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Cumont, grew to some influence in the Roman Empire during the first century A.D. and reached the height of its strength in the third. Are we to regard it as taking the lead in the spread of week-observance, or merely as being carried along in the general current and adapting its rites to its environment? We find, I think, no evidence which would lead us to take the former view. The positive indications adduced by Cumont seem on examination to be exceedingly slight. A Mithraeum at Ostia[1] is said to have the figures of the Seven and below them semicircular stations from which Cumont supposes that the priest invoked the planet of the day. But the figures are not in week-order. A basrelief undoubtedly Mithraean found in Bologna[2] does give them in week-sequence, but, if read in the ordinary way from left to right, they run Sun, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Moon. This sculpture, therefore, to which Cumont does not assign a date, has the week-gods, but in an inverted order. Much the same appears in the one literary passage on which Cumont relies to prove week-knowledge in Mithraism. This is in Origen's famous refutation of the attack made on Christianity by an otherwise unknown person called Celsus[3]. It is
