Thus it came about that in the course of the ages the common people, especially the many aliens from Asia Minor, slave and free, everywhere tended to seek more and more a religion for themselves--something in which they could share equally and intimately; somewhat as, in a later period, the common people in so many parts of Europe recoiled from official Catholicism before as well as at the Reformation, or as the townspeople in England later set up their own dissenting chapels in dislike of the Established Church. As early as the Peloponnesian war we find new religious societies arising among the humbler Athenians, making accessible to them Dionysian or other eastern mysteries of sacred baptism, and a sacred banquet of "body and blood," in which a kid was the victim. Some such banquet was the normal basis; and the societies, which were numerous, were self-supporting and self-governing, appointing their own priests or priestesses, and keeping their own sacred books. In these cults slaves, aliens, and women were alike admitted; and, though in some the worship was orgiastic, in keeping with the then common level of popular culture, it is not to be supposed that the avowed ideals of "goodness, chastity, piety," were for such groups in general devoid of moral significance. They were condemned by the educated classes alike in republican Greece and in republican Rome as vulgar and licentious; but if these imputations are to be fully believed as against the pagan societies, they must be equally believed as against the Christians, concerning whom, in turn, they were generally made in the second and third centuries. Of neither movement, probably, were they more than partially true. In any case, the Greek societies gave a model to the early Christian churches in more than one point of organisation, most of them having had "presbyters" and a "bishop" (episcopos), and some being called "synagogues," a term synonymous with ecclesia. So great, finally, became the competitive pressure of the private cults that those of the State had to offer inducements as against them; and in course of time the once exclusive Eleusinian mysteries of Athens were opened to all members of the State, and latterly--save in exceptional cases, such as those of avowed unbelievers, or Epicureans, or Christians--to all members of the Roman empire. Even the slaves, finally, were initiated at the public expense.