by missionary effort at least by the birth of Christ. But this resolution of the tribal primitives into the Magian nations of Persians, Jews, Mandæans, Christians, and the rest must have occurred quite generally and on an immense scale. I have already drawn attention to the decisive fact that long before the beginning of our era the Persians represented simply a religious community, and it is certain that their numbers were indefinitely increased by accessions to the Mazdaist faith. The Babylonian religion vanished at that time--which means that its adherents became in part Jews and in part Persians--but emerging from it there is a _new_ religion, inwardly alien to both Jewish and Persian, an astral religion, which bears the name of the Chaldees and whose adherents constituted a genuine Aramaic-speaking nation. From this Aramæan population of Chaldean-Jewish-Persian nationality came, firstly the Babylonian Talmud, the Gnosis, and the religion of Mani, and secondly, in Islamic times, Sufism and the Shia. Moreover, as seen from Edessa, the inhabitants of the Classical world, they also, appear as nations in the Magian style. “The Greeks” in the Eastern idiom means the aggregate of all who adhered to the Syncretic cults and were bound together by the _ijma_ of the Late Classical religiousness. The Hellenistic city-nations are no longer in the picture, which shows only _one_ community of believers, the “worshippers of the mysteries,” who under the names of Helios, Jupiter, Mithras, θεός ὕψιστος, worshipped a kind of Yahweh or Allah. Throughout the East, Greekness is a definite _religious_ notion, and for that matter one completely concordant with the facts as they then were. The feeling of the Polis is almost extinct, and a Magian nation needs neither home nor community of origin. Even the Hellenism of the Seleucid Empire, which made converts in Turkestan and on the Indus, was related in inward form to Persian and post-exilic Judaism. Later, the Aramæan Porphyry, the pupil of Plotinus, attempted to organize this Greekness as a cult-Church on the model of the Christian and the Persian, and the Emperor Julian raised it to the dignity of being the State Church--an act not merely religious, but also and above all national. When a Jew sacrificed to Sol or to Apollo, he thereby became a Greek. So, for example Ammonius Saccas (d. 242), the teacher of Plotinus and probably also of Origen, went over “from the Christians to the Greeks”; so also Porphyry, born Malchus and (like the “Roman” jurist Ulpian)[260] a Phœnician of Tyre.[261] In these cases we see jurists and State officials taking Latin, and philosophers Greek, names--and for the philological spirit of modern and religious research, this is quite historical enough to justify these men’s being regarded as Roman and Greek in the Classical city-national sense! But how many of the great Alexandrines may have been Greeks only in the Magian sense of the term? In point of birth were not Plotinus and