Nor is it unlikely that Hindu
teachings exercised an influence over them, for Buddhism was at this
age, like Judaism, a missionizing religion, and had teachers in the
West. Philo speaks in several places of its doctrines.[59] Whatever
its moulding influences, Essenism represented the spirit of the age,
and it spread far and wide. At Alexandria, above all places, where the
life of luxury and dissoluteness repelled the serious, ascetic ideas
took firm hold of the people, and the Therapeutic life, _i.e._, the
life of prayer and labor devoted to God, which corresponded to the
system of the Essenes, had numerous votaries. The first century
witnessed the extremes of the religious and irreligious sentiments.
The world was weary and jaded; it had lost confidence in human reason
and faith in social ideals, and while the materialists abandoned
themselves to hideous orgies and sensual debaucheries, the
higher-minded went to the opposite excess and sought by flight from
the world and mortification of the flesh to attain to supernatural
states of ecstasy. A book has come down to us under the name of
Philo[60] which describes "the contemplative life" of a Jewish
brotherhood that lived apart on the shores of Lake Mareotis by the
mouth of the Nile. Men and women lived in the settlement, though all
intercourse between the sexes was rigidly avoided.
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