not meet merely to carouse; their activities included a sermon, a sacrifice,
and quite possibly the performance of mystery plays, with the members
assuming roles drawn from cult myth—sacred charades, as it were. The col-
lective production of religious goods by a myriad of non-exclusive firms, far
from being the impossibility that Starkian theory makes it, was a norm
permeating Greco-Roman society.
Most of the firms of paganism represented by the voluntary associations
did what one would call a specialist or niche business. There were, however,
some full-service firms or religious department stores (Stark’s metaphor,
1997, 206), which offered more or less complete product lines, including all
the benefits of belonging. They recruited, moreover, as did early Christian-
ity, through social networks. The most obvious and best-documented exam-
ple is Mithraism, where a considerable mass of epigraphic data concerning
its members, mostly recovered from their own mithraea and thus attached
to known and precise contexts (e.g., a particular military camp), has allowed
us to reconstruct the social networks in and through which the cult grew
and flourished.
The data, empire wide, are impeccably displayed in Manfred Clauss’s
Cultores Mithrae(1992; almost one thousand Mithraists extant, with many
career details) and admirably evaluated there by Clauss and in important
articles by Richard Gordon (1972a) and J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz (1994; see also
Beck 1992; 1996b; 1998a—a reconstruction of Mithraism’s founding group;
and Clauss 1990, 42–50). Shortly after Cultores Mithraewas published, the
names of a further ninety-eight Mithraists were recovered on the bronze
album(membership list) of the Virunum community, which was the sub-
ject of the preceding chapter 8.
Of all this evidence and its scholarly analysis Stark makes no men-
tion.^1 In some ways, it would have been helpful to him, for it would have
supported his fundamental thesis in the first chapter of The Rise of Christian-
ityconcerning Christianity’s growth, namely, that new religious move-
ments spread through social networks (see Stark 1997, 13–21). The ultimate
238 PART III •RISE?
1 The omission, though unfortunate, is understandable. Paganism, after all, is a very minor
concern in Stark’s inquiry, and assimilating sufficient scholarship on Christianity over
the first three centuries from a standing start was surely enough of a challenge. For his
broad picture of paganism, Stark relied primarily on MacMullen 1981, a sensible choice
at the time for the single most informative work. I would now recommend Beard, North
and Price 1998, whose primary virtue is a sensible articulation of the development of the
Roman Empire’s multiplicity of religions within a single historical process. On the mys-
tery cults specifically, Stark cites only Cumont 1956b, now terribly out of date (the orig-
inal French edition appeared in 1911). A better guide, especially to the social aspects of
the mysteries, is Burkert 1987.