The Syrian people, Semites by race and cult, had fallen, like all the rest of the eastern world, under the Hellenic dominion of the successors of Alexander. A quick and subtle folk, very pliable and plastic, they underwent rapid and facile Hellenisation. It was an easy task for them to accept Greek culture and Greek religion. The worshipper of Adonis had little difficulty in renaming his chief god as Dionysus and continuing to practise his old rites and ceremonies to the newly-named deity after the ancestral pattern. The Astarte whom the east had given to Hellas under the alias of Aphrodite, came back again as Aphrodite to Astarte’s old sanctuaries. Identifications of gods and cults were but simple matters, where so many gods were after all essentially similar in origin and function. Thus the easy-going Syrian had few scruples about practising his primitive ceremonies under foreign titles, or admitting to the hospitality of his Semitic temples the Hellenic deities of the reigning Antiochi. The Seleucids, however, did not fare so well in their attempt to impose the alien gods on the fierce Jehovistic zealots of the southern mountains. Antiochus IV. endeavoured in vain to force the cults of intrusive Hellenism on his new kingdom of Palestine. He reckoned without his hosts. The populace of Jerusalem would not away with his “idolatrous” rites--would not permit the worship of Zeus and Pallas, of Artemis and Aphrodite, to usurp a place in the holy city of Jahweh. The rebellion of the Maccabees secured at least the religious independence of Judæa from the early Seleucid period down to the days of Vespasian and Titus. Lower Syria remained true in her arid hills {367}to the exclusive and monotheistic cult of the God of Israel. And at the same time the Jew spread everywhere over the surrounding countries, carrying with him not only his straw and his basket, but also his ingrained and ineradicable prejudices. In Antioch, then, after the Roman absorption of Syria, a most cosmopolitan religion appears to have existed, containing mingled Semitic and Hellenic elements, half assimilated to one another, in a way that was highly characteristic of the early empire. And among the popular cults of the great city we must certainly place high those of Adonis and Dionysus, of Aphrodite-Astarte, and of the local gods or goddesses, the Baalim and Ashtareth, such as the maiden who, as we learnt from Malalas, was sacrificed at the original foundation of the city, and ever after worshipped as its Tyche or Fortune. _In other words, the conception of the human god, of the corn and wine god, of the death of the god, and of his glorious resurrection, must have all been perfectly familiar ideas to the people of Antioch and of Syria in general_.