In the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods and Attis also there developed certain rites which gave the promise of security here and of salvation after death—the greatest religious concern of the opening centuries of the Roman Empire. Down to the close of the Republic the Great Mother apparently exerted no very wide or deep influence on the people. She had quickly accomplished the purpose for which she had been brought in 204 B.C., and therefore, with the exceptions of which I spoke earlier in this lecture, her worship was left to the Phrygian priests. Attis certainly played a small part at Rome before the Empire, but by the second century of our era, if not before, he overshadowed to a considerable extent the Great Goddess herself. The story of Attis has many forms in detail, due no doubt to original local differences and to the influences of later environment. The kernel of the literary myth is as follows: Attis, a beautiful shepherd, was loved by the Great Goddess; when he refused her advances, he was driven mad by her, and in his frenzy mutilated himself at the foot of a pine tree, into which his spirit departed, while from his blood sprang violets. But in answer to the prayers of the mourning goddess Attis was presently restored to life. The primitive elements from which this myth developed we need not now discuss, but it will be sufficient to note that in Attis, as in Adonis, we have an eastern vegetation-divinity, a god who dies and lives again, thus becoming a symbol of man’s resurrection into immortality and an earnest of his hope. The parallel cases of Osiris, Dionysus, and Persephone will also occur to all.