strange emperors, therefore, occupied the throne:  Elagabalus, a Syrian priest, who garbed himself as a woman and had his mother assemble a senate of women; Maximin, a soldier of fortune, a rough and bloodthirsty giant, who ate, it was said, thirty pounds of food and drank twenty-one quarts of wine a day.  Once there were twenty emperors at the same time, each in a corner of the empire (260-278).  These have been called the Thirty Tyrants.

The Cult of Mithra.—­This century of wars is also a century of superstitions.  The deities of the Orient, Isis, Osiris, the Great Mother, have their devotees everywhere.  But, more than all the others, Mithra, a Persian god, becomes the universal god of the empire.  Mithra is no other than the sun.  The monuments in his honor that are found in all parts of the empire represent him slaughtering a bull, with this inscription:  “To the unconquerable sun, to the god Mithra.”  His cult is complicated, sometimes similar to the Christian worship; there are a baptism, sacred feasts, an anointing, penances, and chapels.  To be admitted to this one must pass through an initiatory ceremony, through fasting and certain fearful tests.

At the end of the third century the religion of Mithra was the official religion of the empire.  The Invincible God was the god of the emperors; he had his chapels everywhere in the form of grottoes with altars and bas-reliefs; in Rome, even, he had a magnificent temple erected by the emperor Aurelian.

=The Taurobolia.=—­One of the most urgent needs of this time was reconciliation with the deity; and so ceremonies of purification were invented.

The most striking of these was the Taurobolia.  The devotee, clad in a white robe with ornaments of gold, takes his place in the bottom of a ditch which is covered by a platform pierced with holes.  A bull is led over this platform, the priest kills him and his blood runs through the holes of the platform upon the garments, the face, and the hair of the worshipper.  It was believed that this “baptism of blood” purified one of all sins.  He who had received it was born to a new life; he came forth from the ditch hideous to look upon, but happy and envied.

=Confusion of Religions.=—­In the century that preceded the victory of Christianity, all religions fell into confusion.  The sun was adored at once under many names (Sol, Helios, Baal, Elagabal, and Mithra).  All the cults imitated one another and sometimes copied Christian forms.  Even the life of Christ was copied.  The Asiatic philosopher, Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in the first century (3-96), became in legend a kind of prophet, son of a god, who went about surrounded by his disciples, expelling demons, curing sicknesses, raising the dead.  He had come, it was said, to reform the doctrine of Pythagoras and Plato.  In the third century an empress had the life of Apollonius of Tyana written, to be, as it were, a Pythagorean gospel opposed to the gospel of Christ.  The most remarkable example of this confusion in religion was given by Alexander Severus, a devout emperor, mild and conscientious:  he had in his palace a chapel where he adored the benefactors of humanity—­Abraham, Orpheus, Jesus, and Apollonius of Tyana.