By the same token, they could claim that Mithraism, like the Egyptian cults, and
that of the Jews, was far older than Greek and Roman religion, since the chief debate
about Zoroaster was whether he had lived five thousand years before the fall of Troy
or six thousand years before Xerxes’ invasion (Diogenes Laertius, proemium 1.2).
Mithras may have been new and strange in the empire – Lucian quipped that, with
his Median sleeved tunic and tiara, he could not even speak Greek (Deorum concil-
ium9) – but his cult claimed to be of hoary antiquity.
There were other self-conscious distances, too. Whereas the classical temple had
a distinctive architectural form appropriate to its function as the home of a cult statue,
the Mithraic temple, at least in towns, was often a room in a rented space inside a
larger building, a horreumor an insula. It fused three functions kept separate in civic
cult: a house for a cult image, a sacrificial site, and a meeting-place for a dining group.
As such, it was indeed similar to, say, the andra(cult dining rooms used by men
only) known at Palmyra, Dura-Europos, and other Syrian sites. We may also think
of the cult’s non-classical iconography, its promotion of a hero, Mithras, extra-
vagantly dressed in Persian cap, trousers, and a billowing cloak, subduing a grown
bull with his bare hands and then stabbing it to death; its use of the bas-relief, with
all its narrative possibilities, in preference to the normative cult statue; the plethora
of unfamiliar figures and scenes that crowd these reliefs, demanding to be interpreted
by some knowledgeable exegete. Then again the striking rituals: the veiled, lamp-
carrying male-bride (Nymphus) greeted with the words “[See (the)] Nymphus, hail
Nymphus, hail new light!” (Firmicus Maternus, De errore19); or the initiation scene
on a ritual vessel found in the mithraeumat Mainz, showing a Father, the senior
member of a Mithraic congregation, seated on a chair and aiming an armed bow at
a terrified initiate, entirely naked, whose arms are bound in front of his chest (cf.
Beck 2000). Except possibly for the whipping scene in the Villa dei Misteri at Pompeii,
whose documentary status is quite uncertain, nothing comparable is known from
any other cult of the Greco-Roman world – except from the mithraeumat Capua,
to which I shall return. Exceptional, too, are the references everywhere in the archae-
ological record to non-casual astral/astrological lore (for example the “houses” of
the planets, or, in the mithraeumon the island of Ponza in the Gulf of Naples, to
the Pole constellations, cf. Beck 2004: 151–231), references that in number and
quality far exceed those known from any other widespread ancient cult; and the
Mithraists’ determined, indeed conscientious, rejection of women. In the second-
century Roman marketplace of cults, such sophisticated self-distancing evidently appealed
to a relatively wide assortment of men both in Italy and in the provinces.
Sol Persicus Mithra
Some preliminary observations are in order. Since it became fashionable in the
1970s– 80s to think of the Mithraic cult image as a sort of star-map (instaurating
the allegorical turn of the high and late Renaissance), an entire literature of deci-
pherment has grown up on the topic, and not merely in the wackier corners ofInstitutionalized Religious Options 393