had been part of the Persian creed since Zoroaster. Rostovtseff * reproduces a bas-relief
representing his worship, which was found in a subterranean sanctuary at Heddernheim in
Germany, and shows that his disciples must have been numerous among the soldiers not only in
the East, but in the West also.
Constantine's adoption of Christianity was politically successful, whereas earlier attempts to
introduce a new religion failed; but the earlier attempts were, from a governmental point of
view, very similar to his. All alike derived their possibility of success from the misfortunes and
weariness of the Roman world. The traditional religions of Greece and Rome were suited to
men interested in the terrestrial world, and hopeful of happiness on earth. Asia, with a longer
experience of despair, had evolved more successful antidotes in the form of other-worldly
hopes; of all these, Christianity was the most effective in bringing consolation. But Christianity,
by the time it became the State religion, had absorbed much from Greece, and transmitted this,
along with the Judaic element, to succeeding ages in the West.
III. The unification of government and culture. We owe it first to Alexander and then to
Rome that the achievements of the great age of Greece were not lost to the world, like those of
the Minoan age. In the fifth century B.C., a Genghiz Khan, if one had happened to arise, could
have wiped out all that was important in the Hellenic world; Xerxes, with a little more
competence, might have made Greek civilization very greatly inferior to what it became after he
was repulsed. Consider the period from Aeschylus to Plato: all that was done in this time was
done by a minority of the population of a few commercial cities. These cities, as the future
showed, had no great capacity for withstanding foreign conquest, but by an extraordinary stroke
of good fortune their conquerors, Macedonian and Roman, were Philhellenes, and did not
destroy what they conquered, as Xerxes or Carthage would have done. The fact that we are
acquainted with what was done by the Greeks in art and literature and philosophy and science is
due to the stability introduced by Western conquerors who had the good sense to admire the
civilization which they governed but did their utmost to preserve.
* History of the Ancient World, II, p. 343.