By common consent the most virtuous livers of Greece were the members of the Pythagorean schools, both men and women. After the death of their founder the Pythagoreans seem to have gradually blended with the Orphic communities, and the “Orphic life” was the recognised term for a life of purity and self-denial. We also know that the Orphics, and therefore the Pythagoreans, were actively engaged in the reformation, or even the entire reforming, of the Baccho-Eleusinian rites; they seem to have brought back the pure side of the Bacchic cult with their reinstitution or reimportation of the Iacchic mysteries, and it is very evident that such stern livers and deep thinkers could not have been contented with a low form of cult. Their influence also spread far and wide in general Bacchic circles, so that we find Euripides putting the following words into the mouth of a chorus of Bacchic initiates: “Clad in white robes I speed me from the genesis of mortal men, and never more approach the vase of death, for I have done with eating food that ever housed a soul.”[1] Such words could well be put into the mouth of a Brāhman or Buddhist ascetic, eager to escape from the bonds of Saṃsāra; and such men cannot therefore justly be classed together indiscriminately with ribald revellers--the general mind-picture of a Bacchic company. But, some one may say, Euripides and the Pythagoreans and Orphics are no evidence for the first century; whatever good there may have been in such schools and communities, it had ceased long before. On the contrary, the evidence is all against this objection. Philo, writing about 25 A.D., tells us that in his day numerous groups of men, who in all respects led this life of religion, who abandoned their property, retired from the world and devoted themselves entirely to the search for wisdom and the cultivation of virtue, were scattered far and wide throughout the world. In his treatise, On the Contemplative Life, he writes: “This natural class of men is to be found in many parts of the inhabited world, both the Grecian and non-Grecian world, sharing in the perfect good. In Egypt there are crowds of them in every province, or nome as they call it, and especially round Alexandria.” This is a most important statement, for if there were so many devoted to the religious life at this time, it follows that the age was not one of unmixed depravity. It is not, however, to be thought that these communities were all of an exactly similar nature, or of one and the same origin, least of all that they were all Therapeut or Essene. We have only to remember the various lines of descent of the doctrines held by the innumerable schools classed together as Gnostic, as sketched in my recent work, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, and to turn to the beautiful treatises of the Hermetic schools, to persuade us that in the first century the striving after the religious and philosophic life was wide-spread and various.