Chapter VI: The Religion of Mithra (2)

But the conflict between good and evil, even on this earth, will not last for ever. There will be a second coming of Mithra, which is to be presaged by great plagues. The dead will arise from their tombs to meet him. The mystic bull will again be slain, and his blood, mingled with the juice of the sacred Haoma, will be drunk by the just, and impart to them the gift of eternal life.(3136) Fire from heaven will finally devour all that is evil. Thus the slaughter of the bull, which is the image of the succession of decay and fructifying power in physical nature, is also the symbol and guarantee of a final victory over evil and death. And, typifying such lofty and consolatory truths, it naturally met the eye of the worshipper in every chapel. It was also natural that the taurobolium, which was originally a rite of the Great Mother, should be absorbed, like so many alien rites and ideas, by the religion which was the great triumph of syncretism. The baptism of blood was, indeed, a formal cleansing from impurity of the flesh; but it was also cleansing in a higher sense. The inscriptions of the fourth century, which commemorate the blessing of the holy rite, often close with the words _in aeternum renatus_.(3137) How far the phrase expressed a moral resurrection, how far it records the sure hope of another life, we cannot presume to say. Whether borrowed from Christian sources or not, it breathes an aspiration strangely different from the tone of old Roman religion, even at its best. There may have been a good deal of ritualism in the cleansing of Mithra. Yet Mithra was, from the beginning, a distinctly moral power, and his worship was apparently untainted by the licence which made other heathen worships schools of cruelty and lust. His connection, indeed, with some of them, must at times have led his votaries into more than doubtful company; Sabazius and Magna Mater were dangerous allies.(3138) Yet, on the whole, it has been concluded that Mithraism was a gospel of truth and purity, although the purity was often a matter of merely ceremonial purification and abstinence.

The day is far distant when the mass of men will be capable of the austere mystic vision, which relies little on external ceremonies of worship. Certainly the last ages of paganism in the West were not ripe for any such reserved spirituality. And the religions which captivated the ages that preceded the triumph of the Catholic Church, while they strove to satisfy the deeper needs of the spirit, were more intensely sacerdotal, and more highly organised than the old religions of Greece and Rome. Probably no small part of their strength lay in sacramental mystery, and an occult sacred lore which was the monopoly of a class set apart from the world.(3139) Our knowledge of the Mithraic priesthood is unfortunately scanty, and the ancient liturgy has perished.(3140) But inscriptions mention an _ordo sacerdotum_; and Tertullian speaks of a “high pontiff of Mithra” and of holy virgins and persons vowed to continence in his service.(3141) The priestly functions were certainly more constant and exacting than those of the old priestly colleges of Greece and Rome. There were solemn sacraments and complicated rites of initiation to be performed. Three times a day, at dawn, noon, and evening, the litany to the Sun was recited.(3142) Daily sacrifice was offered at the altars of various gods, with chanting and music. The climax of the solemn office was probably marked by the sounding of a bell.(3143) And turning on a pivot, the sacred slab in the apse displayed, for the adoration of the faithful, the scene of the holy feast of Mithra and the Sun after their reconciliation. The seventh day of the week was sacred to the Sun, the sixteenth of each month to Mithra, and the 25th of December, as marking the sun’s entrance on a new course of triumph, was the great festival of Mithra’s sacred year.(3144)

Initiation in the mysteries, after many rites of cleansing and trial, was the crowning privilege of the Mithraist believer. The gradation of spiritual rank, and the secrecy which bound the votaries to one another in a sacred freemasonry, were a certain source of power. S. Jerome alone has preserved for us the seven grades through which the neophyte rose to full communion. They were Corax, Cryphius, Miles, Leo, Perses, Heliodromus, and Pater.(3145) What their origin was who shall say? They may correspond to the seven planets, and mark the various stages of the descent of the soul into flesh, and its rise again to the presence of God. According to Porphyry, the first three stages were merely preliminary to complete initiation. Only the Lions were full and real communicants,(3146) and the title Leo certainly appears oftenest on inscriptions. The dignity Pater Patrum, or Pater Patratus, was much coveted, and conferred a real authority over the brethren, with an official title to their reverence.(3147) The admission to each successive grade was accompanied by symbolic ceremonies, as when the Miles put aside the crown twice tendered to him, saying that Mithra was his only crown.(3148) The veil of the Cryphius, and the Phrygian bonnet of the Perses, have a significance or a history which needs no comment. Admission to full communion was preceded by austerities and ordeals which were made the subject of exaggeration and slander. The neophyte, blindfold and bound, was obliged to pass through flame. It was said that he had to take part in a simulated murder with a blood-dripping sword. On the sculpture of Heddernheim a figure is seen standing deep in snow. These ceremonies probably went back to the scenes and ages in which mutilations in honour of Bellona and Magna Mater took their rise. They may also have been a lesson, or a test of apathy and moral courage.(3149) But the tales of murder and torture connected with these rites have probably no better foundation than similar slanders about the early Christian mysteries.(3150)

The votaries of Mithra, like those of Isis and other eastern deities, formed themselves into guilds which were organised on the model of ordinary sodalities and colleges. As funerary societies, or under the shelter of Magna Mater, they escaped persecution. They had their roll of members, their council of decurions, their masters and curators.(3151) And, like the secular colleges, they depended to a great extent, for the erection of chapels and the endowment of their services, on the generosity of their wealthier members and patrons.(3152) One man might give the site of a chapel, another a marble altar; a poor slave might contribute out of his _peculium_ a lamp or little image to adorn the walls of the crypt.(3153)

One undoubted cause of the success of Mithra in the West was the spirit of fraternity and charity which was fostered in his guilds. The hopeless obscurity and depression of the plebeian and servile classes had some alleviation in companies where, for the moment, the poor and lowly-born found himself on an equality with his social superiors. Plebeians and the slaves had a great part in the propagation of the eastern worships, and especially that of the God of Light.(3154) In his mysteries and guilds the highest dignities were open to them.(3155) Moreover, from the size of the chapels it is clear that the congregations were generally small, so that the members of lower social importance were not lost in a crowd.(3156) Growing numbers were accommodated, not by enlarging, but by multiplying the shrines.

