very probable, because the Orphic doctrine, which, as we have seen, made Chronos or Time the progenitor of all the gods, was widely spread in Asia Minor before Alexander’s Conquest, and the Persian colonies formed there under his successors must therefore have come in frequent contact with this most accommodating of schools[816]. Traditions of a sect of Zervanists in Western Asia, who taught that all things came from Infinite Time, are also to be found[817]. But most of these are recorded after Mithraism had become extinct; and M. Cumont’s proofs of the existence of this dogma in the European religion of Mithras can be reduced on final analysis to a quotation from a treatise by Theodore, the Christian bishop of Mopsuestia who died in 428 A.D., directed, as it would seem, against the “Magi” of his time, in which he admits that their dogmas had never been written, and that the sectaries in question, whom he calls Magusaeans, said “sometimes one thing and deceived themselves, and sometimes another and deceived the ignorant[818].” M. Cumont’s identification of the lion-headed statue often found in Mithraic chapels with the Supreme God of the system has been shown elsewhere to be open to serious question, and the figure itself to be susceptible of another interpretation than that which he would put upon it[819]. On the whole, therefore, while M. Cumont’s mastery of his subject makes it very dangerous to differ from him, it seems that his theory of a Boundless Time as the pinnacle of the Mithraist pantheon cannot be considered as proved.