Het zou ook kunnen dat je hier niet veel over wist. Effe Googlen terwijl de koffiezet z'n werk doet :HJVorser schreef: Dat is een ontwijkend antwoord. En ik weet wel waarom: die tempels bestonden niet voor onze jaartelling.
1st century BC – The Lion King of Pontus and the "pirates" of Cilicia
Links-onder op het eind van de galerie staat het Mithras-tempeltje:Traditional hostility with Persia did not favour Rome adopting a religion of its enemies. This changed, however, when the army of the east waged a twenty-five year struggle with an enemy protected by a fierce but noble deity, Mithra, which the Roman forces found worshipped throughout west Asia.
Pontus emerged from the northern provinces of Cappadocia during the wars of Alexander's successors. Its early kings annexed territory of neighbouring states and along the coasts of the Black Sea, eventually to include the Bosporan kingdom of the Crimea. Pontus became a powerful maritime empire and a formidable opponent of Rome.
Early in the 1st century BC, Mithridates Eupator Dionysius, together with his younger brother Mithridates Chrestus, inherited the throne of Pontus while both were still minors. Around the age of twenty, Mithridates eliminated his mother, the regent, and his brother, to become sole ruler of the kingdom, ruling as Mithridates VI. For the next twenty-five years (88 to 63 BC) he would be Rome's most implacable enemy in the eastern Mediterranean.
Cilicia, on the southeastern shores of Anatolia, had been, nominally, a Roman province from 102 BC but the Roman presence remained confined to a few enclaves along the coast until the time of Trajan. Native rulers allied themselves with Mithridates of Pontus in opposing Roman expansion, particularly in the sea lanes vital both to Rome and themselves. The Romans disparaged them as "pirates" but the problem was severe:
"Supported by its bellicose religion, this republic of adventurers dared to dispute the supremacy of the seas with the Roman colossus." – Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, p31.
Elements of Pontic armies and fleets gathered in Cilicia with the "pirates", and over several years they threatened Roman shipping and in particular, the imperial corn supply. Running freely not only in the eastern Mediterranean but also in the western, they allied themselves with rebel Roman forces in Spain. The "pirates" at their zenith reputedly commanded more than a thousand ships and held over four hundred cities and were able to raid the coasts of Italy as far as the port of Ostia, and penetrated far into Greece. Evidently, they introduced the god Mithras into Olympia:
"They offered strange sacrifices of their own at Olympius, where they celebrated secret rites or mysteries, among which were those of Mithras. These Mithraic rites, first celebrated by the pirates, are still celebrated today."
– Plutarch of Chaeronea, Life of Pompey, 24.1-8. (The Ancient Mysteries, A Sourcebook, Ed. M. W. Meyer).
In this crisis, so worried was the Roman senate that it gave Pompey almost unlimited resources to eradicate the problem. In 68 BC, with more than one hundred and twenty thousand troops and five hundred ships at his disposal, he "cleared the seas of pirates" in little more than four months. It was a prelude to a final confrontation with Mithridates, now allied with Armenia. Pompey's campaign in the east (66-61 BC), which took him deep into the Caucasus and as far south as Nabatea, won him eternal fame. Mithradates himself committed suicide in the Crimea. The capture of the Jewish prince Aristobulus after a three-month siege of Jerusalem brought Pompey's dazzling campaign to an end.
The defeated Asiatic Greeks were absorbed into several new provinces. The booty returned to Rome was colossal. Taken to Rome in triumph, along with immense treasure and captured chieftains, was the god Mithras. The formidable deity had won the respect and reverence of the Roman military. Rome assimilated the gods as well as the peoples it conquered and the legionnaires, in particular, had taken to the machismo "Persian" faith, with its ceremonies of male-bonding, self-control, and triumph over death. For a century or more, the history of Roman Mithraism is obscure but we next hear of the cult during the time of Nero, and the pageant of a priest-king of Mithra.
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Graag gedaan.