In the sacraments of Mithra, Tertullian and other Apologists perceived a diabolic parody of the usages of the Church.(3157) The _acceptio_ of the neophytes, the _sacramentum_, in which they were pledged to secrecy and holy service, the sign or brand made on the brow of the Miles, the ablutions or baptism with holy water, as in the rites of Isis, whatever their origin, could not fail, in an age of death-struggle for supremacy, to arouse the suspicions and fears of the champions of the Church.(3158) Finally, the consecrated bread and mingled water and wine, which were only offered to the higher grades, may well have seemed the last and worst profanation of the most solemn Christian rite. The draught from the mystic cup, originally the juice of Haoma, was supposed to have supernatural effects. It imparted not only health and prosperity and wisdom, but also the power to conquer the spirits of evil and darkness, and a secret virtue which might elude the grasp of death.(3159)

The temples in which these rites took place repeated for ages the same original type. Mithra and his cave are inseparable ideas, and the name _spelaeum_, _antrum_, or _specus_, remained to the end the regular designation of his chapels.(3160) In country places, grottoes or recesses on the side of a rocky hill might supply a natural oratory of the ancient type.(3161) But, in the centre of great towns, the skill of the architect had to simulate the rude structure of the original cavern. Entering through an open portico, the worshipper found himself in an antechapel, through which he passed into another chamber which was called the _apparatorium_, where the priests and neophytes arrayed themselves in their robes or masques before the holy rites.(3162) Thence they descended by stairs to the level of the cave-like crypt, which was the true sanctuary. On each side there ran a bench of stone, on which was ranged the company of the initiated.(3163) The central aisle led up to the apse, against the walls of which was set the sculptured scene of the slaying of the bull, surrounded by the symbolic figures and emblems of Chaldaean star-lore, with altars in front.(3164) This was the holiest place, and, from some remains, it would seem to have been railed in, like the chancel of one of our churches.(3165) The neophyte, as he approached, must have been impressed by a dazzling scene. On either side the congregation knelt in prayer. Countless lamps shed their brilliant light on the forms of ancient Hellenic gods, or on the images of the mighty powers of earth or ether(3166)—above all, on the sacred scene which was the memorial of the might of the “unconquered.” The ancient rhythmic litany was chanted to the sound of music; the lights came and went in startling alternations of splendour and gloom. The draught of the sacred cup seemed to ravish the sense. And the votary, as in the Isiac vision in Apuleius, for a moment seemed borne beyond the bounds of space and time into mystic distances.(3167)

The Persian cult owed much of its success to imperial and aristocratic favour. The last pagan emperor of the West, the last generation of the pagan aristocracy, were devotees of the Sun-god. It is a curious thing that even under the early Empire Mithraism seems never to have suffered from the suspicion and persecution with which other alien worships had to contend.(3168) Its close league with the cult of the Great Mother, which, since the second century B.C., had been an established institution, may have saved Mithra from official mistrust. He also emerged into prominence in the age in which imperial jealousy of guilds and colleges was visibly relaxing its precautions.(3169) A more satisfying explanation may perhaps be found in the sympathy of the Flavian dynasty(3170) and the princes of the third century for the religious ideas of the East, and in the manifest support which heliolatry lent to growing absolutism and the worship of the Caesars.

The apotheosis of the emperors began even in the time of the first Caesar, who rose to the highest divine honours before his death. But it was long a fluctuating and hesitating creed. The provinces, and particularly the cities of Asia Minor,(3171) were more eager to decree temples and divine honours to the lord of the world than even the common people of Italy. The superstitious masses and the soldiery, indeed, were equal to any enthusiasm of flattery and superstition. But the cultivated upper class, in spite of the effusive compliance of court poets,(3172) having but little belief in any Divine Powers, were not likely to yield an easy faith to the godhead of a Claudius or a Nero.(3173) The emperors themselves, belonging to this class, and often sharing its fastidious scepticism, for a time judiciously restrained a too exuberant devotion to their person.(3174) The influence of Herod may have filled the lunatic imagination of Caligula with dreams of an eastern despotism and the superhuman dignity of kings.(3175) Nero, who had visions of a new monarchy with its seat on eastern hills, may have rejoiced in being adored by Tiridates as the equal of Mithra.(3176) But the politic Augustus, while he permitted the foundation of temples and priestly orders in his honour throughout the provinces, and even in Italian towns, along with the divinity of Rome, obstinately refused to have shrines erected to him in the capital.(3177) Tiberius pursued the same policy, which was congenial to his cold, realistic temperament. Vespasian, although eastern superstition had a certain charm for him, jested on his death-bed about his own claims to divinity.(3178) It was reserved for his son Domitian to be the first emperor who claimed the salutation of “Dominus et Deus” in his lifetime.(3179) The best of the early emperors aspired to full divine honours only when their career on earth had closed.

Many historic causes made their posthumous elevation to divine rank seem not unnatural. The cult of the Manes, or good spirits of departed friends and ancestors, prepared the Roman mind to adore the memory of the father of the State. The legendary kings of the Latin race—Saturnus, Faunus, Picus, Latinus—were worshipped as _Di indigetes_;(3180) Romulus had vanished in a tempest and been carried up to heaven to join the company of the gods. The hero-worship of the Greeks, which raised to semi-divine state after death those who had done great deeds of service to mankind, who had founded cities, or manifested splendid gifts of mind or body, influenced the imagination of a people who had long sat at the feet of Greece. Greek cities raised altars to Rome and to Roman generals who had enslaved them.(3181) When the Senate decreed divine honours to a dead emperor, he became _divus_, not _deus_, at least to the cultivated class, and _divus_ is a title which even modern sentiment might accord to men who have borne a great and shining part in a world-wide system of administration. The Spartan women were said to call great warriors, men who won their admiration by gallantry, “divine.”(3182) To the masses the dead emperor no doubt became a veritable god, as the image of M. Aurelius two centuries after his death was found among the _penates_ of every pious family in the West.(3183) But the philosophic man of the world might also honestly accept the imperial apotheosis by the decree of the Senate, in the sense that another figure had been added to the rare company of those who have been lifted by fortune or merit far above their fellows, and have filled a great space in the life of humanity. People, who for generations erected shrines to the minion of Hadrian, might easily believe in the claims of the Antonine emperors to a place among the gods.

