Until about the beginning of the seventeenth century, when secularity entered the domain of music and received such important consideration in the development of dramatic and instrumental music, practically the whole creative energy of art-music had been expended in the interest of religion. From the earliest times the most important music of the Greeks, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Hebrews was associated with their respective religious rites and ceremonies. Roman civilization contributed nothing of importance to the musical knowledge or practices of its time, for militant Rome was far more interested in assimilating from the culture of conquered countries than in originating and developing practices of her own. Even the dawn of the Christian era, with the tremendous dynamics of its new moral and ethical ideals and its prophecy of intellectual freedom, did not usher in any essential departure from the old musical usages. The early Christians merely selected from current musical systems and contemporaneous melodies those elements that were best suited to the services of the new religion and to the religious home life of its adherents. Until the period of open persecution set in, the converts to the new religion did not in general follow a social or economic life that differed in any essential respects from that of their neighbors who still paid homage to the old forms and trod the old paths of religious worship. The believers in the new and the old forms of religion mingled freely in the daily rounds of their various duties and pleasures. Just as the early Christian art did not differ in principle from the best Pagan models, so the music of the early Christian congregations was absorbed into their services from the musical practices of the communities from which the converts came. Those in the East naturally turned for their musical material to the noble melodies of the Hebrew synagogue and to the more chaste Greek melodies whose association was farther removed from sensual Pagan rites. Those in the West borrowed freely from current Græco-Roman music, employing, of course, only those melodies that were purest and most refined in character and association.