Roman imperial cult

• 1. Introduction

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  The Roman imperial cult bound the authority of the emperor to the will of the gods themselves. When Julius Caesar's heir Octavian completed the ceremony of apotheosis for his adoptive father in 42 BC, he was doing something that would have been unthinkable to his ancestors five centuries earlier: officially declaring a Roman man a god by vote of the Senate. That act opened a question that would trouble Rome for centuries. Where does a ruler end and a deity begin? The imperial cult, known formally as the cultus imperatorius, was Rome's answer to that question. But the answer kept changing. What began as a carefully managed fiction, a way for Augustus to claim divine approval without claiming godhood outright, grew into an institution so entangled with Roman identity that refusing to participate could be treated as treason. This is the story of how a republic that prided itself on rejecting kings learned to worship its rulers.

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• 2. A World Before Worship

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  For five centuries, the Roman Republic refused to worship any living person. From 509 BC to the final decades of the Republic, Roman tradition held firm against the divine honors that surrounded Rome on almost every side. The aristocrats who filled the Senate acknowledged no man as their inherent superior. No citizen, living or dead, was officially regarded as divine. Yet the line between honor and worship was never as clear as Romans liked to pretend. The same crowns, garlands, statues, thrones, and processions that the state awarded to exceptional men were also suitable to the gods. When a general was acclaimed imperator by his troops, and the Senate voted him a triumph, he rode in a chariot bearing divine emblems, wearing the toga picta, in a costume thought to descend from the ancient kings of Rome. Some scholars have viewed the triumphal general as impersonating or even becoming a king or a god for that single day. Private life blurred the line further. Every head of household embodied the genius of his ancestors, a generative principle that family members and slaves would swear oaths by. A client could address his patron as "Jupiter on earth". After Gaius Marius defeated the Teutones, private citizens offered food and drink to him alongside their own household gods, calling him the third founder of Rome after Romulus and Camillus. In 86 BC, incense and wine were offered at crossroad shrines to statues of the still-living Marius Gratidianus, the popular nephew of the elder Marius, whose monetary reforms had eased a financial crisis during his praetorship. None of this was state cult. But it showed that the impulse was there, waiting for the right conditions.

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• 3. The Greek Inheritance

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  Greek city-states had long since solved the problem of ruler worship, and their solution would prove decisive for Rome. When a Greek city wanted to declare allegiance to an outside power, it offered that power divine honors, committing the city to obey the ruler exactly as it obeyed Apollo or any of the other gods. Plutarch identified the cities of Ionia worshipping the Spartan general Lysander, after he dominated Greece following the Peloponnesian War, as the first instance of ruler cult in Greek history. Philip II of Macedon had his statue dressed as a god, set among the Twelve Olympians as their thirteenth member. But it was his son Alexander the Great who made the divinity of kings a standard expectation. The Egyptians accepted Alexander as Pharaoh, and therefore divine, after he drove the Persians from Egypt. In 324 BC he sent word to the Greek cities that they should make him a god; they did so, the source notes, with marked indifference. When the Athenians allied with Demetrius Poliorcetes, they lodged him in the Parthenon with Athena and sang a hymn calling him a present god who heard them as the other gods did not. When Roman magistrates began conquering the Greek world, they inherited this tradition. Games were set up in honor of Marcus Claudius Marcellus when he conquered Sicily at the end of the Second Punic War, as the Olympian games were for Zeus, and they were kept up for a century and a half. Titus Quinctius Flamininus had temples built for him; cities placed his portrait on their coinage. The Greeks also devised a goddess Roma, and her joint cult with Flamininus is attested in 195 BC. She would prove more durable than any individual general, becoming a continuing symbol of romanitas long after a Marcellus or Flamininus had lost power.