The influence of Egypt and Persia lent its force to stimulate native and original tendencies to king-worship, and to develop the principate of Augustus into the theocratic despotism of Aurelian and Diocletian. The eastern peoples were always eager to lavish on the emperors the adoration which they had been used to offer to their native princes. The ancient Pharaohs had been revered as incarnations of the deity and gods upon earth.(3184) The Ptolemies inherited and utilised so useful a superstition. These ideas spread into Italy with the diffusion of the Isiac cult among the upper class, and through the influence of travellers and envoys who kept up a fruitful intercourse between Alexandria and Rome. But Egypt went rather too far for the western mind in its apotheosis of kings.(3185) A more potent and congenial influence came from the lands of the remoter East. The Persians prostrated themselves before their monarchs, but they did not actually adore them as gods. They reverenced the daemon, or, in Roman phrase, the “genius Caesaris,” without worshipping the monarch himself.(3186) The king was supposed to be enlightened, inspired, and guarded by a heavenly grace; his brow was crowned by a divine aureole. Yet he was not the equal of God. But the majesty and fortune of kings was something divine and supernatural; they reigned by special grace and had a divine protection. The dynasties who succeeded to the great heritage of the East exploited these ideas to the full, and the most solemn oath was by the Fortune of the King.(3187) The superstition of Chaldaea, which connected all human destiny with the orbs of heaven, exercised a profound influence for many centuries both in the East and West. And the Sun, the monarch of the heavens, often identified with Mithra, was regarded as the special patron of kings, enduing them with irresistible power, and guarding their lofty destiny. These ideas spread easily from Pontus and Commagene into the western world. In eastern cities, Caligula and Nero had altars raised to them as solar deities,(3188) and Tiridates offered to Nero the adoration due to Mithra.(3189) The enigmatical goddess Fortuna, who seems to have had early associations with the Sun,(3190) gained fresh strength from the ideas of the divinised destiny of eastern monarchs. According to Plutarch, Tyche left the regions of Assyria and Persia to make her home on the Palatine.(3191) The republican “Fortune of the Roman People” naturally passed into the “Fortuna Augusti,” which appears on the imperial coins from the reign of Vespasian. In the age of the Antonines, the image of the goddess in gold always stood in the prince’s bed-chamber, and was transferred at the hour of his death to his successor.(3192) With the reign of Commodus, who was himself initiated both in the Isiac and Mithraic mysteries, begins the temporary triumph of the oriental cults, which was to reach its height in the reign of Julian. The absence of full materials for the history of the third century,(3193) a century crowded with great events, and pregnant with great spiritual movements, should perhaps impose greater caution in tracing the development of imperial power than some writers have always observed. Yet there can be little doubt that the monarchy of the West tended to become a theocratic despotism, and that Persian Sun-worship had a large share in this development. There was always a sober sense in the West which rebelled against the oriental apotheosis of the prince.(3194) Yet the iterated adulation, so often recorded faithfully in the Augustan History, reveals an extraordinary abasement of the upper class before the person of the emperor.(3195) The emperors never, indeed, claimed like the Sassanids to be “brothers or sons of the Sun and Moon.”(3196) But in their official style and insignia there were many approaches to the divine claims of the monarchs of the East. The title _invictus_, sacred to Mithra and the Sun, was assumed by Commodus, and borne by his successors.(3197) The still more imposing title of “eternal,” springing from the same origin, came into vogue in the third century, and appears in the edicts of the last shadowy emperors of the fifth. From the reign of Nero, the imperial crown with darting rays, symbolised the solar ancestry of the prince. Gallienus used to go forth crowned in this manner, and with gold dust in his hair, and raised a colossal statue of himself in the garb of the Sun.(3198) The coins of Aurelian, who built the great temple of the Sun from the spoils of Palmyra, bear the legend “deo et domino nato.”(3199) The West probably never took these assumptions so literally as the East. But metaphor and imagery tended to become a real faith. The centre of the great religion which was to be the last stronghold of paganism, was the prototype of the emperor in the starry world, and his protector on earth. And the solar grace which surrounded the prince found an easy explanation in the mystic philosophy of the soul’s descent which had been absorbed by Mithraism. In coming to earth from the empyrean, the future lord of the world received a special gift of grace and power from the great luminary which is the source of light and life. The religion of the Sun thus tended to become a great spiritual support of an absolutism which was more and more modelling itself on the royalty of the East. The cult of the Sun, which was established in such splendour in 273 A.D. by Aurelian, must have had a great effect in preparing for the oriental claims of monarchy from the reign of Diocletian. Thirty years after the foundation of the stately shrine on the Esquiline, and only twenty years before the conversion of Constantine, all the princes of the imperial house, Jovii Herculii, Augusti, Caesares, as an inscription tells, united to restore a temple of Mithra at Carnuntum, his holy city on the Danube.(3200) But the days of Mithra as the god of kings were numbered. After the establishment of the Christian Empire, he had a brief illusory triumph in the reign of Julian, and again in the short-lived effort of reaction led by Eugenius and Nicomachus Flavianus, which had a tragic close in the battle on the Frigidus. Yet his mystic theology was the theme of debate among Roman nobles, trained in the philosophy of Alexandria, long after his last chapels had been buried in ruins; and his worship lingered in secluded valleys of the Alps or the Vosges into the fifth century.(3201) The theocratic claim of monarchy, to which Mithra lent his support for so many generations, was destined, in its symbols and phrases, to have a long reign.

