It is not surprising that such an age was an age of religious propaganda. Since religion was no longer an affair of the nation as such, but addressed itself to men as men, free scope was offered for the extension to the whole world of religions which originally had been national in character. The golden age of such religious propaganda, it is true, did not begin until the second century; and that fact is of very great importance in dealing with certain modern theories of dependence so far as Pauline Christianity is concerned. Nevertheless the cosmopolitanizing of national religions had begun to some extent in an early period and was rendered natural by the entire character of the Hellenistic age. Even before the fall of the Greek city-state, little communities of the worshipers of eastern gods had established themselves here and there in Greece; and in other parts of the world the barriers against religious propaganda were even less effective. In the Hellenistic age such barriers were almost everywhere broken down. When any religion ceased to be an affair of the nation, when it could no longer count on the devotion of the citizens or subjects as such, it was obliged, if it desired to subsist, to seek its devotees through an appeal to the free choice of individuals. This religious propaganda, however, was not carried on in any exclusive way; the adoption of one god did not mean the abandonment of another. On the contrary, the Hellenistic age was the age of syncretism _par excellence_. Gods of different nations, originally quite distinct, were identified almost as a matter of course. One example of such identification has already been noted; at an early time the gods of Rome were identified with those of Greece. But in the later portion of the Hellenistic age the process went on in more wholesale fashion. And it was sometimes justified by the far-reaching theory that the gods of different nations were merely different names of one great divinity. This theory received classic expression in the words of the goddess Isis which are contained in the "Metamorphoses" of Apuleius: "For the Phrygians that are the first of all men call me the Mother of the gods at Pessinus; the Athenians, which are sprung from their own soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about by the sea, Paphian Venus; the Cretans which bear arrows, Dictynnian Diana; the Sicilians, which speak three tongues, infernal Proserpine; the Eleusians their ancient goddess Ceres; some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate, other Rhamnusia, and principally both sort of the Ethiopians which dwell in the Orient and are enlightened by the morning rays of the sun, and the Egyptians, which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustom to worship me, do call me by my true name, Queen Isis."[136]