There was no predicting the next moral panic. The most powerful empire in the world, an all-male enterprise, was clamping down on a female-led religion that promised immortality to its initiates. With only a few ounces of its secret potion, this religion with no name had finally broken the spiritual exclusivity of Egypt and the Near East, and the monopoly of the Greek families in Eleusis. And for largely political reasons the Romans wanted this dangerous religion, what Euripides once called “an immoral trick aimed at women,” to simply go away.44 But
