The extant literature of the time makes it quite clear that there was no belief in the truth of the mythology. But it is doubtful whether there ever had been, and mythology was no part of religion. This was particularly true at Rome. For some thousands of years the inhabitants of central Italy had performed ceremonies in their fields in connection with their daily life. A great many of these ceremonies had become official and regulated in the city of Rome and many other Italic civic communities. It was the practice of educated Italians to devise aetiological stories for these practices and to bring them into connection with Greek myths. In this way a Roman mythology was created, but more even than in the case of the Greeks it was devoid of a folkloristic foundation.[252] For the masses these stories can scarcely be said to have existed. But the ceremonies did, and their punctilious performance and the anxious care with which extraordinary rites of purgation were performed satisfied the ordinary needs of ordinary men. Mention has been made of the religious movement which from the seventh century B.C.E. spread over the Eastern Mediterranean, and which was concerned with the demand for personal salvation and its corollary, a belief in personal immortality. In the Greek-speaking world the carriers of that movement were the Orphic and Dionysiac mysteries. In the non-Greek East there was abundant occasion for beliefs of this kind to gain ground. The great world monarchies introduced such cataclysms in the smaller nations that a violent readjustment of relations with the divinity was frequently necessitated, since the god’s claim to worship was purely national. No such profound political upheavals occurred in Greece. Here, however, a fertile field for the spread of mysteries and extra-national means of divine relations was found in the rapid economic degeneration caused by the slave system. Attachment to the state was confined to those who had a stake in it. The maxim that a man’s fatherland was where his fortune brought him seemed less a bold and cynical aphorism than the veriest commonplace for all but a few idealists.[253] To save the personality that individual misfortunes threatened to overwhelm, recourse was had to every means and especially to the vague and widespread doctrine of other and fuller existences beyond the confines of mortality.