Many of the Syrian emigrants who were attracted westward in the pursuit of fortune were more or less attached to Judaism. Others remained faithful to the worship of their own village,[16.61] that is, to the memory of some temple dedicated to a local "Jupiter"[16.62] who was ordinarily the Supreme Deity designated by some special title;[16.63] and they thus carried with them a kind of monotheism under the disguise of their strange divinities. At least in comparison with the perfectly distinct divine personalities of the Greek and Roman polytheism, the Syrian gods being mostly synonymes of the sun, were almost the brothers of the one Deity.[16.64] Like their long and enervating chants, these Syrian rites appeared less dry than the Latin and less empty than the Greek. The women acquired from them a mixture of ecstasy and voluptuousness. Those Syrian women were always strange creatures, disputed for by God and Satan, and oscillating between the saint and the demon. The saint of serious virtues, of heroic self-denial, of accomplished vows, belongs to other races and climes. The saint of vivid imaginings, of absolute entrancements, and of sudden devotion, is the saint of Syria. The demoniac of our Middle Age became the slave of Satan through baseness or crime; that of Syria was distracted by the ideal--the woman of wounded affections, who avenges herself by madness or refusal to speak,{16.65} and who needs only a gentle word and kind look to restore her. Transported to the western world, the Syrian women acquired influence, sometimes by evil feminine arts, but oftener by real capacity and moral superiority. This happened in a special degree about a hundred and fifty years later, when the most important personages of Rome married Syrian wives, who at once acquired a great ascendency over affairs. The Mussulman woman of the present time, a noisy scold and foolish fanatic, existing for scarce anything but evil, and almost incapable of virtue, ought not to make us forget such as Julia Domna, Julia Mæsa, Julia Mamæa, and Julia Sœmia, who introduced into Rome a spirit of toleration and a mystical feeling in religion which were till then unknown. What is also well worthy of remark is, that the Syrian dynasty thus established was friendly to Christianity, and that Mamæa, and afterwards the Emperor Philip the Arabian,{16.66} passed for Christians. In the third and fourth centuries Christianity was the predominant religion of Syria, and next to Palestine, Syria played the greatest part in its establishment.