carmen sacrum, or perhaps rather from more than one, presumably composed by
the Father, in the Severan period. The fragmentary line 21, reddite cantu, “rehearse
in song,” suggests that it was sung, either on a particular occasion or regularly. The
topics range from cosmological description, through epiclesis of inanimate objects
that had key roles in the story of Mithras (in this case, the stream that Mithras caused
to flow out of a rock) and moral exhortation linked to Mithras’ deeds (such as carry-
ing the entire weight of the bull heroically on his shoulders), to the allusion to the
Lions cited below. The formulation is personal to the composer; but the thoughts
themselves draw upon the common body of Mithraic belief. The very existence of
such compositions suggests, what is anyway obvious from the iconography, that there
was a considerable body of exclusive lore current in Mithraic circles that commented
upon both mythical event/example and ritual practice. The resolve to “give an account”
is typical of the “universal cults” under the empire.
Patronage and Deference
The cultural horizon implied by the use of written texts suggests another issue
connected with status claims: that of patronage. If individual Fathers provided cult
furniture at their own expense, their reward did not simply lie, as they piously claimed,
in heaven. These men must have been in many ways the driving forces within Mithraic
congregations: their knowledge and enthusiasm were crucial to the continued exis-
tence of such small religious groups, ever liable, as we know from the archaeolo-
gical record, to fail for one reason or another. In return for that outlay of expense
and effort, the Fathers as a group expected deference. At Ostia, for example, one
Diocles dedicated his brick altar faced in marble to Mithras ob honorem C. Lucreti
Menandri patris, as a mark of respect to the Father of the congregation (CIMRM
225). A Mithraic symbolon, a secret utterance belonging to the sacred “property” of
an initiation cult, addresses the initiate as syndexie patros agauou, “hand-shaker” of an
illustrious Father (Firmicus Maternus, De errore5.2), the genitive case suggesting
an unspecifiable relation of dependence. The best-preserved lines at S. Prisca request
that the sanctus Pater, the reverend Father, should “receive the Lions as they offer
incense,” accipe thuricremos... accipe Leones(lines 16f.). All this suggests that we
should think of relations within Mithraic congregations at least partly in terms of
patronage.
It is a truism that the society of the empire was articulated not merely by legal,
economic, cultural, and geographic differentia but also by patronage networks.
If the grand central patron was the emperor, who found his moral and political
justification in its exercise, his very capacity to act as patron within the empire, at
the level of hundreds of individual cases, was brokered by individual senators and
equestrians. “Grand” patronage is thus the indispensable grease that oils the
machinery of a society of legally differentiated orders. As a mode of social interaction,
it simultaneously confirms the necessity and propriety of the unequal distribution of
power and wealth, and gives the impression that the distribution of those social goods
is subject to the intervention of rational goodwill. It has thus an important masking402 Richard Gordon