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provincial community such as Lyons, we may take it for granted that in the second century A.D. the religious outlook of the populace ranged from open disbelief to a willingness to suffer, and even to die horribly, for one's convictions. Nor should this occasion surprise: even if we discount for the moment the matrix of cultural forces which condition religious sentiments, such as social status and educational attainment, it should be remembered that for more than six centuries Rome's rule stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the banks of the Euphrates, and that throughout this long period the Romans presided over populations of striking social and cultural dissimilarity. Rome subjugated the primitive tribes of Britain, the Iberian peninsula and the Danubian basin as well as the culturally sophisticated and highly urbanized inhabitants of Greece and the Near East. Diversity of belief is to be expected in such an environment, but for anyone who wishes to analyze the parts or the whole, it also poses difficulties that are all but insuperable.
First, there is the question of evidence. In matters of religion, as in all else regarding classical antiquity, it is notoriously imperfect. We are handicapped above all by its capricious character. We know a great deal about some cults, but of others, almost nothing. Even in the case of well-documented cults, however, a caveat is necessary: the literary sources, upon which we are heavily dependent for information, not only vary widely in reliability but are also unevenly distributed. Too much of the evidence stems from Rome itself, but even here we know a great deal more about some periods than we do about others. Hence even when the source is trustworthy, too frequently it still remains unclear whether the particular passage that interests us reveals behaviour current only at this one point in space and time, or has a wider application.
Confronted with such difficulties, it is hardly surprising that classical scholars have tended to shy away from ambitious syntheses in favor of the more modest task of tracing the spread of particular cults and elucidating their contents.12 To be sure, there have been exceptions, the most notable being Nock's seminal work on conversion;13 in scope it compares favorably with the global view of Chinese religion advocated by J.J.M de Groot, Marcel Granet, and C.K. Yang.14 It is, however, only a noteworthy exception: in the literature on