Altar of Chrestion from Alba Iulia

TNMM 666 ↔ CIMRM 1945

In 1852, a naval captain named Károly Pap unearthed two altars and a fragmentary Mithraic relief in his garden in Marospartos, inside a Roman-era building that may have been a small Mithraic temple separate from the previous one. The two dedications were probably made by two slaves.

A monument long kept in a private collection and recently published by Cs. Szabo, bears exactly the same text as TNMM 665 and can be linked to the CIMRM 1939 altar found at Partos in 1867, which must have come from the same site: it uses the same spelling Mythra and a simple onomastic system that translates Greek names into Latin on dedications of the same form engraved on a very similar type of altar.

The Mithraeum, probably located near the Mures, seems to have been visited by worshippers of modest means, perhaps members of a community linked to the river environment, as suggested by the presence of a trident and a dolphin on the side of one of the altars, which is rare in Mithraic contexts. Unlike the three slaves mentioned above, Aurelios Stephanos wrote his ex-voto to the god Mithras in Greek TNMM 667, which is unique in the Apulum Mithraic repertoire.