Five years later, Flavius Nectareus was co-opted, already a Pater,to suc-
ceed Iulius Secundinus or Trebius Alfius, whichever one had died or
moved away. Not less than two years after that, the recently joined Mar-
ius Severianus was created Paterin succession to Secundinus, Alfius, or
Nectareus. Several years later, when the new (marble) albumis drawn up,
Severianus is still a member and presumably a Pater.His colleague can-
not be ascertained. It is possible, on this scenario, that Severianus, like
Alfius and Nectareus, held the grade of Pateron arrival but was made a
Father of the Virunum mithraeum only when there was a vacancy in the
diarchy.
Whatever the case, one does not get the impression that these Patres
were the “Pauls” of the Virunum community, and one might take this
impression as yet another index of the difference between the propaga-
tion of Mithraism and the propagation of early Christianity. Caution, though,
is needed. As Richard Gordon has pointed out (1994, 466 f.), formal inscrip-
tions are not the written medium through which the Mysteries of Mithras
expressed their inner dynamics. That function belongs rather to graffiti
anddipinti.What inscriptions reveal for the most part is external, not inter-
nal, status.
No doubt, in this highly respectable cult association, external prece-
dence was duly respected. Speratus the slave would not be giving orders to
Lydacius Ingenuus the duumvir. Superficially, one might assume from the
Virunum bronze that all Mithraists were more or less equal; but it is just
as apparent that more equal than the others was the one who could pay not
merely for his share of the building but also for the plaque to dedicate it and
the pictures on its ceiling, Ti. Claudius Quintilianus (see above, n. 5, on this
person’s votive dedication to Jupiter Dolichenus as well).
It would, however, be dangerous to project that secular precedence
deep into the life of the mithraeum as a religious enterprise. Neither
Claudius Quintilianus the donor nor Lydacius Ingenuus the duumvir was
a Mithraic Pater.It seems to me that this is precisely what distinguishes clas-
sic Mithraism of the second and third centuries CEfrom the otherwise (as
far as we can tell) identical form practised in Rome in the late fourth cen-
turyCEby certain members of the pagan nobility. The Mithraism of the
latter was clearly their creature. They held the high cult offices, and they
controlled initiation into its grades (see, e.g., V400–406). Mithraism was an
instrument of the pagan revival of the elite; and so, like most cults of this
sort when they command no popular base, evanescent.
On Becoming a Mithraist 191