By the reign of Gordian, the pagan gods could look back across centuries of uninterrupted worship. In the cities, their cults were supported by their claims to tradition and antiquity, supports which recur as commonplaces in pagan literature, from the orators of classical Athens to Libanius’s speech “On Behalf of the Temples,” composed in 386 A. D.1 The cults of the gods had helped men and their cities to come so far for so long. Life, maybe, was bleak, but who was to say that it would not have been very much bleaker if these cults had not been maintained? These arguments did not exclude change: new gods were accepted; old gods were welcomed in new manifestations; details of worship and ritual were added or forgotten. Although the last new pagan god, Mithras, was introduced to the Latin West by the late first century A. D., the pagan cults did not become static: even the old state priesthoods at Rome, the Arval Brothers and the Vestal Virgins, show lively changes of detail during the first half of the third century.2 However, the old argument from tradition survived continuing changes in matters of practice. It survived because it was essential to the way in which people wished to understand pagan cult.
The argument from tradition continued to outweigh the scepticism which was sometimes expressed by members of the educated class. Past thinkers had written very penetratingly on the nature of the gods and religious practice and had aired much which modern theorists of religion have had to rediscover. Cults and images, some had said, were valid only because they existed already and encouraged civic cohesion; the nature of god was unknowable, and negative theology was the sole way of discussing it; as for men’s ideas of the gods, they were modelled on the social relationships which men experienced among themselves on earth.3 Subtle though many of these arguments were, they attracted next to no interest and had no practical consequences in the Imperial period. They slumbered, until Christian