Intermarriage with the Gentiles was prohibited as strictly as ever, in obedience to the old commandment: “Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.”[21] And so it came to pass that, while they appeared to the Gentile a strange and unsocial species of men, to them the Gentile continued to be an unclean animal. Had it not been for its stern and exclusive spirit, the Hebrew cult might have excited the derision or the scornful curiosity of the Pagans, but it would have hardly been made the object of systematic attack. The Jews would have continued their eccentric worship of “the sky and the clouds”[22] unmolested, though unrespected, and their Temple, with all its uncanny “emptiness,”[23] would have remained standing; for Paganism was nothing if not tolerant. The religion of classical antiquity was a matter of convention rather than of conviction. The earnest and the unhappy sought solace in philosophy; the masses in superstition. Philosophy did not degenerate into theology, but left theology to the poets who, unfettered by doctrine, created or transformed the popular deities and legends, purging or perverting them according to the promptings of their own imagination, or the requirements of their art. The priests in pagan society counted for less than the poets. The word “heresy” in pagan Greece meant simply “free choice,” and later “a philosophical school.” The terms “orthodox” and “heterodox” had hardly as yet acquired their invidious meaning. Religious rancour, that baneful mother of manifold misery to mankind, was not yet born. There is no parallel in antiquity to that unremitting and systematic war of creeds by which, in later ages, men tried to crush those who disagreed with them in matters of metaphysical conjecture. Tolerance and speculative freedom were never better understood than in pagan Greece and Rome. The Pagan was content to navigate his own ship by his own compass--whether of head or of heart--without insisting that every one else should adopt the same compass, or be drowned. The total absence of dogma, which forms at once the charm and the foible of polytheism, while precluding persecution, encouraged a free exchange of religious traditions, not only between sister nations, as the Greek and the Italian, but even between entirely foreign and even hostile races. Thus, while the Latin writers hastened, more or less successfully, to identify the deities of Italy with those of Hellas, Greek travellers in the East, from Herodotus onwards, habitually sought and found, or imagined that they found, common attributes between the divinities of Olympus and those of Memphis and Sidon. Frequent intercourse facilitated the work of assimilation, and not only specific attributes but whole gods and goddesses found their way from one pagan country to another, where they were welcomed. The doors of the Pantheon stood hospitably open to all comers.