296 Outlines of European History only prescribed by physicians as a delicacy for convalescents.^ Instead of sweetening their dishes with honey, as formerly, Roman households began to find a new product in the market place known as "sakari," as the report of a venturesome oriental sailor of the first century a.d. calls the sirup of sugar cane, which he brought by water from India into the Mediterranean for the first time. This is the earliest mention of sugar in his- tory. These new things in the Roman world remind one of the potatoes, coffee, tobacco, and Indian corn of America as they found their way to Europe after the voyages of Columbus. Section 47. Popularity of Oriental Religions and THE Spread of Early Christianity Supremacy These things are tangible evidence of the tide that was set- of oriental . . i -» t t religions tmg mto the Mediterranean from the Orient. This tide brought with it other things less easily traced, but much more important in their influence on the declining Roman world. Intellectual life was steadily ebbing ; there was not a really great name in Roman literature after Horace and Virgil. Philosophy was no longer occupied with new thoughts and the discovery of new truths. In its place, as we have seen, appeared the semireligious systems of living, taught by the Stoics and Epicureans. But such teaching was only for the highly educated and the intel- lectual class — a class constantly decreasing. Even such men frequently yielded to the tendency of the multitude and sought refuge in the oriental religions which the incoming life of the East was bringing in. Egyptian isis Even in Augustus's day the Roman poet Tibullus, absent on a military campaign which sickness had interrupted, wrote to his fiancee Delia then in Rome : " What does your Isis for me now, Delia ? What avail me those brazen sistra ^ of hers, so often shaken by your hand .? . . . Now, now, goddess, help me ; 1 Horace amusingly pictures the distress of a miserly Roman at the price of a dish of rice prescribed by a physician. It was still a luxury in his time. 2 Musical instruments played by shaking in the hand.
