and gave him courage.  Thus her cult entered Rome, and the capture of the city by Sulla has its parallel in the capture of the hearts of the people by his companion, the goddess of Comana.  The original name of this goddess seems to have been Ma, but the Greeks, who also knew her, had likened her to Enyo, their goddess of strife and warfare; hence in these days of facile identification the Romans’ course was clear, and she became straightway Bellona, called by the name of their old goddess of war.  Of all the chapters of the history of such identifications none is more curious than this.  The old Bellona had borne to Mars the same relation that Fides, the goddess of good faith, had borne to Juppiter.  She was the result of the separate deification of one of the qualities of Mars, the breaking off of an adjective and the turning of it into a noun; but from now on, though the old goddess still existed and had her own temple and her own worship, the name was also applied to this strange Oriental goddess who came in the train of the debauched Roman army on its return from the East.  But though men might call this new-comer by the name of a sacred old national goddess and worship her in private as they pleased, the religion of the state, even in its sunken condition, refused to admit her among its deities, and the priests, the Fanatici, with their wild dances, to the music of cymbals and trumpets, slashing themselves with their double axes until their arms streamed with blood, were not, at least as yet, the official representatives of the state, the companions of the reverend old Salii with their dignified “three-step.”  Even the sanctuaries of the private cult must be kept outside the city, and the violation of this law in B.C. 48 resulted in the raiding and destruction of one of these private chapels.  Her cult does not seem to have become a state affair until the beginning of the third century A.D., when Caracalla, who had extended Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the provinces, gave a similar citizenship to all the foreign deities resident in Rome.  It is a curious coincidence that this action of Caracalla’s occurred just about the same year A.D. in which the breakdown of the pomerium for state cults had occurred B.C.  For the present, however, that is to say in the first century B.C., the state retained her dignity, though the resultant unorthodox character of the cult increased its power and influence, and made it more subversive to morals than the Magna Mater was.

An even more interesting instance, both of the popularity of sensational foreign cults and of the struggle of the state religion against them, is found in the case of the Egyptian goddess Isis.  The spread of Isis worship into the Greek, and consequently also into the Roman world, began relatively early.  In the third century Isis and her companion Serapis were well established on the island of Delos; and in the second century we find traces of their worship in