Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/158

126 none have been found except in connection with Roman remains and coins. But before the close of the first century, a crowd of divinities, unknown to the classical world, took their place in the laraires and temples of the three Gauls. Yet though a great number of them are unknown, even by name, to the Greeks and Latins, they show the influence of foreign ideas and forms of art. Graeco-Egyptian influences had penetrated by way of the Alps on the Italian side, as well as on the south by the Valley of the Rhone and Marseilles, with which up to the opening of the Merovingian epoch Egypt was still in close connection. It was an Alexandrian named Zenodore who had made the colossal statue of Mercury at the Gaulish city of Arvernes, and a colony of veteran Alexandrians established by Augustus had introduced the cult of Isis and Anubis at Nimes and in other parts of Southern Gaul. Local deities are assimilated at one time to Serapis, at another to Jupiter, Hercules, or Sylvanus, at another it would appear to Buddha and Oriental deities. Frequently a Roman name is added to the native title, as Mars Camulus, Mercurius Atesmerius, Mercurius Dumias, etc. What is evidently the same native divinity reappears at different places with different attributes; he has been identified by some Roman observer at one place with Jupiter, at another he may be thought to resemble Mercury, elsewhere he is transformed by some change of costume or attribute into an Egyptian deity, with the appropriate symbols added. He may retain or he may lose his original symbols altogether. Sometimes the new attributes are added to the old, sometimes they altogether replace them. Amid such confusion of ideas as these