PREFACE.

In November 1905, the Collège de France honored the writer by asking him to succeed M. Naville in opening the series of lectures instituted by the Michonis foundation. A few months later, the “Hibbert Trust” invited him to Oxford to develop certain subjects he had touched upon in Paris. In this volume, the contents of both series have been collected, with the addition of a short bibliography and notes intended for scholars who wish to verify assertions made in the text.¹ The form of the work has scarcely been changed, but we trust that these pages, intended though they were for oral delivery, will bear reading, and that the title of these studies will not seem too ambitious for what they offer. The propagation of the Oriental religions, along with the development of Neo-Platonism, is the leading fact in the moral history of the pagan empire. May this small volume on a great subject throw at least some light upon this truth, and may the reader receive these essays with the same kind interest shown by the audiences in Paris and Oxford.

The reader will please remember that the different chapters were thought out and written as lectures. They do not claim to contain a complete account of what Latin paganism borrowed from or lent to the Orient. Certain well-known facts have been de-