de terreur, the spectacle of public execution, and in the history of gladiatorial com-
bat. The Roman principate strikingly confirms their account of the symbolic value
of the body in pre-industrial state repression. Indeed, the explicitness, inventiveness,
memorability, and expense of Roman ceremonies of degradation, the apparently unlim-
ited ability of the judicial system to produce “worthless bodies” (in Latin: vilis
sanguis), the centrality of the spectators’ consent and desire (Occide! Verbera! Ure!,
“Kill him, thrash him, burn him!”: Seneca, Epistulae7.5) – all these serve to make
the principate the example Foucault must have wished he had thought of.
Placed in this context, the initiation rituals at Capua are suggestive. Although they
have no direct connection with the apparatus of state power, their images of sub-
jection, degradation, and suffering imply an imaginairebased on the same premises
as the théâtre de terreur, namely the ingenious multiplication of forms of humilia-
tion, the use of physical suffering to underwrite the triumph of Power, a heightened
interest in the reactions of the implied spectator. Capua boasted the second largest
amphitheater in the entire Roman world, built in the late Flavian/Trajanic period
over the republican amphitheater (where Spartacus had trained), and was the cen-
ter of an important gladiatorial training school. Of course these Mithraic panels depict
voluntary sufferings and humiliations, performances rather than tortures, of roles
assumed and played out. But we cannot deny the evidence that the performances
were not “mere” play-acting: they were accompanied by the intentional infliction of
pain, to say nothing of terror and humiliation. Rather, the Mithraic teletarchs saw
in that real-world violence a symbolism appropriate to their own ends, the produc-
tion of a Mithraic body “fit for the job,” a body that could under no circumstances
be female.
We may conclude that the primary intention of the degradation of the Mithraic
body at Capua is to image, both to the subjects and to the spectator, the superior-
ity of constituted Power, the legitimacy of authority, and the mystic connection between
masculinity, hierarchy, and salvation. The initiate was induced to believe that he
could only attain the desired identification with Mithras by accepting the right
of beneficent Authority to inflict pain and terror for his own good, not once, but
repeatedly. Whether this was understood in the manner of popular Stoicism as
learning to endure the buffets of Fortune, as proof of the superiority of the race of
men over that of women, or more specifically as punishment for sin, as the Lions’
purification with honey would suggest, Authority is presented and experienced as
controlling the sole road to the higher end. It was not for nothing that the tetrarchs
at Carnuntum in November 308 recognized Mithras as fautor imperii sui, upholder
of their empire (ILS659).
FURTHER READINGClassic is the English translation of Cumont (1902). But it is now more than a century old
and hopelessly outdated: more than 54 Mithraic temples have been discovered since World
War II, 33 of them since 1965; in this chapter, I have deliberately referred to as much recent404 Richard Gordon