IV. Greek Mysteries in Roman Times

Abstract

Now that we have looked at the Mysteries in the Classical and Hellenistic period, we will turn to later times but will at first remain in the Greek world, albeit during the period of Roman rule. In the later second century AD the traveller Pausanias described a great number of cults which he called teletai. He never defined this properly, 1 but from his comments and reports it is clear that he was describing Mysteries and that there were many of them on the Greek mainlandhe mentions eleven in Arcadia alone. Unfortunately, in most cases he makes only a few remarks and he consistently refuses to tell us anything about the content of these Mysteries. 2 His reticence means that on the basis of his reports alone we could do little more than list the various instances. As this would not be very helpful, in the first part of this chapter we will instead take a brief look at three of the Mysteries for which we have at least some additional information: those of Lycosura (§ 1.1), Andania (§ 1.2) and Aegina (§ 1.3). All these Mysteries originated before the Romans arrived, but they managed to maintain their existence well into Roman times and, in the case of Aegina, even until the end of antiquity. Inscriptions have given us some extra information about the rituals connected to these Mysteries, though they do not lift the veil on their revelations. The second part of the chapter will look at the Dionysiac Mysteries (§ 2). These Mysteries pose many problems, but they were popular in Roman times, so we cannot pass over them. As with all things concerning Dionysos, 3 we will see that it is hard to reach a consensus on the meaning of his Mysteries or how to interpret them. But first let us turn to Arcadian Lycosura.