With regard to the priests who acted as celebrants in these strange mysteries, there are instances to be found in the inscriptions which make it plain that the priestly office was not confined or attached to any particular degree of initiation. _Pater Patrum_ (Father of Fathers) is a designation which occurs too frequently on the monuments for it to mean anything but eldest or president of those who had taken the seventh or highest degree in one congregation[966]. But _Sacerdos_ or _Antistes_ indifferently is the name by which the priest of Mithras is described by himself and others, and the holding of the office seems not to have been inconsistent with the tenure at once of other priesthoods and of high office in the State. Thus the _clarissimus_ Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, who was Urban Praetor, Proconsul of Achaea, Prefect of the City, Prefect of the Praetorians of Italy and Illyricum, and Consul Designate at the time of his death, was Father of Fathers in the religion of Mithras besides being Pontiff of the Sun and Pontiff of Vesta[967]. This was at a very late date, when probably only a man of high civil rank dared avow on his tombstone, as did Vettius, his fidelity to the god; but earlier, we find Lucius Septimius, a freedman of Severus, Caracalla, and Geta, acting as “Father and Priest of the Unconquered Mithras in the Augustan house”—evidently a Court chaplain—, and a certain _clarissimus_ Alfenius Julianus Kamenius who is of consular rank, a quaestor and a praetor, as a “father of the sacred things of the Highest Unconquered One Mithras[968].” So, too, we find a veteran of the IVth Flavian Legion acting as _pater sacrorum_, a decurion as _antistes_ and another as _sacerdos_ of Mithras[969]. Evidently, the cares of the priesthood did not occupy the priest’s whole time, and he never seems to have lived in the temple as did the clergy of the Alexandrian divinities. There was, on the faith of Porphyry, a _summus pontifex_ or Supreme Pontiff of Mithras, who like the Christian bishop in the Epistle to Timothy was forbidden to marry more than once[970]; but this was probably a high officer of State appointed directly by the Emperor. No proof is forthcoming that a fire was kept perpetually burning on the altar in the European chapels of Mithras, as perhaps was the case with the temples of the faith in Asia Minor, or that daily or any other regularly repeated services were held there, and such services moreover could seldom have been attended by the soldiers with the colours, who seem to have made up the majority of the god’s worshippers. Prayers to the Sun-God and other deities were no doubt offered by Mithraists, possibly at sunrise and sunset, and perhaps special ones on the first day of the week, which they very likely held sacred to their god. But the small size of the Mithraea, and the scanty number of the members of the associations supporting each[971], make it extremely unlikely that there was anything like regular congregational