"

Be spectators at a new contest! Against all these torments one woman
alone contends and is victorious over all."

--Leukippé to Thersandros and Sosthenes, in Kleitophon and Leukippé

"If you wish to kill me, I am ready.... But I do not choose to enter
your bed, nor will I obey such an order."

--Habrokomes to Manto, in Xenophon Ephesiaka

"Because I would not marry Thamyris I was chased out of my city."

--Thekla to Alexandros, "Paul and Thekla"

The novels certainly resemble the mystery religions in this, if nothing else: that
they give great value to the experience, including the inner experience, of the
individual. The period of the Roman Empire, the period of our first "Rise of the
Novel," saw also the development and expansion of the mystery religions. The
oldest of these, the cult of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, goes back to at
least the sixth century B.C. and has a profound effect on the imagery and ideas of
Socrates and Plato. The incorporation of many regions and peoples into the newly
connected and communicating world of the Roman Empire assured the transmis-
sion of foreign and even new religions. The "cults," as we rather disdainfully call
them, of Dionysius ( Bacchus) and of the Magna Mater were fairly old. The cult of
the Mother Goddess (whose lover Attis is castrated, dies, and is reborn) came into
Rome during the war against Carthage in 204 B.C., long before the Imperial pe-
riod. But that in itself is a fairly "modern" development compared to the long
time in which the Mother Goddess had been worshipped in Asia Minor.

Even today the visitor who has come to Asia Minor (modern Turkey) to
look at the antiquities of the Hellenistic and Roman eras may be immediately
struck by the still-visible traces of a culture based on very different foundations
from those of the Peloponnesus or Attica or Latium. The people of the kingdoms
of Asia Minor adopted and adapted the styles of the Helienes, but the fact that we
see plenty of Corinthian columns and read Greek inscriptions everywhere should
not blind us to the evident difference between this world and that of Athens or of
Rome. The region had been populated before the coming of the Greeks--and the
Iliad itself may be taken as an account of the impact of determinedly expansionist
westerners (the Achaians) upon an "Oriental" people.

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