From the point of view of the musical historian the dominant note of civilization at the opening of the Christian era was the all-pervading influence of Hellenistic culture. It is well to remember, however, that this influence was more in form than in content. Greek art was no longer the pure, bright flame that lighted the world so gloriously in the age of Pericles. Its blaze had become dull and lifeless; elements foreign to the fuel that had fed it in the classic age had been brought to it by the softly sensuous fingers of the Orient and the rough, unsympathetic hands of Rome. Hellenic art at the opening of the Christian era resembled that of Periclean Athens as little as the pseudo-classic architecture of the Italian Renaissance resembled the crowning glories of the Acropolis. The serene, clear, intellectual æstheticism of Greece had degenerated into the coarse sensuality of the pagan Latins and the sterile dilettantism of the theistic peoples of the Orient. Neither Latins nor Orientals were at all capable of understanding or assimilating it. Its joyous, essentially Aryan paganism was as foreign to the Semitic temperament as its lucid intellectuality was impossible to the turgid Roman mind. We have then at the beginning of the Christian era a veneer of Greek culture covering a gross materialism in the West and a decadent, mystic symbolism in the East. Into this situation was born the new cult with its utter negation of everything the ancient world, pagan or theistic, held precious. Christianity from the beginning was at war with its environment--Greek, Roman, and Hebraic. Though its roots lay in Jewish philosophy, its pessimistic attitude toward the world, its view of life as an evil, poisoned condition, was directly opposed to the spirit of a people with whom, as Renan says, 'the evils of life were never chronic complaints’ ('_pour qui les maux de la vie ne deviennent pas des maladies chroniques_’). Its opposition to all the teachings and practices of paganism was, of course, absolute and uncompromising.