The self-esteem of the Hellenes, well-warranted in itself and fostered by the attitude of the Roman government, and perhaps still more by that of the Roman public--the consciousness of intellectual primacy--called into life among them a _cultus_ of the past, which was compounded of a faithful clinging to the memories of greater and happier times and a quaint reverting of matured civilisation to its in part very primitive beginnings. [Sidenote: Religion.] To foreign worships, if we keep out of view the service of the Egyptian deities already earlier naturalised by trading intercourse, particularly that of Isis, the Greeks in Hellas proper sustained throughout the attitude of declining them; if this held least true in the case of Corinth, Corinth was also the least Greek town of Hellas. The old religion of the country was not protected by hearty faith, from which this age had long since broken off;[178] but the habits of home and the memory of the past clung to it by preference, and therefore it was not merely retained with tenacity, but it even became--in good part by the process of erudite retouching--always more rigid and more antique as time went on, always more a distinctive possession of such as made it a study. [Sidenote: Pedigrees.] It was the same with the worship of pedigrees, in which the Hellenes of this age performed uncommon feats, and left the most aristocratic of the Romans far behind them. In Athens the family of the Eumolpidae played a prominent part at the reorganisation of the Eleusinian festival under Marcus. His son Commodus conferred on the head of the clan of the Kerykes the Roman franchise, and from him descended the brave and learned Athenian, who, almost like Thucydides, fought with the Goths and then described the Gothic war (p. 246). A contemporary of Marcus, the professor and consular Herodes Atticus, belonged to this same clan, and his court-poet sings of him, that the red shoe of the Roman patriciate well befitted the high-born Athenian, the descendant of Hermes and of Cecrops's daughter Herse, while one of his panegyrists in prose celebrates him as Aeacides, and at the same time as a descendant of Miltiades and Cimon. But even Athens was far outbidden in this respect by Sparta; on several occasions we meet with Spartiates who boast of descent from the Dioscuri, Herakles, Poseidon, and of the priesthood of these ancestors hereditary for forty generations and more in their house. It is significant of this nobility, that it in the main presents itself only with the end of the second century; the heraldic draughtsmen who projected these genealogical tables cannot have been very punctilious as to vouchers either in Athens or in Sparta. [Sidenote: Language; archaism and barbarism.]