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• 4. Caesar and the Fatal Step

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  Julius Caesar was the first Roman to pursue godhood as part of a deliberate reach for monarchy. His claim began with lineage. As a member of the gens Julia, he could trace descent from Aeneas and his mother Venus. In his funeral eulogy for his aunt Julia in 69 BC, he implied descent also from Ancus Marcius and the kings of Rome, and therefore from Mars. As a teenager, the elder Marius had named him flamen Dialis, special priest of Jupiter; Sulla cancelled the appointment, but Caesar later became pontifex maximus, the chief priest who fulfilled most of the religious duties of the ancient kings. After defeating his rivals in 45 BC, the new Senate he had filled with his own partisans began offering him honors that crossed from exceptional to divine. His portrait appeared on Roman coinage, the first time a living man had done so. A house was built for him at public expense in the manner of a temple. His image was paraded with those of the gods. A special priest, a flamen, was ordained for him; the first was to be Mark Antony, then consul. That rank would have placed Caesar as an equal of Quirinus, Jupiter, and Mars. Cicero's account held that the living Caesar's honors were already and unambiguously those of a full-blown god. His name as a living divinity was Divus Julius. He was killed in the Senate on the 15th of March 44 BC before he could take another step. An angry crowd gathered in the Roman Forum to hear Antony's funeral oration. A comet was interpreted as Caesar's soul ascending to heaven and named the Julian star. In 42 BC, Octavian held ceremonial apotheosis for his adoptive father. With the full consent of the Senate and people of Rome, Julius Caesar became a god of the Roman state.

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• 5. Augustus and the Art of Restraint

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  Octavian, now Augustus, understood the lesson of Caesar's death with perfect clarity. His predecessor had claimed too much, too openly, in Rome itself. Augustus would claim nothing, officially, while arranging for everything. When the koina of Asia and Bithynia in 30-29 BC requested permission to worship him as their deliverer, he imposed a careful structure. Cult honors could be jointly offered to the goddess Roma at centers to be built at Pergamum and Nicomedia. Roman citizens in those provinces were not to worship the living emperor but might worship Roma and the divus Julius at Ephesus and Nicaea. In 29 BC Augustus dedicated the temple of the divus Julius at the site of Caesar's cremation, presenting himself not as a god but as the dutiful son of one. He had, he claimed, come into being through the Julian star, and was therefore the divi filius, son of the divinity. His official achievements included the repair of 82 temples in 28 BC alone, the founding or repair of 14 others during his lifetime, and the construction of a new road, water supplies, Senate house, and theatres. His military successes brought what he called an enduring sacred peace, earning him the permanent title of imperator. His administrative genius was to make the office of emperor so central to every institution of Roman life that cult was simply the natural extension of that centrality. The emperor's image was everywhere, on coins, in temples, in the courts and offices of every level of administration. His name was used for oaths. His res gestae were public monuments. In Rome, Augustus was content to have the honors of his office, his munificence, his auctoritas, and his family line identified with every possible legal, religious, and social institution of the city. If foreigners wished to honor him as something more, that was their prerogative. In 27 BC, he accepted the elevated title of Augustus itself.

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• 6. Province by Province

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  The imperial cult did not spread uniformly across the empire. In the Eastern provinces, where Greek and Hellenistic traditions had long normalized ruler worship, it found immediate and fertile ground. Greek cities of Roman Asia competed for the privilege of building high-status imperial cult centers called neocorates. Ephesus and Sardis, long rivals, each held two until the early 3rd century AD, when Ephesus was allowed an additional temple to the reigning emperor Caracalla. The Cypriot calendar honored the entire Augustan household by dedicating a month each to imperial family members, their ancestral deities, and major gods of the Romano-Greek pantheon. The Western provinces presented a different problem. Only recently Latinized following Caesar's Gallic campaigns, most of the West had no native tradition of monarchic divinity to absorb the imperial cult. The Western provincial concilia emerged as direct creations of the cult, recruiting existing local military, political, and religious traditions into a Roman model. The first known Western regional cult centers to Augustus, the arae sestianae, were established with his permission around 19 BC in north-western Spain, named after their military founder, L. Sestius Albanianus Quirinalis. Soon after, either in 12 BC or 10 BC, Drusus founded the first provincial cult center in the West at Lugdunum. The first priest of the altar there was Caius Julius Vercondaridubnus, a Gaul of the provincial elite who had been granted Roman citizenship. His priestly office gave him the right to participate in local government. Rejection of the cult carried real consequences. In 9 AD, Segimundus, the imperial cult priest at what would later become the city now known as Cologne, destroyed or cast off his priestly regalia to join the rebellion of his kinsman Arminius. In the province of Africa, local Berber deities were simply identified with the authority of Augustus, while two temples to Roma and the divus Augustus were attested in the senatorial province at Leptis Magna and Mactar.

