I have already said that these oriental gods were known over virtually all the western world. We naturally find the evidence for their worship most abundant in the great centers of trade and in those districts where soldiers were quartered. In Italy the ports of Puteoli on the Bay of Naples and of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, together with the capital, Rome, were the greatest centers. But the oriental cults were found throughout the Italian peninsula. In the provinces of the Gauls and the Germanies we find two great areas—the populous valleys of the Rhone and the upper Garonne, and the Rhine valley. The chief centers, as we should expect, were for the most part the larger towns or army headquarters: Marseilles, Arles, Orange, Die, Vaison, Vienne, Nîmes, Narbonne, and Bordeaux; Lyons, Trèves, Mayence, Heddernheim, and Cologne. Occasionally a small town showed remarkable devotion to some cult, as did Lactoure in Aquitaine, where the Great Mother of the Gods was especially popular in the latter third of the second and the first half of the third century of our era. In like fashion these cults flourished along the valley of the Danube and even in remote Dacia, which included approximately modern Rumania and Transylvania; dedications are also found in the more important towns in Africa, Spain, and Britain, being most abundant in the last named province along the line of Hadrian’s wall. With regard to the centuries during which these oriental religions flourished our evidence, aside from that for the Great Mother, shows clearly that some entered southern Italy in the second century B.C. or even earlier, and that they began at Rome about 100 B.C.; there they lasted to the very close of the fourth century of our era, almost a hundred years after the recognition of Christianity by Constantine. In the provinces of the Roman Empire these cults did not become prominent until about 100 A.D., and they ceased before the close of the third century. When in 307 A.D. Diocletian, Galerius, and Licinius restored a shrine of Mithras, “the protector of their empire,” at Carnuntum on the Danube, they were honoring a god whose potency in the European provinces had ended more than a generation before.[287] The reasons for the decay of these cults we shall consider later. But I should like you now to observe that in Rome these religions flourished for a good century longer than they did in the western provinces. The explanation of this fact is to be found in that sharp conflict between paganism and Christianity which went on through the fourth century, when the pagan party rallied its forces of every sort for a final defense against the advance of Christianity. This movement at Rome, which had slight influence elsewhere save perhaps in some of the largest cities, produced a pagan revival which helped to maintain the adopted oriental religions for over a century after they had lost all vitality in the provinces.