cipal doctrines regarding the destiny of souls. This is not the place for the
specifics.^2 Suffice it to say that the Mithraists had within their belief sys-
tem ample reason to die in “sure and certain hope.” For Stark (1997, 35–36,
167–73), this is the ultimate religious good. The Mithras firm undeniably
dealt in it, namely, the rewards of “victory over death” or “eternal life,”
which cannot be obtained in the present secular order. More precisely, such
a good are the “compensators” of trust and expectation that these rewards
will be realized in the life to come; they are warrants, as it were, to be exer-
cised in the hereafter. Their value is enhanced and their perceived risk less-
ened, as Stark shrewdly argues, when they are produced collectively—just
as we see the Mithraists of Virunum doing.
There is, then, no objective reason for supposing that our exemplary
pagan initiates, the Mithraists of Virunum, were any less committed to
their group, to each other personally, and to their saviour god, than were,
say, Paul’s Christians at Corinth or John’s seven churches in Asia. To claim
that the Mithraists and the devotees of other mystery gods adhered to their
communities (as if temporarily stuck there until something better came
along) while the Christians were converted to theirs, is unwarranted—and
belittling. Conversion versus adhesion is finally just another a prioristrat-
egy, empirically bogus and methodologically lazy, for explaining Christian-
ity’s triumph. One would not have expected a social scientist to adopt it so
uncritically.
PAGANISM OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR
The pagan firms, especially the voluntary associations and the mystery
cults, which exhibit community life, could no doubt be accommodated
within Stark’s model of a religious economy by re-characterizing them
more accurately as collective producers of religious goods of the same type
as Christianity. Christianity’s eventual market dominance could then be
explained, in part, by demonstrating that the pagan firms were less efficient
or, more tellingly, less ambitious producers of these same goods. Much
more problematic are the public cults, the religion of state and city, which
The Religious Market of the Roman Empire 2412 Our evidence for Mithraic soteriology mostly concerns the mystery of the soul’s descent
and return, into which, Porphyry tells us (Antr. nymph.6), the initiate was inducted
within the “cosmic model” of the Mithraic “cave.” I have repeatedly argued for the
cogency of this evidence (e.g., Beck 1992, 4–7; 1996b, 183). In Beck 1998b, I relate these
matters to the meeting of the Virunum Mithraists mortalitatis causa.In Beck 2000, 158–65,
I argue that one of the ritual scenes depicted on a recently published Mithraic cult ves-
sel is precisely that initiation into the mystery of cosmic soul travel, of which Porphyry
speaks.