an autonomous democracy or even oligarchy there had been no room for men-gods. The divine kings did not supplant the
old gods but took their place alongside them; they had little in common with, say, Asclepius, but were not so different from
Zeus the King or Zeus the Saviour. The gods lived on. The traditional religion could still in the second century A.D. win the
earnest devotion of a man as cultivated as Plutarch. It was still the old religion that was vanquished in the end by
Christianity.
TOC