Not less hopeless, in this respect, was the case of the Graeco-Roman pantheon. The late Mr Long’s picture of “Diana or Christ,” representing a young woman called upon by a sympathetic Roman magistrate to choose between sacrificing to the statue of the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus and condemnation to death as a Christian, attained great popularity in its day, and shows with fair clearness the view of the relations between Paganism and early Christianity supposed at the end of the last century to have been current in the first. Yet hardly anything could give a falser idea of the religious history of the period. The officials of the Roman Empire in time of persecution sought to force the Christians to sacrifice, not to any of the heathen gods, but to the Genius of the Emperor and the Fortune of the City of Rome; and at all times the Christians’ refusal was looked upon not as a religious but as a political offence[13]. For the rest, the worship of the Olympian gods had, when Christianity came to the surface, almost entirely died out, and both Greek and Latin writers bear witness to the contempt with which it was regarded by both races at the beginning of our era. Cicero, while admitting that the world is governed by the providence of the gods, rejects all the myths attached to them as impious, and declares that the “Deity who is diffused in every part of Nature” appears as the earth under the name of Ceres, as the sea under that of Neptune, and so on[14]. Plutarch, too, is plainly a monotheist, who worships “the one eternal, passionless Spirit far removed from the world of chance and change and earthly soilure” of Greek philosophy[15]; and, while lamenting the decay of faith which has led to the cessation of oracles, thinks that all the manifestations of the Divine providence are the work of no great deity, but of a crowd of inferior powers or demons who are hardly in a greater superiority of position to man than the fairies of our childhood[16]. Whatever rivalry the Christian Church had to face in its infancy, it had none to fear from the deities of Olympus.