burst of growth. I should first say something, then, about the stage at
which Mithraism was a real novelty, when presumably those who were
co-opted into it had for the most part no prior knowledge of its existence.
The origins and spread of the Mysteries are matters of perennial debate
among scholars of the cult. I have recently contributed a new scenario
(Beck 1998a), in which I suggest diffusion from a founding group consist-
ing of the military and household followers of the last ruling king of Com-
magene, Antiochus IV (deposed 72 CE). The high mobility of this group,
following its patrons first in the Civil and Judaean Wars and then into
exile in Rome, would account for the wide geographical spread of the ear-
liest evidence for Mithraism. The group’s military and civilian composi-
tion would account for the emergence of Mithraism both in the Roman
army and in bureaucratic and household structures (the familiaeof the
great). Lastly, the attested mixture of Greek and Persian theology (together
with much astrology) in the Commagenian dynastic traditions would
account for that same ideological blend (the content undergoing a sea
change into the new religion) in the Mithraic Mysteries. There is, inciden-
tally, no evidence for the existence of typical Roman Mithraism prior to
the very late first century CE. Most accounts of Mithraism place its gene-
sis in the mid-first century CE. My late foundation scenario avoids the awk-
ward evidential silence over the interval.
Nonetheless, to preclude suspicions of idiosyncrasy, let me simply sketch
here what is probably today the dominant model.^1 The Mysteries, it is
thought, were fashioned in Rome in the late first century CE. They were
carried thence by Italian soldiers north to the Rhine and Danube, where they
are first attested within a relatively brief time span in several widely sepa-
rated locations. The cult then spread, during the second century CE, from the
frontiers to the hinterlands of the European provinces, to the non-military
European provinces, to North Africa, and throughout Italy; also, though it
seems only spottily and to a very limited extent, in the Orient as well.
It is impossible to trace the exact course of this expansion. Iconogra-
phy, it used to be thought, furnished a key. The composition of the tau-
roctony (the icon of the bull-killing Mithras), in particular its frame and the
arrangement of side-scenes around the central scene, was used to establish
182 PART II •MISSION?
1 See Merkelbach 1984, 146–49; Clauss 1990, 31f.; 1992, 253–55; Turcan 1993, 31–37; for
an excellent up-to-date overview and critique, Gordon 1994. The old Cumontian model
of formation in, and diffusion from, Anatolia (see Cumont 1956a, 11–32; cf. pp. 33–84
on propagation in the West) is by no means dead—nor should it be. On the role of the
army in the spread of Mithraism, see Daniels 1975.