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Updated: June 28, 2025
The Graeco-Oriental half of the empire, which had long been accustomed to kings and to treating them almost as gods, frankly styled this head of the state "king" or "autocrat," but no true Roman would forget himself so far as to lapse into this vulgar truth. One other title, however, the Romans did attach to their "Princeps."
Thus the rising power of Islam, which had high faculties of self-accommodation to environment, was able to enter upon the heritage of the mixed Graeco-Oriental civilisation existing in the East; in consequence it gained an immediate advantage over the West, where Eastern ideas were acclimatised with difficulty.
We can, with logical propriety, accept the Graeco-Jewish eschatology or the Graeco-Oriental sacramental regeneration if we reject modern thought. But we cannot, except in intellectual chaos, combine the two, or appropriately express modern thought in language belonging to the ancient systems. The modern man does not believe in any form of salvation known to ancient Christianity.
The East, which was then thickly inhabited by an industrious civilized Graeco-Oriental race, became incorporated in the Roman dominion, and the annual revenue of the State rose to twice what it had been. Pompey's success had been dazzlingly rapid. Envy and hatred, as he well knew, were waiting for him at home, and he was in no haste to present himself there.
Just as Alexander found for his Graeco-Oriental empire an appropriate capital in the Hellenic, Jewish, Egyptian, and above all cosmopolitan, Alexandria, so the capital of the new Romano-Hellenic universal empire, situated at the meeting-point of the east and the west, was to be not an Italian community, but the denationalized capital of many nations.
The points of importance are the means whereby they thought that this immortality was obtained, and the nature which they ascribed to it. The act by which the faithful acquired immortality was Baptism. The history of this distinctively Christian rite is obscure. From the standpoint of the historian of religions it is the combination of a Jewish ceremony with Graeco-Oriental ideas.
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