In a separate article, I have explored the doctrinal implications of the
festival of the “mortality” and the coincidence, if such it is, that it was
held at the time of the summer solstice, which, in Mithraic cosmology and
soteriology, is the gate through which souls enter and descend into the
mortal condition (see Beck 1998b). Interestingly, the dedication of the
Virunum mithraeum recorded in V1438 (see above, n. 2) also took place at
this time of year (June 25). That, together with the fact that the dedication
also mentions a “painting” (cum pictura), makes it probable that we are
dealing with the same mithraeum rebuilt some 56 years later. The aforemen-
tioned article concerns the utopian side of the cult (to use J.Z. Smith’s
polarity [1990, 121–42]). Here I am concerned more with the locative side,
or the response of the Virunum Mithraists to the exigencies of the here
and now, in particular with their strategy for self-perpetuation.
Celebrating (or deploring) the “mortality” is not the only recorded
reaction of the Virunum Mithraists. They also co-opted eight new members,
who were duly registered in the next block of names in the second col-
umn. Thereafter, as Piccottini infers from the different and progressively
deteriorating hands of the inscribers, there were another sixteen additions,
concluding with L. Quar(tinius?) Quartus, appended inelegantly below the
last word of the lower part of the dedication (Piccottini 1994, 25ff.; see the
dividing lines drawn there on Abb. 15, p. 27).
Piccottini argues that these were annual additions, and that the plaque
accordingly records recruitment into the mithraeum from 184 CE, the year
of the “mortality,” to 201 CE. What warrants this inference is the second
album,^3 to which I alluded earlier. Its two marble fragments contain names
that appear in the second, third, and fourth columns of the bronze plaque.
They appear, moreover, in the same order in both documents. Finally, no
names appear in the marble album,which do not appear on the bronze.
Enough of the introductory text of the marble albumremains to tell us
that those named there built some edifice “from the ground up at their
own expense” (a s]olo impen[dio] suo extruxer[unt), and that they built it
between 198 and 209 CE(Piccottini 1994, 41). The inference is inescapable
that they are the same group of Mithraists, building again some fifteen to
twenty-five years later.^4 Into this time slot comfortably fits the terminus of
On Becoming a Mithraist 1853 Piccottini 1994, 44ff. Its two fragments (found more than a century apart) are (1) CILIII
4816 (= ILLPRON15, 16) and (2) ILLPRON748, 773, 774.
4 The marble albumis thus the fourth Mithraic building dedication to be recovered from
Virunum (see above, n. 2). In A New Mithraeum? (see below), I recapitulate Piccottini’s
plausible case that this represents a new and separate building undertaken by a group from
the original mithraeum when the membership had outgrown the mithraeum’s capacity.