[133] For example, Rohde, _Psyche_, 2 Bde, 3te Aufl., 1903; Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_, vol. iii, 1907; Wendland, _Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur_, 2te u. 3te Aufl., 1912; Anrich, _Das antike Mysterienwesen_, 1894; Cumont, _Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain_, 2ième éd., 1909 (English Translation, _The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism_, 1911). At the time of Paul, the civilized world was unified, politically, under the Roman Empire. The native religion of Rome, however, was not an important factor in the life of the Empire--certainly not in the East. That religion had been closely bound up with the life of the Roman city-state. It had been concerned largely with a system of auguries and religious ceremonies intended to guide the fortunes of the city and insure the favor of the gods. But there had been little attempt to enter into any sort of personal contact with the gods or even to produce any highly differentiated account of their nature. The native religion of Rome, on the whole, seems to have been rather a cold, unsatisfying affair. It aroused the emotions of the people only because it was an expression of stern and sturdy patriotism. And it tended to lose its influence when the horizon of the people was broadened by contact with the outside world. The most important change was wrought by contact with Greece. When Rome began to extend her conquests into the East, the eastern countries, to a very considerable extent, had already been Hellenized, by the conquests of Alexander and by the Greek kingdoms into which his short-lived empire had been divided. Thus the Roman conquerors came into contact with Greek civilization, not only in the Greek colonies in Sicily and southern Italy, not only in Greece proper and on the Ægean coast of Asia Minor, but also to some extent everywhere in the eastern world. No attempt was made to root out the Greek influences. On the contrary, the conquerors to a very considerable extent were conquered by those whom they had conquered; Rome submitted herself, in the spiritual sphere, to the dominance of Greece. The Greek influence extended into the sphere of religion. At a very early time, the ancient Roman gods were identified with the Greek gods who possessed roughly analogous functions--Jupiter became Zeus, for example, and Venus became Aphrodite. This identification brought an important enrichment into Roman religion. The cold and lifeless figures of the Roman pantheon began to take on the grace and beauty and the clearly defined personal character which had been given to their Greek counterparts by Homer and Hesiod and the dramatists and Phidias and Praxiteles. Thus it is not to the ancient official religion of Rome but to the rich pantheon of Homer that the student must turn in order to find the spiritual ancestry of the religion of the Hellenistic world.