M. Renan has hazarded the opinion that, if the Christian Church had been stricken with some mortal weakness, Mithraism might have become the religion of the western world. And, indeed, its marvellously rapid diffusion in Italy and the provinces along the Danube and the Rhine, in the second and third centuries, might well have inspired the hope of such a splendid destiny. Although it was primarily a kingly and military creed, it appealed in the end to all classes, by many various attractions. Springing from remote regions of the East, it seemed instinctively to seize the opportunity offered by a marvellous political unity, along with anarchy in morals and religion, to satisfy the imperious needs of a world eager for spiritual light and hope, but distracted among the endless claimants for its devotion. Philosophy had long tried and was still trying to find a spiritual synthesis, and to draw from old mythologies a support for life and conduct. Might not religion succeed where philosophy had failed? Or rather, might not religion gather up into itself the forces of philosophy, and transmute and glorify them in a great concrete symbol? Might not the claims of the past be harmonised with the higher intuitions of a more instructed age, and the countless cults embraced within the circuit of the Roman power be reconciled with the supreme reverence for one central divine figure, as the liberties of an Alpine canton, like those of a great city of Asia, were sheltered under the unchallenged supremacy of Rome? Mithra made the effort, and for the time he succeeded. In his progress to what seemed an almost assured victory, he swept into his orbit the Greek and Latin and Phrygian gods—nay, even the gods of Celtic cantons.(3202) They all found a place in his crypts, beside his own sacred image and the Persian deities of his original home. Their altars were ranged around his chapels, and were duly visited by his priests. Yet, though the Persian deity might seem very cosmopolitan and liberal in his indulgence to parochial devotion, he never abated his own lofty claims, and he never forgot his ancestry. While he might ally himself with Magna Mater and Jupiter Dolichenus, he coldly repulsed any association with Isis and Serapis, who were his rivals for oecumenical sway. The old hostility between the worships of Persia and Egypt was only softened in the internecine conflict of both with a more powerful foe. It is only in the last stone records that a votary of Mithra is found combining a devotion to Isis.(3203) The claims of the Sun-god to spiritual primacy are expounded in the orations of Julian and the dissertations of Praetextatus in the _Saturnalia_ of Macrobius. Monotheism in the pagan world was not, indeed, a new thing. It goes back to the philosophers of Ionia and Elea, to Aeschylus and Plato. Nor was syncretism unknown to earlier ages. The Greeks of the days of Herodotus identified the gods of Egypt with their own, as Julius Caesar and Tacitus identified Gallic and German deities with those of the Roman pantheon.(3204) But the monotheistic syncretism of Mithra was a broader and more sweeping movement. Local and national gods represented single aspects of nature. Mithra was seated at the centre on which all nature depends. If nature-worship was to justify itself in the eyes of philosophic reason, men must rise to the adoration of the Sun-king, the head of a great hierarchy of divine forces, by means of which he acts and diffuses his inexhaustible energy throughout the universe. And such is the claim made for him by Praetextatus, in the _Saturnalia_ of Macrobius, who was a high adept in the mysteries of Mithra.

But the world needed more than a great physical force to assuage its cravings; it demanded a moral God, Who could raise before the eyes of men a moral ideal, and support them in striving to attain it; One Who could guide and comfort in the struggles of life, and in the darkness of its close, Who could prepare the trembling soul for the great ordeal, in which the deeds done in the body are sifted on the verge of the eternal world. In fulfilling his part, Mithra could rely on his own early character as a god of truth and righteousness, a mediator between the powers of good and evil: he had also the experience of the classic mysteries, stretching back to the legendary Orpheus, which, in whatever crude, shadowy symbolism, had taught for ten centuries the doctrine of a moral sequence between this life and the next. The descent of the soul into gross material form, and its possible ascent again, if duly fortified, to ethereal worlds, was common to Mithra and the Orphic and Pythagorean systems. Such a system on one side sad and pessimist, on another was full of the energy of hope. And Mithraism combined the two. It was a religion of strenuous effort and warfare, with the prospect of high rewards in some far-off eternal life.

It is little wonder that the Fathers, from the second century, saw in Mithra the most formidable foe of Christ. Indeed, the resemblances between the two religions, some of them superficial, others of a deeper kind, were very striking. How far some of these were due to a common stock of ideas in East and West, how far they were the result of conscious borrowing and mutual imitation, seems to be an insoluble problem. The most learned student of the cult of Mithra is the most cautious in his conclusions on the subject.(3205) On the one hand, the two religions, in outlying regions of the Empire, long followed different lines of dispersion. Christianity from its origin in the religion of Israel, spread at first among the cities on the Mediterranean, chiefly where there were colonies of Jews.(3206) On the other hand, outside Italy, Mithraism, which was propagated by soldiers and imperial officers, followed the line of the camps and centres of commerce chiefly along the great rivers of the northern frontier. Yet at Ostia and Rome and elsewhere, the two eastern religions must have been early brought face to face. In the syncretism of that age, the age of Gnosticism, rites and doctrines passed easily from one system to another. Mithra certainly absorbed much from kindred worships of Asia Minor, from Hellenic mysteries, and from Alexandrian philosophy. It is equally certain that the Church did not disdain a policy of accommodation, along with the consecration of altars of Christ in the old shrines of paganism. The cult of local heroes was transferred to saints and martyrs. Converts found it hard to part with consecrated phrases and forms of devotion, and might address Jesus in epithets sacred to the Sun. Some Christians in the fifth century still saluted the rising sun with a prayer.(3207)

