Mithraeum of Virunum

TNMM 401

In 1992 a bronze plaque recording the dedication of a mithraeum was discovered in Virunum, the principal town and administrative capital of the province of Noricum. The mithraeum, as the text of the plaque reveals, had collapsed in some sort of catastrophe, probably natural, and the members rebuilt it at their own expense. The plaque functioned as the mithraeum's album. The original thirty-four contributors to the rebuilding were listed in the furst one and one third columns of an eventual four columns, and thereafter names were added in different hands until the album was full.

The primary importance of the Virunum plaque lies of course in the recovery of a complete membership list which shows recruitment into the mithraeum over a considerable period of time. At a stroke, ninety-eight persons have been added to the 997 previously known cultores Mithrae so painstakingly tallied and analysed by Manfred Clauss (1992).