This volume is the result of an ‘Empires of Faith’ research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust in collaboration with Wolfson College, Oxford, and the British Museum. It is the first of a planned series of interdisciplinary ‘conversations and arguments’ about ‘the place of visual culture’ in the historiography of ancient religions (p. vi). It is significant to note that the authors represent a new generation of Classical scholars (three are Ph.D. candidates at Oxford, one is a post-doctoral researcher at the British Museum and Oxford, and one is a researcher at the British Museum). Although a primary author for each chapter is identified (but only in the acknowledgements), they wish to present the volume in a single, ‘collaborative’, voice (pp. 13–14); consequently, reference will henceforth be made simply to ‘the authors’.
The fundamental question posed by the authors is whether there are any connections between a god called ‘Mithra’ beyond the name, across both Western and Asian religious and visual cultures (p. vi). For much of the twentieth century answers to this question were shaped by F. Cumont, who argued that a Mithraism had spread from Iran to Rome through a process of historical diffusion (Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra [1896–1899]), a late nineteenth-century theory of cultural spread popularised by L. Frobenius (Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis [1897–1898]). According to Cumont, original Iranian Mithraic doctrines were modified by each culture through which they were transmitted, culminating in a Roman Mithraism. Although this Cumontian ‘grand narrative’ has been challenged (e.g. by M. Boyce, ‘On Mithra's Part in Zoroastrianism’, BSOAS 32.1 [1969], 10–34; R. Beck, ‘Mithraism since Franz Cumont’, ANRW II.17.4 [1984], 2002–115), his views still remain influential. This is especially evident in contemporary attempts to reconstruct a consistent Mithraic myth or coherent set of practices for the Roman Empire (e.g. M. Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras [2001]). Although the authors disavow privileging the Roman Mithras (p. 170 n. 15), the first half of the book (Chapters 1–3) is devoted to appearances of the god in this context.
Since ‘[a]lmost everything that lends itself to a reconstruction of Mithra, his cults, and his worshippers is material not textual’, particularly for the Roman Empire (p. 10), the authors adopt an ‘iconographically centered’ approach (p. 9). Consequently, in their first chapter, they focus on two tauroctonies (statues of Mithras sacrificing a bull) currently in the British Museum. Although probably from late-first/early-second-century ad Rome, modern restorations of these tauroctonies raise the fundamental historiographical question of reconstructing a uniform Roman cult of Mithras from its ‘fractured’ material remains (p. 15).
The Roman image of Mithras sacrificing a bull differentiates the tauroctony from sacrificial representations in other Greco-Roman cults that portray sacrifice as performed by worshippers (p. 57); further, the image ‘does not appear to mimic a specific cult statue located in a specific place, as does, for example, Jupiter of the Capitoline or Artemis of Ephesus’ (p. 32). Consequently, the authors acknowledge that the tauroctony is ‘profoundly Roman’ (p. 29). And, while ‘the striking dispersal of this image type [throughout the Empire] suggests a high degree of shared knowledge amongst those who worshiped Mithras’ (p. 38), ‘[v]ery little is known about the strength of ties between one community and another’ (p. 24). Rather, the authors view this central Mithraic image as ‘a religious and artistic dialogue that drew upon and developed pre-existing images’ (p. 30), while its compositional complexity allowed numerous interpretations (p. 38). Questioning a common historiographical presumption that Roman imperial expanse represented ‘a homogeneous cultural sphere’ (p. 164), the authors agree that ‘there is an inherent danger’ in attempting to recreate a Roman cult of Mithras as ‘a unified whole’ by ‘filling gaps’ in one set of evidence from information gathered from very different contexts (pp. 22, 103–4, 158).
In Chapter 2 the authors shift their attention to the Roman east, to the mithraeum of Dura-Europas (on the border between the Roman and the Parthian Empires), built in ad 168 with major restorations in 210 and 240 (p. 43). Two tauroctony reliefs in this mithraeum, one positioned above the other, have dedicatory inscriptions – by Ethpeni on the lower, smaller relief (ad 168) and by Zenobius on the upper, larger relief (ad 170). These reliefs not only continue questions about reconstructions but, since a figure of Zenobius is depicted on the relief he dedicated, also raise questions about patronage. The inclusion of patrons in religious representations seems to have been a local custom at Dura-Europas that was adopted into the Mithraic iconography (p. 59), and, together with differences between the scenes within the Dura-Europas mithraeum, and between those within that mithraeum and elsewhere, in the authors’ view reinforces ‘a strong case for regional variation’ among Mithraic images (p. 41).
In Chapter 3 the authors turn to a large tauroctonous relief carved in a rock face near the city of Bourg-Saint-Andéol in south-east France. Similar to other images of Mithras that are publically visible or that are attached to public spaces (e.g. at Močići in Croatia and in the baths of Caracalla and at Ostia), the relief at Bourg-Saint-Andéol raises further questions about ‘the physical context of images of Mithras’ (p. 61). Images of Mithras, they argue, while ‘uniform in … [their] subject matter, … [are] strongly diversified by [their] specific settings within [both] the mithraeum and the landscape’ (p. 80). Consequently, the authors conclude that ‘it seems wise to refrain from [making any] universal claims about how Mithraists conceptualized nature’, even for the Roman Empire (p. 170).
