asleep or too far off to be taken into account, or were not really gods at all[84]. But it is not with impunity that the religious ideas of a people can be thus suddenly and violently affronted. Within a few years from Alexander’s death, Cassander’s friend and envoy Euhemerus put forward, with the aid of a literary fraud something like that of Psalmanazar, the theory that all the gods worshipped by the Greeks had once been kings or at least distinguished men and women upon earth[85]—a doctrine that was received with as much enthusiasm in the Rome of the Republic as it once evoked in our own days among the followers of Herbert Spencer[86]. Later, the Epicurean philosophy, with its happy gods neither interfering with nor caring about the doings of mankind, came to the assistance of this rather crude atheism. Although the Stoic philosophers in their turn tried to introduce a more lofty idea of the Deity, it was probably not until late Roman times that they ever obtained anything like a grip on the people. Whether for good or ill, it is certain that the Greeks after Alexander’s death never returned to the simple faith in their national gods which had sufficed for their forefathers. This is a point that it is important to remember, because without it, it is hard to understand the passion for innovation in religious matters which seems for the next three centuries to possess unchecked sway over mankind. It appeared as if Alexander, who indeed had made all things new, had set free the gods of the ancient world to wander from one end of his Empire to the other, and the desire to proselytize appears for the first time in the world’s history. Buddhism must have been prevalent in India for nearly a century before Alexander; but when it became the religion of the state in the reign of Asoka, grandson of that Chandragupta or Sandracottus who had talked with Alexander face to face, the Indian king boasted that he had sent out missionaries for the propagation of his new faith to the courts of Antiochus of Syria, Ptolemy of Egypt, Antigonus of Macedonia, Magas of Cyrene and Alexander of Epirus[87]. Whether the Indian missionaries ever reached the kings to whom they were sent may be doubted, and it is certain that these last did not pay the attention to them that Asoka claims; but it is quite possible that to the impulse given by such missions may be attributed some of the practices of the Jewish sect of the Essenes, and perhaps the monastic seclusion affected by certain worshippers of the Alexandrian god Serapis[88]. But if Buddhism could thus find its way westward from so distant a country as India, how much more must this have been the case with the other Oriental religions with which the Greeks had already some slight acquaintance, and which, as we shall see in the sequel, poured into Europe in such a flood that Juvenal compared it to the Orontes emptying itself into the Tiber. That the Greeks, ever eager for