How completely Christianity belongs to the world of religious ideas in which it arose may be realised, finally, by a glance at the worship of the Roman Emperor, already established before the Christian era. In Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, written about 40 B.C., there is sung for Romans the universal myth of the coming Child, who is to be Saviour and Lord of a rejuvenated earth, and whom Virgil was ready to identify with the nephew of Augustus. But in the same period he sings of Augustus as already divine; and Augustus in due course exploited for himself the whole idea. Not only did he, like Alexander, set in currency the typical fable of his mother's intercourse with Apollo, and a Roman version of the ancient myth which in the gospels becomes the story of the Massacre of the Innocents: in edicts which are in part actually preserved on monuments he gave himself out in the East as a God and Saviour whose birthday was henceforth to be celebrated as the beginning of an evangel to the world, and who was to make an end of war and disorder. Later emperors continued the expedient, which had been well tried by Persian and Egyptian kings in previous ages. Against such divine pretensions on the part of the Roman conqueror the Jews would instinctively develop their own formulated hope of a Jewish Messiah; and wherever in the Empire men revolted against the apotheosis of the earthly autocrat, the Judæo-Gentile cult of the slain and re-arising Christ, who was soon to come and judge the world, would find devotees eager to accord to him the attributes claimed by Cæsar, and whatever others might avail. The new religion was thus in every aspect a syncretism of the religious material of the time. § 5. Ethics: Popular and Philosophic