Mithras, Milites, and bovine legs

In their new interpretation of "The Third Symbol of the Miles Grade on the Floor Mosaic of the Felicissimus Mithraeum in Ostia," Aleš Chalupa and Tomáš Glomb present a convincing argument that this symbol represents a bovine leg. Less satisfying is their conventional historiographical method by which the significance of a target problem is assumed to become clear when located in its historical context, in this case, an assumed but never explicated "symbolic world of the Mysteries of Mithras." As an alternative, I have suggested network theory as providing an empirically based possibility for tracking relationships between Mithraic cells and, thus, between similar imagery. Nevertheless, Chalupa and Glomb are to be commended for their credible identification of the ambiguous image associated with the grade of Miles in the Felicissimus Mithraeum and for reopening, thereby, a larger discussion about explanations for the diffusion of Mithraism and of its (supposedly) analogous Mithraic images throughout the Roman Empire.