204 A Short History of The World public sacrifices to Caesar. They would not even salute the Roman ■standards for fear of idolatry. In the East long before the time of Buddha there had been ascetics, men and women who gave up most of the delights of life, who repudiated marriage and property and sought spiritual powers and an escape from the stresses and mortifications of the world in abstinence, pain, and solitude. Buddha himself set his face against ascetic extravagances, but many of his disciples followed a monkish life of great severity. Obscure Greek cults practised similar dis- ciplines even to the extent of self-mutilation. Asceticism appeared in the Jewish communities of Judea and Alexandria also in the first ■century B.C. Communities of men abandoned the world and gave themselves to austerities and mystical contemplation. Such was the sect of the Essenes. Throughout the first and second centuries A.D. there was an almost world-wide resort to such repudiations of life, a universal search for " salvation " from the distresses of the time. The old sense of an established order, the old confidence in priest and temple and law and custom, had gone. Amidst the pre- vailing slavery, cruelty, fear, anxiety, waste, display and hectic self- indulgence, went this epidemic of self-disgust and mental insecurity, this agonized search for peace even at the price of renunciation and voluntary suffering. This it was that filled the Serapeum with weep- ing penitents and brought the converts into the gloom and gore of the Mithraic cave.
