On the other hand, there was the pagan literary tradition, which owed all the value that it possessed to contact with Greek culture. Except in the field of legal social relations, the Romans made no original contribution to civilization. They had no proper curiosity concerning the universe, and so could do no thinking of vital importance concerning it. Anything approaching scientific thought in the modern sense was absolutely unknown to them. Therefore, while most of their writers were prosaic and secular in their habit of mind and free from mystical leanings, the intellectual possession of the Romans was not of the close-knit rational character which would have enabled them to resist successfully the avalanche of Oriental superstition which descended on the Western world in the centuries after the conquest of the East.[46] Secular thought in the Roman civilization was thus doomed to undergo a process of decay. [46] For a brief account of Oriental influences in Roman religion, see Dill, _Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire_ (London, 1898), ch. 4. The branch of pagan Latin literature which throws most light on the character of Isidore’s _Etymologies_ is the succession of encyclopedias which constituted so conspicuous a feature of literary history under the Empire. The chief writers in this field, in order of time, were Varro, Verrius Flaccus, the elder Pliny, Suetonius, Pompeius Festus, and Nonius Marcellus. While the motives and causes that impelled them to their task were doubtless many and intricate, consideration of a few paramount influences by which they were affected will explain much of the character of their work, and will indicate the origin of the main peculiarities of Isidore’s encyclopaedia. In the first place, it is in these encyclopaedias, which profess to cover the fields of literary scholarship and natural science, that the intellectual decline most clearly reveals itself. They may be regarded on the one hand as representing the successive stages in the decay of the intellectual inheritance, and in them we may trace the way in which the array of ordered knowledge was steadily losing in both content and quality. Viewed, on the other hand, as a totality, and considered with reference to the impulses that led to their production, they are again symptomatic of degeneration; they stand as the most thorough-going example of the epitomizing tendency which permeated Roman thought and which evidenced its decline. Written as they were by the intellectual leaders of their day, they represent a curious reversal of the modern situation, since where the leaders in the modern expansion of thought have devoted themselves to specialized inquiry, those of the Roman empire gave their attention to compiling and arranging the whole body of knowledge rather than to extending it at any point. The conditions of their time drove them to _generalize_ rather than to specialize.