Pagan Ideas of Immortality During the Early Roman Empire

... So we have returned to that which seems to me most important in the relations of paganism and of early Christianity. In many ways paganism provided an environment favorable for the spread of the religion which Jesus founded. The two were at many points irreconcilable, and the former has not always benefited the latter by its influence; but it is a grave historical error not to recognize the areas in which the thought of the two ran parallel. Is the nobler faith the poorer because its paths were made broad by the pagan in his search after Immortality?