In the second half of the volume (Chapters 4–6) the authors reflect on appearances of Mithra in Asia. In Chapter 4 they turn first to a Sasanian rock relief from the second half of the fourth century at Tāq-e-Bostān, a village in western Iran, which shows the Zoroastrian Mithra (Middle Persian Mihr) accompanied by two Sasanian kings. Like the tauroctonies in the British Museum and the mithraeum at Dura-Europas, the Sasanian site has been restored several times (p. 83), and like the rock carving from Bourg-Saint-Andéol, the relief is public. Unlike the reliefs from Dura-Europas, however, that at Tāq-e-Bostān is unaccompanied by any inscription (p. 85).
The Zoroastrian Mithra is interpreted in the Avesta and the Zand as a deity overseeing transactions or oaths, as at Tāq-e-Bostān (p. 94), and two contemporaneous Greco-Roman sources from the Parthian period (247 bc–ad 224) refer to Mithras similarly (Plutarch, De Is. et Os. 46–7; Cassius Dio 63.5.1) (p. 94). However, the authors note ‘apparent incompatibilities and contradictions’ between the visual and the Persian literary evidence (p. 81), the earliest extant manuscripts for which are from the thirteenth century (p. 93). While a strong connection is made in the Persian texts, as in the Greco-Roman sources, between Mithra and the sun, the two were not always synonymous (p. 99). And, like the adoption of local customs of representation at Dura-Europas, it is not possible to identify any distinctively Mithraic practices ‘in the Sasanian Empire because they were part of common religious observance’ (p. 103). Consequently, the authors continue their argument for an ‘imagining of Mithra in … [his] particular local context (both temporal and geographical)’ (pp. 103–4).
In Chapter 5 the authors consider first- to third-century ad coins from the Bactrian Empire of Kushan that portray ‘Miiro’ (Mithra, Mihr) as a solar deity (p. 107), even as a personification of the sun (p. 119). Nevertheless, these public images depict the god as subordinate to the emperor (p. 109), as they do in Kushan temples, where Miiro was represented as but one among many deities, all supporting the authority and power of the king (pp. 114, 124).
In Chapter 6 the authors reflect on Mithraic syncretism. On the west terrace of Nemrut Daği in south-east Turkey, in the hierothesion of Antiochus I (69–34 bc), there is a sandstone stele with an image of the emperor grasping the hand of a god that is identified by an inscription as ‘Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes’ (p. 128). Like those in Kushan, this image represents the god(s)’ pledge of support for the emperor (p. 140). In addition to being seen as defender of Antiochus, however, this syncretistic image may also have been viewed variously ‘as overseer and judge of the earth, as a fertility god, … as god of victory and triumph’, and/or as a psychopomp or an astrological memorial of the victory of sun over moon (p. 156). It is such local ‘clusters of religious ideas’, the authors conclude, that deities and their images represent (p. 146).
The theme of the volume throughout is an unrelenting argument for local variations of Mithraic representations. There simply was, the authors contend, ‘no broad Mithraism, covering the geographic and temporal range … from Gaul to Bactria … from the first century bc to the fourth century ad’ (p. 5). Although they acknowledge that the various appearances of the name ‘Mithra’ are somehow related, they conclude that the ‘different ways of positioning’ images of Mithra show that ‘the reformulations and re-applications of the name took place in different religious, artistic, social, cultural and political settings, the impact of which cannot be overlooked’ (pp. 167–8). Rather, surviving representations related to that name must ‘be analysed for the multitude of possible meanings they carry, rather than trying to ascribe to them a fixed and preordained interpretation’ (p. 10).
In an interesting epilogue, C. Brittenham addresses the authors’ initial question of what the ‘appearance of a shared name in varied contexts [might] mean for our understanding of ancient religion generally’ (pp. vi, 158, 165). With an example from Meso-American religions, she argues that ‘[n]oble attempts have been made to unify… [the] disparate representations’ of Quetzalcoatl. However, she concludes that his worship – like that of Mithra and of most ancient deities (p. 182) – was ‘diverse and decentralized’, as should be expected ‘where there are no standard written texts, and even more importantly, no institutions which encourage standardization’ (p. 179).
The authors of this incisive study represent a fresh approach to the study of ‘Mithraism’ (and to ancient religions generally) that challenges (Cumontian) concerns with origins and linear transmissions. Rather, their approach is closer to a Foucauldian archaeology of conceptual possibilities (p. 1 n. 1; p. 9 n. 18) that is concerned with the ‘complexity of Mithra's appearances’ (p. 133), whether or not such appearances appear coherent to modern scholars (p. 156). The authors’ careful and detailed presentation of evidence in this handsomely produced volume and their well-argued conclusions based on this evidence should give pause to any still enamoured of pursuing some grand Mithraic narrative, even for Mithras’ Roman adherents (pp. 5–8).
