that the foreign divinity was only another form of some god already worshipped by the citizens[68], and by keeping his cult as private as possible. Later, when the popularity of the new deity seemed to be assured, an oracle of Delphi was generally secured authorizing the adoption of his worship under the name of his nearest Greek analogue, and in this way many foreign worships were brought into Athens itself[69]. Bendis, the moon-goddess of Thrace, had there from early times a temple or Bendideion[70], and the Syrian Adonis was publicly wailed for in the city when Alcibiades was setting out for Sicily[71]. This, too, was the more natural because the Greeks always acknowledged that their older divinities originally came to them from foreign parts. The myths in which the traditions of their origins were preserved gave Crete or Asia Minor as the birthplace of Zeus, an island in the Aegean as that of Apollo and Artemis, and the whole scene of the earthly trials of Demeter and Persephone was laid partly in Eleusis and partly in Asia[72]. As for Africa, Herodotus boldly asserts that the “names” of almost all the gods worshipped by the Greeks came from Egypt[73], and, although this is certainly not literally true, it gave him an excuse for identifying all the Egyptian deities of whom he had any knowledge with the Greek divinities whom he thought they resembled. But when Alexander’s conquests had made the different subject nations really acquainted with each other’s religion, the process of _theocrasia_ or the fusion of one god with another received an impulse that carried it beyond all bounds[74]. The divinities of Asia Minor were naturally the first to be taken into the Greek pantheon, especially by the Athenians, always mindful of their Ionian kinship; and the many-breasted goddess of Ephesus, Cybele of Pessinus with her consort Atys or Attis, and the Sidonian Astarte, were all worshipped in Greece after identification with different Greek deities in the manner that had served to naturalize the “Thracian” or Thessalian Dionysos, and the (probably) Egyptian Hermes[75]. As we shall see later, the Phrygian Sabazius and the Cretan Zagreus had already preceded them in secret, and Persian, Jewish, and perhaps Indian gods were to follow. From Greece, the passion for _theocrasia_ spread both eastward and westward. The Greek kings of Upper India found it necessary to identify on their monuments the gods of their native subjects with the divinities of Homer[76], and those of the Central Provinces and of Asia Minor did the same with such effect that it is almost impossible for us to distinguish their many Artemises, Aphrodites, and different forms of Zeus from the gods worshipped under similar names in ancient Greece[77]. As for the West, the Romans, even before they became the masters of the world, took over the Greek pantheon _en bloc_ by the simple process of calling their own Italian deities by Greek names; and if we still speak of Zeus as Jupiter, Athena