Futile attempts have been made to find parallels to Biblical narrative or symbolism in the faint and faded legend of Mithra recovered from his monuments, the miraculous birth, the sacred rock, the adoration of the shepherds, the grotto,—above all, in the mystic sacrifice of the bull, which seemed to occupy the same space in Mithraic devotion as the Sacrifice on Calvary. But one great weakness of Mithraism lay precisely here—that, in place of the narrative of a Divine life, instinct with human sympathy, it had only to offer the cold symbolism of a cosmic legend. In their offices and sacramental system the two religions had a more real affinity. Mithra had his baptism and confirmation of new disciples, his ablutions, ascetic preparation for the sacred mysteries, and holy feasts of the consecrated bread and wine, where the mystic draught gave purity and life to soul and body, and was the passport to a life in God. The sacerdotal and liturgical character of his worship, with its striking symbolism, using to the full the emotional effects of lights and music and sacred pomp, offered to souls, who were ripe for a diviner faith, some of that magical charm which was to be exerted over so many ages by the Catholic Church. There are, however, deeper and more fundamental resemblances between the faiths of Mithra and of Christ, and it was to these that the Persian cult owed its great superiority to classical mythology and the official Roman paganism. It responded to a great spiritual movement, of which it is one great object of this book to show the sweep and direction. Formal devotion and ascetic discipline were linked with lofty doctrines as to the origin of the human spirit and an immortal destiny, depending on conduct, as well as sacramental grace, through Mithra the mediator. While the vulgar may have rested in the external charm and power of the worship, there were others who drank in a more spiritual creed expounded to us by one of the last Neo-Platonic votaries of the Sun-God. It told of a fall of the soul into the duress of the body, for a brief period of probation, of a resurrection and great judgment, of a final ascent and beatitude in the life in God, or of endless exile from His presence.(3208)

And yet the two systems were separated by an impassable gulf, and Mithra had associations which could not save him from the fate of Jupiter and Demeter, of Hecate and Isis. It is true that his fate was hastened by hostile forces and causes external to religion. Many of his shrines in the Danubian provinces, and along the upper Rhine, were desolated and buried in ruins by the hordes of invaders in the third century.(3209) And in the fourth century, the fiercest assaults of the Christian Empire were directed against the worship which was thought to be the patron of magic arts, and a device of the Evil One to travesty and defy the Religion of the Cross.(3210) But material force, however fiercely and decisively exerted, although it hastened the doom of the Persian god, only anticipated an inevitable defeat.

A certain severity in Mithraism, which marked it off honourably from other worships of the East, also weakened it as a popular and enduring force. The absence of the feminine charm in its legend, while it saved it from the sensual taint of other heathen systems, deprived it of a fascination for the softer and more emotional side of human nature.(3211) Although women may, perhaps, have not been altogether excluded from his mysteries,(3212) still Mithra did not welcome them with the warm sympathy which gave Demeter and Magna Mater and Isis so firm a hold on the imagination of women for many generations. The Mater Dolorosa has in all ages been an enthralling power. The legend of the Tauroctonus was a religion for strenuous men. And even its symbolism, with all its strange spell, seems to lack depth and warmth for human nature as a whole. It would indeed be rash to set limits to the power of pious sentiment to transfigure and vivify the most unspiritual materials. And the slaughtered bull in the apse of every chapel of Mithra may have aroused in the end visions and mystic emotion which had passed far beyond the sphere of astral symbolism.

Yet such spiritual interpretation of ancient myth is only for the few, who find in a worship what they bring. For the gross masses, the symbolism of natural processes, however majestic, could never have won that marvellous power which has made a single Divine, yet human, life the inexhaustible source of spiritual strength for all the future. With all his heroic effort to make himself a moral and spiritual force, Mithra remained inextricably linked with the nature-worships of the past. And, with such associations, even the God of light could not be lord of the spiritual future of humanity. Mithraism, with all its strange moral force, with all its charm of antiquity and sacramental rite, with all its charity and tolerance, had within it the germs of a sure mortality. In its tolerance lay precisely its great weakness. The Christian Church might, in S. Augustine’s phrase, “spoil the Egyptians,” it might borrow and adapt rites and symbols from pagan temples, or ideas from Greek philosophy.(3213) But in borrowing, it transfigured them. In all that was essential, the Church would hold no truce with paganism. “Break the idols and consecrate the temples” was the motto of the great Pontiff. But Mithra was ready to shelter the idols under his purer faith. The images of Jupiter and Venus, of Mars and Hecate, of the local deities of Dacia and Upper Germany, find a place in his chapels beside the antique symbols of the Persian faith.(3214) And thus, in spite of a lofty moral mysticism, Mithra was loaded with the heritage of the heathen past. A man admitted to his highest ministry might also worship at the old altars of Greece and Rome. The last hierophant of Eleusis was a high-priest of Mithra.(3215) Human nature and religious sentiment are so complex that men of the sincere monotheistic faith of Symmachus, Praetextatus, and Macrobius, have left the almost boastful record of an all-embracing laxity of tolerance on their tombs.(3216) On many of these slabs you may read that the man who has been a “father” in the mysteries of Mithra, who has been “born again” in the taurobolium, is also a priest of Hecate, the goddess of dark arts and baleful spirits of the night.(3217) Through the astral fatalism of Babylon, Mithra was inseparably connected with the darkest superstitions of East or West,(3218) which covered all sorts of secret crime and perfidy, which lent themselves to seduction, conspiracy, and murder, which involved the denial of a moral Providence of the world. Many a pious devotee of Mithra and Hecate would have recoiled, as much as we do, from the last results of his superstition. Such people probably wished only to gain another ally in facing the terrors of the unseen world. Yet there can be little doubt that the majestic supremacy of Mithra, through its old connection with Babylon, sheltered some of the most degrading impostures of superstition.

