The Cult of Mithras in Late Antiquity: Development, Decline and Demise (ca. A.D. 270–430) by David Walsh (review)

This attractively illustrated monograph, on the Mithras cult throughout the Roman world from the late third century onward, is based on the author's doctoral thesis at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he is now a member of Kent's Centre for Late Antique Archaeology. The introduction focuses on the cult of Mithras and changing scholarly views on religious change in Late Antiquity. In the past, it was widely accepted that temple destruction and coercive Christianisation played a significant part in the decline of polytheism in general and Mithraism in particular—a view still shared by many contemporary scholars, if alternative views are gaining ground. Walsh, sceptical of conventional wisdom from the start, seeks to re-evaluate the evidence by comparing and contrasting the fate of Mithraic monuments in different regions. Mithraism was not static and unchanging, and Chapter 1 explores the development of the cult in the late Roman world, postulating considerable changes over space and time. These range from a proven surge in coin offering to alleged ritual fragmentation of cult images. Investment in constructing and repairing mithraea progressively diminished in the course of the third to fourth centuries, as demonstrated in Chapter 2, and possible explanations for this are discussed in Chapter 3. These include a speculative decline in initiation rituals resulting in a less committed community of worshippers. The fate of temples is the focus of Chapter 4. A vanishingly small percentage of pagan temples in the north can be proven to have been destroyed violently (82–83), the proportion of mithraea demonstrably affected being far greater. It might have been helpful to point out here that we simply cannot tell if a temple was peacefully abandoned or brutally desecrated if, as in the vast majority of non-Mithraic shrines, no stratified imagery or occupation layers survive. Damage is much easier to prove in, partially underground, mithraea than in sanctuaries surviving to foundation levels only. Walsh explores possible reasons for their fate and frequent proven destruction, concluding that "the claim that Christianity was the … dominant factor behind the end of the Mithras cult does not stand up to scrutiny" (94). What were the dominant factors?

Most mithraea suffering violent closure were, according to Walsh, on the northern frontiers pointing to barbarians as the most likely culprits (77, 98). Even mithraea as far from the borders as the Adriatic are attributed to frontier regions, and his own maps, not to mention iconoclasm at Vulci (115), disprove the claim that the "only mithraeum located in the interior provinces that looks to have been destroyed was found at Burdi{a}gala" (77). F. L. Schuddeboom's persuasive work (Babesch 91, 2016, 225–45), that thorough image destruction and church building over some mithraea at Rome point to Christian responsibility, is dismissed in a footnote (68 note 5; cf. 84). There is no mention of the mithraeum at Syracuse with fragmented sculpture, used into the fourth century (G. Sfameni Gasparro, I culti orientali in Sicilia, 1973, 281–90; R. J. A. Wilson, Sicily under the Roman Empire, 1990, 301, 413). The recent discovery of a mithraeum on Corsica suffering a violent end (Minerva 28.3, 2017, 5) is a further nail in the coffin of the hypothesis that there are virtually none in the interior provinces.

Walsh attributes the decapitation of statues at Dieburg and elsewhere to barbarian invaders, claiming that this closely mirrors their treatment of members of a family (and others) at a villa at Harting who had "their heads removed and their bodies thrown down a well. The point of note is that … the heads were absent" (86–87, 92–93, 98). In fact, body parts and skulls were found together in two wells (e.g. M. Schnetz, Bericht der Bayerischen Bodendenkmalpflege 54, 2013, 83–85), invalidating the argument, one of many cases of Walsh not consulting original...