Campania, especially at Pompeii and Puteoli.  This last-named place, the seaport Puteoli, the modern Pozzuoli, outside of Naples, was probably the door through which Isis and her train came into Italy.  Puteoli was the chief port for Oriental ships, including Egypt, and it also had commercial relations with Delos.  At this later date it supplied Rome with gods in somewhat the same way that Cumae, in the same neighbourhood, had done centuries before.  So far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, an apparently trustworthy tradition traces the private cult back to the time of Sulla; and it certainly cannot have been introduced much later than this time, because in B.C. 58 it had became so prominent and so offensive to the authorities of the state that they destroyed an altar of Isis on the Capitoline.  Apparently Isis was no exception to the general law of growth by persecution, because in the course of the next decade the state found it necessary to interfere no less than three times, i.e. in B.C. 53, 50, and 48.  Finally the policy of suppression proved so ineffectual that it was decided to try the opposite extreme, and to see what could be done by state acknowledgment and state control, and so the Triumvirs, Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus, in B.C. 43 decreed the building of a state temple for Isis.  But although they had decreed the erection of a temple, they were too much engaged in their own affairs to build it immediately, and until the temple was built Isis could not properly be considered among the state gods.  As events turned out this temple was never built, for in the course of the next few years the trouble with Antony and Cleopatra began, and thus the gods of Egypt became the gods of Rome’s enemies, and so far as the state was concerned an acknowledgment of these gods was impossible.  Instead Augustus forbade even private chapels inside the pomerium.  The subsequent history of Isis does not directly concern us; suffice it to say that after various vicissitudes she was admitted to the state cult by Caracalla along with all the other foreign deities.

But it was not only Asia Minor and Egypt which gave their cults to Rome; the deities of Syria came too.  Prominent among them was Atargatis, whose cult seems to have touched the Italian mainland first at Puteoli.  In B.C. 54 the army of Crassus on its Eastern expedition, which was destined to come to such a tragic end in the terrible defeat at Carrhae, visited and plundered the sanctuary of the goddess in Syria.  Thus she became known at Rome, where she was called simply the “Syrian goddess” (dea Syria) and was worshipped in a way very similar to the Magna Mater and Bellona.

Lastly when Pompey swept the Mediterranean clean of Cilician pirates, the sailors became acquainted with a Persian deity, Mithras, whose cult in Rome began during our period and subsequently crowded all the other orgiastic cults into insignificance.