Whether it is a matter of actuality or of image, there is in this matter
of anticipated and elicited crowd reaction no functional difference between
the doings (and sufferings) of Christian apostles as reported in the various
Acts, on the one side, and, on the other, the preachings, confrontations, and
miracles of an Apollonius of Tyana as reported by Philostratus, the per-
formances of an Alexander or a Peregrinus as pilloried by Lucian, or the
spectacular cures worked on an Aelius Aristides as recorded by himself.
Martyrdom was, of course, unique to Christianity as a mode of publicity and
hence of propagation (see Bowersock 1995). But it belongs with scenes of
miracle and confrontation as large-scale and dramatic public events in
which spectator reaction was an integral part (see MacMullen 1984, 29f.;
Lane Fox 1986, 419–92).
The culmination of these activities is the aretalogy, or wonder at and
acknowledgement of the manifest power and virtues of the god expressed
in the cries of the bystanders (M. Smith 1971; Merkelbach 1994; Beck
1996a). As the vindicated priest of the Delian Serapis aretalogy concludes,
“the entire people marvelled that day at your prowess” (Totti 1985, no. 11,
lines 90f.); or Apuleius’s Lucius, “the crowd was amazed, and the devout
paid homage to this clear manifestation of the power of the mighty deity....
With one clear voice, stretching their hands toward heaven, they bore wit-
ness to the marvellous beneficence of the goddess” (Metam.11.13, trans.
Hanson; cf. Metam.16).
Such high drama and its players are quite simply irrelevant to
Mithraism. The cult did not commend itself or its god to the public, and so
had no need of charismatic figures to make the commendation. Accordingly,
we must place Mithraism at the extreme low end of a spectrum of self-
advertisement, acknowledging that in this respect it is as remote from, say,
Isism as it is from Christianity. The moral is that the dynamic cults of
paganism cannot be reduced to a single pattern of propagation or a single
set of growth strategies. Mithraism’s absence from the public arena makes
talk of competition or of rivalry, whether with other pagan cults or with
Christianity, somewhat problematic; likewise, success based on victory in
competition. It takes two to start a fight, and by accident or design
Mithraism never put itself in a position to pick one.
This is not to suggest that these concepts and terms—competition,
rivalry, success—are altogether inappropriate, just that they require some
caution when applied to Mithraism. For example, what is said by Leif E.
Vaage (chapter 1) about the need to acquire a limited number of [partici-
pants] as one’s “own” in order to assure the group’s ongoing social repro-
duction is germane—crucially so, as we shall see—to Mithraism. But to
On Becoming a Mithraist 177