nomen, was a freedman. We know that there was a third generation of
male Lydacii, since one of Ingenuus’s dedications is for the well-being of
his son, L. Lydacius Honoratus. Interestingly, this son did not join his
father’s mithraeum in any of the subsequent eighteen years (it would be
even more interesting to know whether he chose not to be initiated or was
prevented by some other cause such as death). It is possible that his uncle
was a member, since his mother, the co-dedicant of one of the altars, was
a Rufia Severa, and a Rufius Severinus was, like the two Lydacii, one of the
original thirty-four.
CONCLUSION
One concludes that Mithraism grew, or maintained itself in a steady state,
not by proselytizing or by “spreading the word” to strangers, but by the com-
mendation of friend to friend, by co-option among like-minded adult males
in delimited social contexts; also that, in all likelihood, recruitment among
kin and via the patron-freedman relationship played a significant part.
This is not a new or surprising finding. In fact, it is what we have known
or sensed all along for Mithraism. The Virunum albamerely present this pic-
ture on a fuller canvas with some of the details fleshed out. The similarity
with what Rodney Stark (1997, 13–21) describes relative to recruitment to
new religious movements in the present, and what he postulates for early
Christianity, is striking. It’s not so much what you believe or can be per-
suaded to believe that counts; it’s whom you know.
Lastly, I shall briefly review some of the implications, for the Mithras
cult, of Jack Lightstone’s exciting theoretical and methodological sugges-
tions in chapter 5. In particular, I shall take a quick look at Mithraism
through the lens of Lightstone’s first proposition: “religious rivalry is a
subset of a larger category, namely, differentiation of the social world.” In
Lightstone’s model, religions, through their spokespersons, map out their
own ideal social worlds, including principles and rules of conduct within
those worlds. Actual behaviour in the real world may or may not correlate
with the ideal behaviour so constructed. Externally, one form of religious
rivalry occurs when youractual behaviour fails to conform to myexpecta-
tions of your behaviour within my construct of the social world. At the
same time, no doubt, myactual behaviour fails to conform to its expected
pattern in yoursocial world.
On Lightstone’s paradigm, I should present Mithraic ethics more in
terms of the construction of an ideal world, in which, for example, initiates
of the Lion grade assent to (though they do not necessarily practice outside
the mithraeum) an ethic of pure, austere, and thus appropriately “fiery,”
On Becoming a Mithraist 193