to bridge the gap between Iranian Mithra, known mainly through the Avestan
hymn (YaBt) in his honor, composed c. 450 – 400bc, and the Roman cult of
Mithras/Mithras. Many have tried – this is one of the neuralgic points of Mithraic
scholarship – but there is no genuinely and incontestably relevant evidence.
Archaeologically, the cult of Mithras first appears in the Roman world in the Flavian-
Trajanic period, when traces of it (inscriptions, mithraea) are suddenly found at several
widely separated sites, in Rome, Germania Superior, Raetia/Noricum, Moesia
Inferior, Judea. The contexts are those we might expect: the military, the provincial
toll system, harbor towns; the big surprise is Alcimus at Rome, the rich slave-bailiff
of Tiberius Claudius Livianus, praetorian prefect fromad 102 (ILS4199). No
less striking is the fact that the first clear literary reference dates from the same
period: the poet Statius refers to Mithras, identified with solar Apollo, “twisting
the recalcitrant horns in a Persian cave,” Persaei sub rupibus antri/indignata sequi
torquentem cornua Mithram(Thebaid719f.), a passage probably written in the mid-
80s. This early evidence suggests that the cult already presented many of its later
features – Mithras identified as Persian, as a Sun-god and as bull-slayer; the con-
trastive torchbearers; the death of the bull as the guarantee of agricultural fecundity.
A few years ago it became briefly fashionable to argue that the Roman cult
was created in Italy (Vermaseren 1981; Merkelbach 1984; Clauss 2000). The early
archaeological finds do not support this claim; neither do they point to an origin in
Anatolia. However, the fact that key terms of Mithraic language are Greek and were
translated into Latin implies an origin somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. On
the basis of not unreasonable assumptions about the rate at which a private cult of
this kind might spread, it has recently been suggested that such an “explosion” pre-
supposes a century and a half of archaeologically invisible growth, which would date
the initial foundation to the mid-first centurybc, uncannily close to the Cilician pirates’
secret teletaiof Mithras on Mount Olympus in Lycia-Pamphylia mentioned by Plutarch,
Life of Pompey24 (based on Poseidonius). However, those who cling to this detail
generally prefer to remain silent on the question of how a Lycian mountain-top cult
of Mithra could have become a Roman cult celebrated in underground “caves” (the
fountain-head of this error is Cumont 1902, rightly criticized by Francis 1975a; but
even Francis seems to be unaware of the location of this Olympus, since he con-
tinually speaks of “Cilician pirates,” and wrongly assumes that en Olympoocould
mean “in caves on Mount Olympus”). More recently still, the excavators of the double
cave-mithraeumat Dolichene/Dülük in Commagene, just west of the Euphrates,
have claimed that their site supports a late Hellenistic/early imperial date for the
foundation of this temple (Schütte-Maischatz and Winter 2004). Given its location,
this would be of the greatest importance if true, and is not inherently implausible;
but the evidence, a coin of the Seleucid Antiochus IX Cyzicenus (114 –95bc) and
a very few sherds of high-quality pottery datable to the first centurybc/ad, all found
in infill, is not strong; nor does the rock-cut image of Mithras killing the bull appear
anything other than standard; moreover the archaeologists themselves suggest that
the cave was earlier used as a limestone quarry. At present, it seems most likely that
the entry of the cult into the western empire is to be connected with the Flavian
organization of the Euphrates frontier.
Institutionalized Religious Options 395