So rooted is religious sentiment in reverence for the past, for what our fathers have loved and venerated, that men will long tolerate, or even wistfully cherish, sacred forms and ideas which their moral sense has outgrown. Down to the last years of the fourth century, the Persian worship was defended with defiant zeal by members of the proudest Roman houses. In their philosophic gatherings in the reign of Honorius, they found in Sun-worship the sum and climax of the pagan devotion of the past.(3219) Many a pious old priest of Mithra, in the reign of Gratian, was probably filled with wonder and sorrow when he saw a Gracchus and his retinue break into the sanctuary and tear down the venerable symbols from the wall of the apse.(3220) He deemed himself the prophet of a pure immemorial faith, as pure as that of Galilee. He was probably a man of irreproachable morals, with even a certain ascetic sanctity, unspotted by the world. He treasured the secret lore of the mysterious East, which sped the departing soul with the last comforting sacraments on its flight to ethereal worlds. But he could not see, or he could not regret, that every day when he said his liturgy, as he made the round of the altars, he was lending the authority of a purer faith to other worships which had affrighted or debauched and enervated the Roman world for forty generations. He could not see that the attempt to wed a high spiritual ideal with nature-worship was doomed to failure. The masses around him remained in their grossness and darkness. And on that very day, it may be, one of his aristocratic disciples, high in the ranks of Mithra’s sacred guilds, was attending a priestly college which was charged with the guardianship of gross and savage rites running back to Evander, or he was consulting a Jewish witch, or a Babylonian diviner, on the meaning of some sinister omen, or he may have been sending down into the arena, with cold proud satisfaction, a band of gallant fighters from the Thames or the Danube, to butcher one another for the pleasure of the rabble of Rome. Mithra, the Unconquered, the god of many lands and dynasties from the dawn of history, was a fascinating power. But, at his best, he belonged to the order which was vanishing.

INDEX

Abascantus, secretary _ab epistulis_, career of, described in the
_Silvae_, 110
_ Acta diurna_,
regular arrival of, in the provinces, 205;
reader of, 95
Acte, mistress of Nero, cares for his burial, 115
Aelian of Praeneste,
account of his work on Providence, 456;
immense credulity, and hatred of rationalism, _ib._;
the pious cock of Tanagra, 457;
last dream of Philemon, _ib._
Africa,
the development of its city life, organisation of Thamugadi,
202;
of Lambesi, 208;
amphitheatres in, 201;
and bishoprics, _ib._;
little touched by Mithraism, 597
Agrippina, mother of Nero,
memoirs by, used by Tacitus, 80;
sits on the tribunal with Claudius, 81;
shade propitiated by Nero, 491
Albinus, P. Caeionius, restores a temple at Thamugadi, 202
Alcantara, the bridge of, 220
Alexander of Abonoteichos,
oracle on the Marcomannic war, 451, 476;
physical and mental gifts of, 473 sq.;
skilful charlatanry, 474 sq.;
war with the Epicureans, 476;
Lucian’s treatment of, 477;
establishes new Mysteries, 476 sq.
Alexandria,
roses from, for Nero’s dinners, 32;
singing boys from, at Trimalchio’s dinner, 130 sq.;
character of its populace, 374;
Dion Chrysostom rebukes their passion for games, _ib._;
a great focus of religious feeling, 397;
and eclecticism, 561
Animal-worship,
excites ridicule, 571;
philosophy justified it, _ib._, 395;
little noticed in Apuleius, 572
Annaeus Serenus, Seneca’s _De Tranquillitate_ addressed to,
character of, 319
Antinous, death and apotheosis of, 450, 477, 478
Antium, temple of Fortuna Primigenia at, 456
Antoninus Pius,
builds a temple to Juno Sospita of Lanuvium, 538;
to Mithra at Ostia, 591;
his country pleasures at Lorium, 537;
flattered by the Arval Brothers, 542;
Magna Mater on his coins, 549;
taurobolium for, in 160, _ib._, 557
Apollonius of Tyana,
involved in political conspiracy, 40;
a great preacher, effect of his sermons, 347;
early life, Pythagorean asceticism, Sun worship, and catholic
ritualism, 399;
reconciled myth with a purer faith, 400;
visits all the oracles, 472;
his ideas of a future state, 518 sqq.
Apotheosis,
in the Antonine age, 386, 537;
of Antinous, 477;
of Peregrinus, 478;
of M. Aurelius, _ib._;
of the Emperors, its history, 615 sqq.
Apuleius,
sensual imagination and mysticism of, 389;
weird scenes of miracle in Thessaly, 483;
lofty conception of God, 389;
description of the revels of the wandering priests of the
Syrian goddess, 551 sqq.;
of other scenes in Thessaly, 552;
conception of Isis in the Metamorphoses, 563;
mystic raptures, 570, 574, 576
Aquileia, a great seat of Mithraism, 593
Ardeliones, the, life of, described, 12, 174
Aristides, P. Aelius,
picture of the Roman Empire in, 199;
general security, 205;
journey from Mysia to Rome, 206, 464;
early history and travels, 457;
long ill health and resort to temples of healing, 458 sqq.;
his rhetorical training affected his religious attitude, 458
sq.;
diseases of, lasting for thirteen years, 463;
his ordeals and vitality, 465;
visited by the gods, 466;
recovers his rhetorical power, _ib._;
mingled vanity and piety of, 467
Aristotle, influence of,
on Plutarch, 412;
on Seneca, 314;
on Maximus of Tyre, 421
Army, the,
honesty and courage in, 49;
_ castra stativa_ grow into towns, 207;
Septimius Severus allows the soldier to live with his family,
208;
how pensions provided for, 283;
military colleges, their objects, 283;
the worship of Mithra propagated by, 591;
the legions which were most active, 595, 596
Arrius Antoninus, grandfather of Ant. Pius, Greek verses of, 166
Art,
pretence of taste for, 131, 178;
influence of, in religion discussed by Dion Chrysostom, 382;
decay of, lamented by Petronius, 125
Artemidorus,
work on Dreams by, 468;
immense industry, collections, and faith in the science,
_ib._;
contempt for impostors, 469;
quasi scientific method, _ib._;
its absurdities, 470
Arvales Fratres, the College of,
revived by Augustus, 534;
early history, meetings and ritual of, 540 sq.;
servility to the Emperors, 541
Asclepius,
immense popularity of his worship, 459, 539;
temples of, and their routine and organisation, 460;
new oracle of, at Abonoteichos, 474
Asiaticus, freedman of Vitellius, history of, 206
Astrology,
influence of, in the early empire, a political danger, 45,
447;
astrologers banished by Claudius, Vitellius and Vespasian, 45,
448;
a Greek trade, 93;
Augustus burns books of, 446;
Tiberius believes in, 448;
Otho, 45, 448;
Titus, 449;
and M. Aurelius, 450;
Domitian, _ib._;
Hadrian, _ib._;
in Mithraism, 598, 602
Attis,
legend of, 549;
becomes a solar deity, 556
Augury,
decay of, 445;
abuse of, 532
Augustales, the,
Trimalchio one of, 136;
importance, organisation, social rank, and insignia in
municipal towns, 216, 217;
generosity of, as patrons of colleges, 275
Augustine, S.,
defends the Cynics of his time, 352;
contempt for rites of Magna Mater, 547;
on Varro’s theology, 417, 531 n.;
on the cult of martyrs, 488;
on Plato, 523
Augustus,
his disguised power, 41;
destroys 2000 books of divination, 446;
his horoscope cast, 447;
his religious restoration, and its motive, 533;
attitude to foreign religions, 533;
restores a temple of Magna Mater, 548;
cautious acceptance of divine honours, 615
Aurelian,
his temple of the Sun, 586;
outbreak of the workmen of the Mint in his reign, 255;
legend _deo et domino nato_ on his coins, 618;
effect of his Sun-worship on the development of imperial
power, 619
Aurelius, M.,
slight interest of, in speculation, 339;
his tutors of various schools, 343;
as a boy recites the Salian litany, 385;
his gospel of renunciation, 393 sq.;
his conformity, 394;
employs diviners, 450;
relations of, with Galen, 506;
views of, about immortality, 507;
his Stoic ideal of life, 509;
his sadness and its causes, 510;
one of the Salii in his 8th year, 535;
his religious conservatism, 537;
images of, in every family in the West, 616

