But migration of all or some of the worshipers of a given deity was not the only way by which the god himself moved from place to place. Exotic rituals, as soon as men became acquainted with them, had attractions of their own, especially if they contained features that made a direct sensational appeal. The medium of transference may have been the constantly increasing commerce, which brought strangers into every city at various times. In all Greek communities there was a large number of “disinherited”—metics, emancipated slaves, suffrageless plebs—to whom the established gods seemed cold and aloof, or who had only a limited share in the performance of the established ritual. These men perhaps were the first to welcome newer rituals, which it was safer to introduce when they were directed to newer gods.[24] They were assisted in doing this by the long-noted tolerance Greeks exhibited toward other religious observances, a tolerance which Christian Europe has taught us to consider strange and exceptional. That tolerance was not altogether an inference from polytheism itself. Polytheism, to be sure, takes for granted the existence of other gods in other localities, but it does not follow that it permits the entrance of one god into the jurisdiction of another. And it was not universal. Among communities inhospitable in other respects it did not prevail. But it was the general rule, because the conception of ἀσέβεια, of “impiety,”[25] was largely the same everywhere. Impiety was such conduct as prevented or corrupted the established forms of divine communication. The introduction of new deities was an indictable offense at Athens only so far as it displaced the old ones. Where no such danger was apprehended, no charge would lie. The traditions that describe the bitter opposition which the introduction of Dionysus encountered in many places, are too uniform to be discredited.[26] But the opposition was directed to the grave social derangements that doubtless attended the adoption by many of an enthusiastic ritual. The opposition cannot have been general nor of long duration, since the worship of Dionysus spread with extraordinary rapidity, and covered the whole Greek world.