Hieronymus’ letter to Laeta

Epistula 107 Ad Lactam

I speak thus to you, Laeta my most devout daughter in Christ, to teach you not to despair of your father’s salvation. My hope is that the same faith which has gained you your daughter may win your father too, and that so you may be able to rejoice over blessings bestowed upon your entire family. You know the Lord’s promise: “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.” It is never too late to mend. The robber passed even from the cross to paradise. Nebuchadnezzar also, the king of Babylon, recovered his reason, even after he had been made like the beasts in body and in heart and had been compelled to live with the brutes in the wilderness.

And to pass over such old stories which to unbelievers may well seem incredible, did not your own kinsman Gracchus, whose name betokens his patrician origin, when a few years back he held the prefecture of the City, overthrow, break in pieces, and set on fire the grotto of Mithras and all the dreadful images therein? Those I mean by which the worshippers were initiated as Raven, Bridegroom, Soldier, Lion, Perseus, Sun, Crab, and Father? Did he not, I repeat, destroy these and then, sending them before him as hostages, obtain for himself Christian baptism?

—ANF

Gratian was in A.D. 379 the first emperor to refuse the high dignity and title of pontifex maximus. Shortly before this (A.D. 377) the city prefect Gracchus had, according to Hieronymus (in his letter Ad Lactam 107), overturned, broken and destroyed (subvertit, fregit, excussii) a cave of Mithras filled with monstrous images (portentosa simulacra). We do not know exactly which Mithraic temple this was; de Rossi thought it might be the sanctuary at San Silvestro. Be that as it may, the traces of such an iconoclastic act are clearly visible in the temple of Santa Prisca.

—Vermaseren (1963)

Furius Maecius Gracchus is mentioned in the Codex Theodosianus as Prefect of Rome in A.D. 378 and 377. His destruction of the cave of Mithras is also alluded to by Prudentius, Contra Symmachum, I., 562. Platner and Ashby, Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929), list eight known Mithraea in Rome, with another doubtful. This passage is important for the seven degrees of initiation into Mithraism, but the text is not wholly certain. The Latin words are: -- corax, nymphius, miles, leo, Perses, heliodromus, pater; Hilberg substitutes cryphius for nymphius on the basis of inscriptions, but this is against the manuscripts. For the family connections of Gracchus compare Letter 108:1."

—Greenslade, "Early Latin Theology", Library of Christian Classics vol. 5, p.333)