The personal predilections of the Emperors did but reflect the many and involved influences at work during the first four centuries after Christ. Apart from the enduring influx of Eastern practices and superstitions, Neo-Platonism was responsible for the revival of belief in the supernatural as apart from the divine. The Alexandrian school, discarding the old systems of philosophy, converted its study into that of magic. The barbarians, again, were everywhere astir. The long warrings between Rome and the Germans culminated in the 9th year of the new era when the German Herman by his great victory over Varus brought about the eventual liberation of his country. In 259 A.D. the Emperor Gallienus married a barbarian princess and before the close of the third century A.D. the Empire had become largely "barbarised" by the Goths and Vandals who did it military service, and who, incidentally, served to bolster up paganism and to introduce new features into it. The Teutonic witch met her Roman sister, and introduced her to darker, grimmer, and more vigorous conceptions of her art. The dreadful pestilence which, in the third century, ravaged the Empire gave a new popularity to the black arts, and the Roman witch was never more sought after than in the years preceding the last and most violent persecution of the Christians at the hands of Diocletian. Persecuted or petted, the witch was never able to progress in the good opinion of the Christian, whose protest against her existence was steady and constant whatever his own fate or condition. As soon as the last of his own persecutors had laid aside the sword, he at once seized it and set to harassing the witch with a deserving vigour which has never altogether relaxed.