We have seen that Valentinus left Alexandria to settle in Rome before promulgating his new doctrine[685], and the Eternal City seems at that time to have drawn to itself as with a magnet all those Oriental teachers of Christianity who wished to make innovation in religion. Rome in the IInd century had become a veritable sink into which poured men of all nations and creeds whether old or new. Besides the great flood of Isiacists, Mithraists, and worshippers of the Great Goddess and of the Syrian Baals, that now began to appear there, Alexander of Abonoteichos came thither under Marcus Aurelius to celebrate his newly-invented mysteries[686], and succeeded in gaining a foothold at the Imperial Court. Moreover in A.D. 140, the terrible war of extermination which Hadrian had been compelled much against his will to wage against the Jewish nation was at length over, and the effect of this was to transfer a great number of Asiatic and African Christians to the world’s metropolis, while making it more than ever expedient for them to disclaim connection with the Jews. The slightly contemptuous toleration, too, which the statesmanlike Hadrian seems to have extended to the Christians[687], was not likely to be withdrawn without reason by his philosophic successor, Antoninus Pius; and it was doubtless the consciousness of this which led to the appearance of the various “apologies” for, or defences of, Christianity which Quadratus, Aristides, Justin Martyr, and other persons with some philosophic training now began to put forth. In such of these as have come down to us, the desire of their authors to dissociate themselves from the Jews, then at the nadir of their unpopularity, is plainly manifest, and no doubt gave the note to the innovators[688]. It is certainly very marked in the heresy of Marcion, which, unlike those of Valentinus and the other Gnostics, was to culminate in the setting-up of a schismatic Church in opposition to that founded on the Apostles.