Friday (my bday)

So today we learned more about Mitra, the God worshipped in the Mithraeums I was describing yesterday, and I was RIGHT, it WAS secret cult! Basically, it was tolerated but not really approved so they had to meet secretly to be safe. We learned about the god actually being part of a larger religion called Zoroastarianism practiced in what is modern day Iran. We know almost nothing about this religion because no texts survive, except for the archeological remains in Rome that depict Mitra who was actually only a minor God.

It was popular with soldiers because they brought it back form where they were outposted and actually by the time Mitra was "in" most of the soldiers weren't actual Romans but people from all over the empire so they didn't really care about the Roman gods and that's why they adopted Mitra while the aristocrats and emperor didn't.

Anyway, the initiation involved a male (no women allowed) wearing all white and he had to get spattered with the blood of a bull and of a rooster. Why, you ask? Well Mitra's main job was the slaying of the bull, and while that may seem like a pretty insignificant role to us, it was a big deal back then since sacrifice was in and all.

The traditional depiction of Mitra is of him killing a bull while a dog laps up the blood and a scorpion bites of the bull's testicles. Yeah it's really strange, but that makes me love it more because it's so eerie.

Also, the followers were very into mathematics and astrology and had different ranks that corresponded to the seven heavenly bodies, which were the planets visible to the eye. Mitra also represented transitions, like light to dark and birth and death. One main selling point was it promised an afterlife, unlike the Roman religion which said when you died you just went into limbo.

This made it a competitor of Christianity and eventually Christianity stamped it out and built churches on top of the mithraeums which was no coincidence!

We also learned about the circus maximus which was a huge arena that held 250,000 people and was 5 to 6 football fields long! It was mainly used for these absolutely isane chariot races where people would shove each other while racing, or bribe each other before hand, and there was these crazy crashes and it just sounded like Nascar on steriods.

Another highlight was we saw this man made hill and how it was made was amazing. Basically olive oil was transported in huge jars about waist high, but couldn't be reused because the oil would spoil if they were reused. So what they did with these huge jars was to smash them up into very precise pieces in a very specific way and piled them up with dirt between them to create terrences that created a hill. Today you can see all the layers of jar pieces when you look at the hill! It was calculated that it was made up of 23 million jars over two hundred years. That gives you an idea of how many jars they were importing!

Also, it's my birthday and this morning, everyone said happy birthday! I wore my white dress with poppies on it and everyone thought I had bought it here in Italy which made me feel very stylish. Tonight we are going to go out to dinner and get gelato which should be fun.