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They included the official imperial cult that saw the emperor as the divine representative of the state, which had formally begun with Augustus various mystery cults, such as the Dionysian cult, the Eleusinian Mysteries and the cult of Cybele and various imported eastern religions such as the worship of Mithras which first made its way to Rome from Persia in the late first century AD, and the worship of Isis which had been in Roman culture since the Republican times. These alternatives came into Roman culture at differing times and places.
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In this older view, this slow decline left a vacuum in the personal lives of people that they filled with other forms of worship. A combination of external factors such as war and invasions, and internal factors such as the formal nature and political manipulation of traditional religion, is said to have created the slow decline of polytheism. : 284 Support for this form of traditional Roman polytheism had begun to decline by the first century BC when it was seen, according to various writers and historians of the time, as having become empty and ineffectual. This polis-religion was embedded in, and inseparable from, "the general structures of the ancient city there was no religious identity separate from political or civic identity, and the essence of religion lay in ritual rather than belief". Each city worshipped its own set of gods and goddesses that had originally been derived from ancient Greece and become Romanized. Roman religion at the beginning of Roman Empire (27 BC - 476 AD) was polytheistic and local.
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