you will remember, unfailingly, what was said by the great god, even were the oracle of ten thousand verses.

The single word that carries the claim is aparabátōs — 'without transgression,' without a single step aside from what was said. It is a legal and cosmic word (the same root names the fixed, 'inviolable' order of the stars), and applied to memory it promises something no ordinary mind can do: total, errorless recall of a text you were not conscious to hear. And the scale is deliberately absurd — kàn ên myríōn stíchōn, 'even were it of ten thousand lines.' Mýrioi is the Greek for the largest round number, the myriad; the boast is that the god's word, however vast, is retained entire. Behind it lies the whole ancient anxiety about oracles: they came once, in a rush, from a mouth not the speaker's own, and were gone. Delphi kept scribes for exactly this reason. The Mithras Liturgy promises to make the initiate his own perfect scribe — the recording built into the rite, so that nothing the god says is lost.