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• 7. Apotheosis as Political Weapon

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  The Senate's power to vote a dead emperor divus, and thus raise him to official godhood in an act of apotheosis, became one of the most effective tools of political legitimacy and condemnation in the Roman world. An emperor voted worthy became a divus, a dweller in heaven, a lesser being than the Olympians but an official inhabitant of the divine order. Popular belief held that the divus Augustus would be personally welcomed by Jupiter. An emperor judged unworthy was denied apotheosis, and the Senate could go further, voting damnatio memoriae, the official erasure of a ruler's memory. Vespasian, founder of the Flavian dynasty, could not trace his lineage back to the divine ancestry of Julius Caesar and so could not legitimate his reign through that connection. He secured his position instead by renewing cult to the divus Julius and presenting himself as a restorer of Augustan modesty and senatorial Republican values. He was said to have approached his own impending divinity with dry humor. Suetonius records that his last words were "puto deus fio": I think I am turning into a god. Vespasian's use of apotheosis as legitimacy found a mirror in Septimius Severus, who entered Rome in 193 AD, gave apotheosis to his predecessor Pertinax, and then cancelled the Senate's damnatio memoriae of the much-hated Commodus, deifying him as a brother and thereby adopting Marcus Aurelius as his own ancestor. The mechanism could be wielded in the opposite direction too. Caracalla, who murdered his co-emperor and brother Geta in 212 AD, had Geta's memory officially damned. He is attributed with the phrase, describing his approach to divinity and its absence: "sit divus dum non sit vivus", let him be a divus as long as he is not alive.

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• 8. Faith, Force, and the Fading Cult

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  By the 3rd century, the imperial cult had become inseparable from the question of what it meant to be Roman at all. The emperor Decius, who came to power in 249 AD after deposing Philip the Arab, decreed that all subjects of the empire must actively seek to benefit the state through witnessed and certified sacrifice to ancestral gods. Only Jews were exempt. Refusal was to be tried at proconsular level. Apostasy was the goal, not execution. A year after its deadline, the edict was allowed to expire, and Decius himself died. Valerian, reigning from 253 to 260, identified Christianity as the largest and most stubborn of non-Roman cults and outlawed Christian assembly. Aurelian, who ruled from 270 to 275, stabilized the empire and established an official, Hellenic form of unitary cult to Sol Invictus in Rome's Campus Martius. The Senate hailed him as restitutor orbis, restorer of the world, and deus et dominus natus, god and born ruler. He was murdered by his own Praetorians. Diocletian's response to religious dissent was the most severe in the Church's memory, the Diocletianic Persecution. According to Lactantius, it began with ominous results from haruspicy in Diocletian's own household and a subsequent decree of placatory sacrifice by the entire military. An unknown number of Christians suffered the extreme punishments traditionally reserved for rebels and traitors. But Diocletian's conservatism ultimately could not hold. His framework of divine imperial order passed to Constantine I, who in the ascendancy of Christianity turned the theological and political implications of the cult on their head. The emperor Julian tried and failed to reverse the declining support for Rome's official religious practices. Under Theodosius I, Christianity became the state religion of Rome. The traditional gods and the imperial cult were officially abandoned.

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