Dr. Francis McIntosh

And so...

You can see, kind of like we were talking about with cooking and with other sort of cultural things, these people are moving around.

Maybe they were the first unit were recruited in, let's say, Tungria.

They move up to Hadrian's Wall.

They keep some of the Tungrian things, but then they're also adopting stuff from this wider Roman pantheon, Mars, and they also take on what's happening where they are based because...

it's important to keep the local gods happy because in Roman religion, the gods really had an impact on you.

So if there's a god of that hill or that stream, you need to keep them on side, you know, as well as the gods you believe in from back home, plus the gods that look after the army, you know.

So it's really complicated and it will have changed over time as then, I don't know, a eunuch came over and said, oh, have you heard about Mithras?

You know, and then Mithrasism comes in.

So, cult is a very loaded word.

And it's a modern word.

And a lot of Roman religion...

wouldn't have been sort of cultish and what's the word where, you know, you only worship that.

So we often talk about Mithraism as being more like a cult.

However, you could worship Mithras and still believe in other deities and still believe in them.

And that's why Mithras and all the other gods were allowed to exist and continue, as long as you did, you know, worship the top Roman gods that the empire recognised.

But it's then the reason why Judaism and Christianity are

were not accepted at the beginning because they're monotheistic.

And so they're more maybe what the Romans might have thought of as a cult because they are exclusionists, aren't they?

If you believe in Jesus and God for Christianity, you can't then believe in any of the others and the same with Judaism.