the beef mainly consumed by the garrison of the local fort (von den Driesch and
Pollath 2000). In one of the shopping-lists from the mithraeumat Dura, the largest
single outlay, 28 denarii 11 asses, was for wine, then meat, ?19 denarii(CIMRM
65,ad 240 –53).
Ostia, as a port town, also provides a microcosm of the cult’s further history. (Much
more could have been said had the Fascists’ excavations been conducted with proper
attention to stratigraphy; as it is, in order to present the imperial Roman past in time
for the planned world exposition, they irreparably destroyed a massive amount of
evidence, above all for the site’s later history. The same applies, of course, mutatis
mutandis, to almost all excavations undertaken before 1945.) The earliest of the
15 mithraeaknown from the town dates from c. 160. Over the next thirty years a
further three were founded, followed by seven more in the long Severan period
(193–235). The remaining four all date from the mid-third century. It is now thought
none of them was violently destroyed; all seem to have been quietly abandoned
during the fourth century as the center of Ostian life shifted to Portus, which was
made an independent community by Constantine. None of the Ostian mithraeahas
kitchens or storage rooms, and we have to assume that, as at Dura, food, including
meat, was bought in. In the provinces, especially the northwest of the empire,
however, such additional rooms are an important feature of Mithraic temples, and
underscore the central role played in the cult by communal meals. In some, such as
the temple at Riegel in the Schwarzwald, large quantities of high-quality cups, plates,
and jars have been found (Cämmerer 1986). The most striking recent discovery, how-
ever, is the mithraeumof the Roman vicusat Tienen in Gallia Belgica (Belgium),
where the remains of a large-scale party were discovered in three specially dug waste-
pits (Martens 2004a, 2004b). All the pottery, locally produced cooking pots, lids,
plates, and incense burners, and beakers imported from Trier, each to the number
of at least 88 items, had been deliberately smashed before being thrown, together
with food refuse, into the pits. The small wooden temple here, just 12 by 7.5 meters,
could never have held so many people. From the age of the mainly piglet bones, it
could be calculated that they were all killed in late June/early July; it appears there-
fore that in the periodad 260 – 80 – the period of the “third-century crisis” and the
Gallic empire – the Mithraists in Tienen, perhaps at a summer solstice, perhaps
on the occasion of the rededication of the temple, held a magnificent celebration
with their friends and relations and then disposed of all the utensils in a ritual act
paralleled elsewhere in northern Gaul – one of many indications of the extent to
which the cult was adapted to local needs and usages.
Identity
The provision of an organized space for private ritual meals, of an independent
and locally variable calendar of sacral events, of a non-standard site of memory
co-associating sights, scents, particular actions, and experiences, was of course not
peculiar to the cult of Mithras. In the Greco-Roman world, the boundaries of civic
cult were by no means coterminous with those of religious life tout court: all theInstitutionalized Religious Options 397