Titus Flavius Saturninus

Titus Flavius Saturninus is known from a single dedication to Sol Invictus Mithras discovered at Grumentum in Lucania. The inscription identifies him as an evocatus Augustorum nostrorum, indicating that he was a veteran who had been recalled to imperial service after completing his regular military term. The formula Augg. nn. refers to more than one reigning emperor and places the monument within a period of joint rule, most likely in the later second century CE. Some scholars have suggested a date during the co-regency of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus (AD 161-169), while other periods of dual emperorship remain possible. The monument itself is now lost, although it was recorded in the eighteenth century in the garden of the Danio family at Saponara and is generally believed to have originated from Grumentum.

Very little else can be said with certainty about Saturninus. Because evocati were normally veterans who had already completed the standard term of military service, it has been inferred that he had served for more than twenty years before his recall. Modern scholars have further proposed that he may have belonged to the military milieu connected with the imperial administration, perhaps even to the cohortes urbanae attested at Grumentum, and that he may have returned to his native city after retirement. None of these suggestions, however, is explicitly stated in the inscription. What is certain is that Saturninus dedicated an altar to Mithras and that his monument remains the only known epigraphic testimony to the cult of Mithras from Grumentum, where no mithraeum has yet been identified.

A centurion of the Legio V Macedonica bearing the same name is attested in an inscription from Porolissum (AE 1980, 755), which records the restoration of a temple dedicated to Baal during the reign of Caracalla. While it is conceivable that this Titus Flavius Saturninus and the Mithraic dedicant from Grumentum were the same individual, no direct evidence links the two inscriptions, and the identification remains speculative.