Ulpius Egnatius Faventinus

Ulpius Egnatius Faventinus was a late fourth-century Roman senator, public augur, provincial governor and prominent initiate in several mystery cults, active during the final flourishing of aristocratic paganism in Rome.

He is primarily known through a remarkable inscription discovered beneath the transept of Old St. Peter’s Basilica and dated to the consulship of Valens and Valentinian I (376 CE). In this text, Faventinus presents himself as:

• Augur publicus populi Romani Quiritium,
• Pater et hieroceryx Dei Solis Invicti Mithrae,
• Archibucolus dei Liberi,
• Hierophanta Hecatae,
• and sacerdos Isidis,

while also recording the completion of a taurobolium and criobolium initiation rite. The inscription is preserved as CIMRM 514 = ILS 4253 = TNMM 620.

The title pater identifies him as a high-ranking initiate within the cult of Mithras, while hieroceryx (“sacred herald”) further underlines his ritual authority. Particularly striking is the combination of Mithraic, Dionysiac, Hecatean, Isiac and Magna Mater affiliations within a single epigraphic self-presentation. Modern scholarship increasingly interprets this phenomenon not as accidental syncretism, but as part of a specifically late-antique aristocratic network of initiatory cults.

Francesco Massa has argued that inscriptions such as that of Faventinus belong to a coherent and exceptionally well-dated corpus (376-385 CE) in which members of the Roman aristocracy publicly displayed accumulated sacerdotal identities and constructed “networks of divinities” through epigraphic taxonomies of initiation and ritual office. According to Massa, these inscriptions reflect a distinctive late-antique configuration of mystery cults rather than the simple continuation of earlier imperial religious forms.

Faventinus was likely identical with the Ulpius Egnatius Faventinus attested as consularis provinciae Numidiae between 364 and 367 CE in an inscription from Cuicul (modern Djemila, Algeria), where he records the erection of a statue of Victory in the judicial basilica (LSA-2323; AE 1946, 108/110; Pflaum, Inscriptions Latines de l’Algérie II.3, 7914). Francesco Massa further identifies him as later serving as vicarius Africae in 385 CE. Although absolute certainty is impossible, the identification is considered highly plausible on chronological and prosopographical grounds.

Faventinus appears within the wider milieu of the late Roman pagan aristocracy alongside figures such as Vettius Agorius Praetextatus and Alfenius Ceionius Iulianus Kamenius, who similarly accumulated multiple priesthoods connected with Mithras, Liber, Hecate, Magna Mater and other cults.

Already in 1934, Pierre de Labriolle interpreted these aristocrats as representatives of the pagan reaction of the late fourth century, publicly displaying their initiations and religious identities as a form of cultural and religious affirmation.