The Roman empire produced a lot of movement of people, and it was this that gave scope to the spread of so-called mystery religions, almost all cults derived from the ancient cultures of the Near East. The heart of Roman religion continued to be the traditional ceremonies of the ancestral religion as practised at Rome. Under the Flavians, the process by which each province acquired a provincial assembly and festivals of the imperial cult was completed in the western provinces. The importance of the so-called oriental or mystery cults is greater than the numerical strength of their followers, perhaps never more than a small fraction of the population. This is because these cults, despite the comparatively small numbers and relatively modest social level of their membership, did express, if in different ways and to different degrees, 'the new mood' which was to dominate the religion of the empire through to the triumph of Christianity.
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