Balbilla, Greek verses by, 80
Birth,
respect for, in Juvenal, 69;
in D. Cassius, Suetonius, and Pliny, 70;
manufacture of genealogies, in Vit. Apollonius of Tyana, and
S. Jerome, _ib._;
Herodes Atticus traced his descent from the Aeacidae, 225;
Tiberius on, 70
Bithynia,
civic mismanagement in, 220;
literary distinction of, 372
Boeotia, the oracles of, 471
Brescia, high moral tone of, 147

Caenis, concubine of Vespasian, influence and intrigues of, 52, 115
Caligula,
wild schemes and profusion of, 32;
his cruelty and insolence to Senators, 51;
depraving example, 73;
consults the oracle of Fortune at Antium, 472;
apparitions at his burial, 490;
claims of divinity, 615
Calpurnia, Pliny’s wife,
character of, and his love for her, 188, 189;
literary taste of, 80
_ Canabae legionis_, at Lambesi, 208
Canusium,
_ Album_ of, 210;
Herodes Atticus gave an aqueduct to, 225
Captation,
a regular profession, 72;
result of plebeian poverty and aristocratic vice, 96;
at Croton, in Petronius, 127;
Regulus a captator, 156
Carnuntum, in Pannonia,
a seat of Mithraism from 70 A.D., 591;
its temples, 595;
temple restored at, by the imperial house, in the fourth
century, 619
Centumviral court, the,
picture of, in Pliny’s Letters, 154 sqq.;
he welcomes young aristocrats to, 187
Chaeremon, Alexandrian librarian, wrote a treatise on Isis, 568
Charity, and munificence,
provision for poor children by Trajan and later Emperors, 192,
193;
private benevolence exemplified by Pliny, 193;
his benefactions, 193 sqq.;
other examples in the inscriptions, 193, 224;
the Stertinii, 224;
Dion Chrysostom and his father, 225;
Herodes Atticus, enormous benefactions of, _ib._;
munificence of the Emperors, Vespasian, Titus, Hadrian, 227,
228;
private examples from inscriptions, 223, 229;
ideals of the uses of wealth, 232;
men ruin themselves by generosity, 245
Cicero,
adorned by Pliny, 158;
on augury, 445;
on beneficence, 190;
on superstition, 443;
on legend, 495;
on Delphi, 471;
on immortality, 488
City life,
splendour of, in the Antonine age, 4;
weariness of life in the capital, 174;
growth of, in Gaul, Spain, Dacia, and Asia, 200 sqq.
Claudian,
connects Mithra with Bel, 588;
contempt for Greeks, 90
Claudius,
recruits the Senate from the provinces, 71, 72;
Hellenism of, 89;
his encouragement of trade, 264;
his effort to revive the art of augury, 445;
banishes the astrologers, 418;
conservative in religion, 536;
persecutes the Jewish and Druidic religions, 566
Claudius Etruscus, career of, and duties as minister, 109
Clea, a priestess of Osiris at Delphi, 424
Client, the,
in Juvenal, 93, 94;
change of the relation under the Empire, _ib._;
the relation in the colleges, 273
Clients,
position in the time of Juvenal, 93 sq.;
and Martial, 61
Clodius, P., uses the colleges, 254
Colleges, the,
plebeian class in towns, 251;
pride of free artisan class, 253;
early history of _Collegia_, 254;
danger from, 255;
restrained by law, _ib._;
an irresistible movement, 256;
wish for pious burial, 257;
evidence on, from inscriptions, 258;
funerary colleges authorised, 259;
consequences of the concession, 260;
College of Diana and Antinous, its organisation, fees, etc.
260 sqq.;
College of Aesculapius and Hygia, its regulations, 262;
colleges founded on religion, 263;
industrial colleges, great fair at Cremona, 264;
wandering traders, _collegia peregrinorum_, 265;
colleges at Lyons, Ostia, Arles, etc. 265 sq.;
objects of association, 266 sqq.;
favoured by masters, 267;
colleges moulded on the model of the city, names of offices,
etc. 269;
gradation of rank in, its object, 270;
how the _schola_ was provided, 271;
associations gather round it, gifts made to it, 272;
College of Silvanus at Philippi, _ib._;
patrons of, and their _raison d’être_, 273;
colleges and their patrons of very different rank, 274;
election of a patron, _ib._;
colleges founded to guard a tomb, 276;
provisions for permanent observances, 277;
college feasts and _sportulae_, 277 sq.;
regulations for decorum in, fines, 279;
the college a family, in which the slave is an equal, 281;
were colleges eleemosynary institutions? 282;
military colleges of Lambesi, their organisation and objects,
283 sqq.;
extinction of a college, 285
Commodus,
takes the tonsure of Isis and walks in an Isiac procession,
553;
assumes the Mithraic title of _Invictus_, 618
Como,
Pliny’s estates at, 145;
his gifts to, 194;
a suicide at, 184;
_ honorarium_ of its curia, 209
Conversion,
Seneca on, 34;
result of the preaching of Apollonius, 347;
conversion of Polemon, _ib._;
of D. Chrysostom, 368;
in Plutarch, 413
Corellius Rufus, suicide of, 184
Cornelia, wife of Pompey, culture of, 80
Cotta, M. Aurelius, liberality of, to a freedman, 119
Country life,
growing love of, 174;
Roman country seats, their sites and architecture, 176;
extent and grounds, 178;
routine of life, 179;
purchase and management of estates, 180;
charm of the country in Roman literature, 197;
yet contempt for it, 199;
moral tone of, 2, 144, 147
Cremona,
great fair at, 263;
sack of, 264;
colleges of youth at, 265;
munificence of its citizens, 225
Curatores,
heard of first in the reign of Trajan, 222;
control of municipal finance by, 248
Curia, the,
composition of, illustrated by the roll of Canusium, 210;
numbers, and qualification of, 214;
its fate, 248
Cynics, the,
met a general demand for moral guidance, 340;
description of, in Dion Chrysostom, 349;
and in the literature of the age, 350 n.;
the Cynic in Lucian’s _Banquet_, _ib._;
attractions of the life of, 351;
gross charges against; S. Augustine’s testimony, 352;
causes of prejudice against, _ib._;
death of Peregrinus as treated by Lucian, 355;
affinity of, with Christian asceticism, 355, 361;
evidently a great popular force, 358;
a one-sided Stoicism, 359;
Cynic ideal, 359 sq.;
attitude to the Empire, 362 sq.;
and to popular religion, 363;
cultivated Cynics, 364 sqq.

