CUMONT, FRANZ. Franz Valèry Marie Cumont (1868–1947) was a Belgian historian of religions, as well as a philologist, archaeologist, and epigraphist. He studied at Ghent (1886–1888) and in Germany and Austria (Bonn, Berlin, Vienna [1888–1890], with Usener, Diels, Mommsen, Benndorf, and Bormann), after which he made the classical "grand tour" in Greece and Rome (1891), followed by a year in Paris (École Pratique des Hautes-Études, IVe section, 1892, with Duchesne, Haussoullier, etc.). He became professor of classical philology and ancient history at the University of Ghent in 1892, a position he left in 1911 when the minister of education, supported by the Catholic lobby, denied him the chair of Roman history. Cumont's Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain (1906) had presented a new vision of the historical links between the diffusion of Oriental religions and the development of Christianity. Cumont had friendly relationships with several modernists, including Alfred Loisy, Louis Duchesne, and...