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> Like Augustus a Roman emperor, was initiated into the mystery of two goddesses? What was that? Probably normal mystery-religion/club shit. We'll do the secret rituals, teach you our secret signs, impart some secret knowledge. Ta-da, now you're a 10th degree freemason, master-elect—er, I mean, are initiated into the mysteries of Juno or whatever. There are surviving fairly-old mystery religions (in addition to the alluded-to imitators of that sort of tradition, like the freemasons). They tend to be really shit at proselytizing and to not do great in a globalizing world in competition with bigger religions that are good at gaining converts, so it's a dying breed of religion, but hardly a mystery (ha, ha). Between that and limited ancient accounts, we can make a decent guess at the general kind of thing Roman mystery cults were up to. > Why Marcus Aurelius was so wise and unique? Eh, he wrote a pretty-good book on an existing philosophy that he'd been taught. Not nothing, but not exactly revolutionary. Epictetus, Seneca, and others preceded him. Anyway, a lot of that book doesn't get quoted in tweets, because it's not-so-wise-seeming stoic physics, metaphysics, and religion/cosmology. It's just the pithy bits of ethics and right-living that people really like. Meanwhile, in a few hundred years, Rome produced, what, two emperors whose writing we still care about at all, with IIRC 3ish volumes between them that are still read by ~anyone? Again, not nothing, but also not that out-there. |