These importations of Greek gods were at the time conscious receptions of foreign elements. The foreign god and his ritual were taken over intact. Greek modes of divine communion, notably the _lectisternium_, or sacrificial banquet,[43] and the games, were adopted and eagerly performed by Romans. When Rome reached a position of real primacy in the Mediterranean, the process of saturation with foreign elements was accelerated, but with it an opposition movement became apparent, which saw in them (what they really were) a source of danger for the ancient Roman institutions. The end of the second Punic war, approximately 200 B.C.E., shortly after a most striking instance of official importation of cults, that of the Phrygian Cybele, particularly marks a period in this respect as in so many others. From that time on, the entry of foreign religions went on apace, but it was somewhat surreptitious, and was carried on in the train of economic, social, and political movements of far-reaching effect. When the Jews came in contact with the Romans, this point had been long reached. As far, therefore, as the Jews were concerned, their religion shared whatever feeling of repulsion and distrust foreign religions excited among certain classes, and equally shared the very catholic veneration and dread that other classes brought to any system of worship. The former classes correspond roughly to those of educated men generally. Their intellectual outlook was wholly Greek, and all their thinking took on a Greek dress. But they received Greek ideas, not only through Homer and Sophocles, but also through Plato and Aristotle. Not popular Greek religion, but sophisticated religious philosophy, was brought to the intellectual leaders of Rome. One of the very first works of Greek thought to be brought to Roman attention was the theory of Euhemerus, a destructive analysis of the existing myths, not merely in the details usually circulated, but in respect to the fundamental basis of myth-making.[44] In these circumstances educated men adopted the various forms of theism, pantheism, or agnosticism developed by the Greek philosophical schools, and their interest in the ceremonial of their ancestral cult became a form of patriotism, in which, however, it was not always possible to conceal the consciousness of the chasm between theory and practice. The other part of the Roman population, which knew Greek myths chiefly from the stage, could not draw such distinctions. What was left of the old Italian peasantry perhaps continued the sympathetic and propitiatory rites that were the substance of the ancient Roman cult. But there cannot have been a great number of these. The mass of the later plebs, a mixed multitude in origin, could get little religious excitement out of the state ritual. What they desired was to be found in the Oriental cults, which from this time on invaded the city they were destined to conquer.