The penultimate sentence in the fourth paragraph before the end should read as
follows : « On that basis, the equation established by Pliny, sensitive as he
was to the Jewish problem, between the threat of magic and the threat of foreign
invasion and cultural contamination takes on its full meaning ; for similar
reasons, Pliny and Celsius recognised an eastern cult such as Christianity as a
threat to public order, and could most probably see that Stoicism and eastern
cults were not so much rivals as they were objective allies, since « The latter
counted their adherents by the hundreds where the preaching philosopher might
pick up an occasional adherent. The importance of the philosophers for the
spread of non-Roman beliefs lies chiefly in the fact that they reached all
classes of society, and, different as they seem from the cult-associations of
the various foreign deities, they really represented the same emotional need as
the latter. »