The study of the ancient Mediterranean world has traditionally been a hotbed of ancestralist rivalries and competitive modern genealogies (nationalist and cosmopolitan, Christiano-centric and anti-Christian). This is especially true for what have been – from a European viewpoint – the privileged cultures of Greece and Rome. No account of Roman religion can be free of centuries of layered debate on these issues: consciously or unconsciously, the field is a tangle of constantly outdated ‘presentisms’ deriving their authority from accounts of a special, shared and collective past.1 But Roman religion has a very special place within these narratives: it is not Christianity – it represents the past before the continuing Christian present, which Western scholarship has either upheld or detested since the Enlightenment – and it is not Greece, wherein the highest cultural and philosophical ideals of Europe were always vested. In no other field with which this book is concerned are the self-contradictions of a long history of varieties of investments more directly manifest, than in the subject of visual and material culture in relation to Roman religion.

If Roman religion has been constructed as something of a void, defined in opposition to the Christianity that succeeded it, and the religions of the Greeks that preceded it, an important part of how it has been shaped is through comparison to forms of religious practice that have been called the ‘mystery’ or ‘Oriental’ cults.1 For some, in harking back to the kinds of ecstatic religious experience of the Greek world framed, for example, by Euripides’ Bacchae, these cults evoke the Dionysian dynamism of a Nietzschean archaic;2 for others, in their creative invention during the imperial period, their momentum owing to adherents rather than the state hierarchy, their possible soteriology and their vibrant material culture, they have seemed the ancestors of Christianity.3 Mystery cults are only a subsection of religion in the Roman period, but they have been seen as forming a distinct and peculiar category of their own.4