Mithras Tauroctonos in Late Antique Rome

Abstract

This article discusses the tauroctony icons of late antique Rome, specifically the main icons of Mithraea that were in use during the last century or so of the life of the cult of Mithras in Rome. When dealing with Mithraic art, and even with the scholarship on Mithraic art, we are first and foremost dealing with the image of the bull-slaying Mithras; the tauroctony. This ubiquitous image executed in a wide range of media – reliefs, murals, and sculpture – shows Mithras astride the bull, raising its head by the nostrils, and plunging his dagger into its nick. In the following, I will not concern myself with interpreting the motif of the bull-slaying Mithras as such, but I will rather focus on the corpus of Mithraic icons from Rome as a group, with the main emphasis on tauroctonies which could have been in use in the last phase of the cult in Rome, in particular looking more closely at how these late antique Roman examples of Mithraic art differed from other Mithraic icons both in form and in function.