Dacia,
organisation and town life of, 201;
worship of Magna Mater in, 549;
of Isis, 568;
settlement of, by Trajan, a seat of Mithraism, 594;
of the worship of Isis and Magna Mater, 549, 568
Daemons,
conception of, in Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre, 426;
history of, in Greek literature from Hesiod, 427;
use of the idea by Platonists, 425;
Xenocrates first taught the existence of evil daemons, 431
sq.;
employed by Plutarch to rehabilitate myth, 432;
believed in by the Fathers, 433;
a cause of oracular inspiration, 437;
mortality of, 426;
daemon of Socrates, 438;
daemon a higher self, 439;
daemonology an attempt to bridge the gulf between man and the
Infinite Spirit, 603
Dea Dia, worship of, 540
Delation,
history and causes of, 35;
delators of every rank, _ib._;
attractions of, wealth gained by, 36;
Regulus a delator, 37, 155;
Silius Italicus, 164;
under Domitian, 35
Delphi,
temple of Osiris at, 424;
Plutarch’s love of, 403, 435;
decay of, in first century, 434;
revival of, 435;
why oracles were given in prose, 436;
sources of its inspiration, 437;
Nero’s violence to, 472;
Hadrian tested, _ib._
Demetrius, the Cynic,
life of, 361;
a cultivated ascetic, 362;
knew Apollonius of Tyana, _ib._;
attitude to the Empire, beards Nero and Vespasian, _ib._
Demonax,
attitude to popular religion, 363;
origin, education, and philosophic tone of, 364;
fashion of his life and teaching, 365;
epigrams and sarcasms, 365 sq.;
his personal magnetism, and reverence for him after his death,
366
Dendrophori,
dedications by, to Magna Mater, 549;
in the inscriptions, 551;
at Lyons, 557
Dion Chrysostom,
view of the Cynics, 349;
early history, exile, conversion, and preaching of, 367 sq.;
orations of, 368;
simple philosophy, and view of the time, 369, 370;
warning to Tarsus, 370;
sermon at Olbia, 371 sq.;
picture of city life in Asia Minor, its vices and jealousies,
372 sqq.;
gospel of social charity, 373;
scorn for the Alexandrian character, 374;
his prose idyll on virtuous rural life in Euboea, 375 sq.;
view of prostitution and slavery, 376;
ideal of monarchy, parable of the Two Peaks, 377 sqq.;
oration at Olympia, 379 sq.;
suggested by Olympian Zeus of Pheidias, 380;
Dion’s discussion on natural theology and anthropomorphism,
381;
makes Pheidias defend representation of the Infinite in human
form, 382;
his Zeus a moral ideal and spiritual power, 383
Domitian,
delators under, 35;
his belief in astrology, 45;
secret of his reign, 52;
value of the authorities on, 52 n.;
good traits in his character, 53;
his encouragement of literature and political merit, _ib._;
his Hellenism, 89;
a moral reformer, 54, 74;
causes of his unpopularity, 54;
contradictions in his character, 55;
replenishes the treasury by confiscation, 56;
his terror at the end, 56, 57, 450;
his funereal banquet, 57;
founds a quinquennial competition in literature, 171;
his superstition, 450;
a conservative in religion, 536;
celebrated the Quinquatria of Minerva, 538;
his victories, 542;
escaped from the capital in the vestments of Isis in 69 A.D.,
567;
built a temple to Isis, _ib._;
first called _Dominus et Deus_, 615
Dreams,
in temples of healing, 460;
dream-oracles, 461;
prescriptions in, 463, 464;
treatise of Artemidorus on, 467 sqq.;
his faith in, 468;
his absurdities, 470;
Pliny on, 452, 490