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Imperial cult (Ancient Rome)
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The imperial cult in ancient Rome was the worship of a few select emperors as gods once they were deceased; the only emperor to declare himself a god while still living was Domitian which caused outrage.
Making a god out of certain deceased emperors became a prominent element of religion in the Roman Empire during the Principate, to a point when some relatives of emperors were deified as well (with the word Divus preceding their names, or Diva if female).
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The imperial cult in ancient Rome was the worship of a few select emperors as gods once they were deceased; the only emperor to declare himself a god while still living was Domitian which caused outrage.
Making a god out of certain deceased emperors became a prominent element of religion in the Roman Empire during the Principate, to a point when some relatives of emperors were deified as well (with the word Divus preceding their names, or Diva if female). The cult soon spread over the whole extent of the Empire. It was only abandoned in the Dominate, after the emperor Constantine I started supporting Christianity.
The apotheosis of an Emperor was an essentially political act performed by the dead emperor's successor to reinforce the majesty of the imperial office, and, often quite effectively, to associate the current emperor with a well-regarded predecessor. Since it was a propaganda tool focused on leaders, the Roman imperial cult can be considered a cult of personality.
Subjects
It is usually deceased emperors who were deified. However, it is not always the immediate predecessor. For instance, when Septimius Severus overthrew Didius Julianus to gain power in AD 193, he arranged the apotheosis of Pertinax, who had ruled before Julianus.
This allowed Severus to present himself as the heir and successor to Pertinax, though the two were not related.
Apotheosis could also be applied to deceased members of the imperial family, such
as emperors' wives like Livia or Faustina and emperor's son like Valerius Romulus. It was also
an acceptable and critical part of the imperial cult to the senate (worship of living
emperors being regarded with suspicion).
For royal females, acquiring the title of Augusta, only exceptionally granted, was generally regarded as the essential stepping stone to the status of divinity.
In an even rarer occasion, non-imperial Romans could be deified as
well. The last non-imperial human to be deified was Antinous, the
young lover of Emperor Hadrian. The apotheosis of Antinous became
the subject of numerous sculptures commissioned by Hadrian to
commemorate the youth. Consequently, the image of Antinous is
among the most recognizable faces from antiquity.
Somewhat uniquely, his cult was not so much one of propaganda than one of genuine affection.
Prehistoric origin
The process involved the creation of a waxen image of the emperor sitting in state, adorned with rich raiments and jewelry for a period of days, after which it would be burnt. On the pyre would be a hidden cage with an eagle in it.
At the climax of the ceremony, this eagle would be released, and would be said to be carrying the emperor's soul to the gods.
Deification of Roman rulers had its origins in the worship of Romulus, who became known in his deified form as Quirinus.
From Julius Caesar to Hadrian
In his funeral speech for his aunt Julia, Julius Caesar himself had claimed descent from the ancient Roman kings (Marcii Reges) and the gods (Venus Genetrix). After crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC, Caesar was greeted and worshipped by the Romans as a god. After his first victories in the civil war, he received cults and worship as god and sôter ("savior") in the East, which surpassed the earlier honors of Pompey. On the brumalia of 48 BC he was deified in the temple of Zeus-Amun in Alexandria as Caesar Epibaterios, where later a pompous temple (caesareum) was built for his cult. In 46 BC the Senate voted Caesar a pantokrator-statue in Rome, on which he was called h?mítheos (Latin: Divus). In 45 BC a statue of Caesar was erected, which bore the inscription Deo Invicto (Latin "to the unconquered god"). His statues were erected inside or in front of several Roman temples, among them the temples of Quirinus and Sol. Weinstock (1971) assumes the additional cult of the Genius Caesaris, and the cult of the genius of Dievus Iulius is known from Aesernia. In 44 BC the Senate declared Caesar dictator in perpetuity and decreed many monarchical and divine honors, including his planned apotheosis, which was made official by consecratio in 42 BC. While Mark Antony had already declared Caesar a god during his funeral, an inofficial cult of the deified Caesar ensued soon after the Ides of March, which was led by the Pseudo-Marius Amatius, but was short-lived. Worship of Caesar became prominent again, when a bright daylight-comet, the "Julian star" (sidus Iulium), appeared in July 44 BC during the games in honor of Caesar's victories (ludi Victoriae Caesaris), which was interpreted as Caesar's soul in heaven. Caesar's nephew and adopted son Octavian announced that he "had come into being" through the Julian star, and he later constructed the intended Aedes Divi Iulii, the temple of Divus Iulius (engl.: "God Julius"), on the Forum Romanum. This was an act that consolidated Augustus' power, and since he was now the son of Divus Iulius, he called himself Divi filius ("God's son"). Mark Antony was designated to become the first highpriest of Divus Iulius (flamen Divi Iulii) and eventually inaugurated in 40 BC. The cult of Divus Iulius was officially instated and spread all over the Roman empire, especially in the Caesarian and veteran colonies like Corinth. Altars and temples of Divus Iulius (caesarea)—often for triadic deities, e.g. together with Divi filius and Dea Roma—were built in all Roman provinces, even as far as the ancient Augustan military settlement at modern-day Najran, where the caesareum was possibly later known as ????? ?????, the "Kaaba of Najran". The cult received sporadic renewal under various emperors, whenever the divine Caesarian claim to power was to be emphasized, e.g. under Vespasian of the Flavian dynasty, who renewed and enforced the cult of Divus Iulius in the empire. It is unknown, if the cult of Divus Iulius lasted until late antiquity, since contemporary sources are silent after the christianization of the empire in the 4th century AD. However, according to Onuphrius Panvinius the priests of Divus Iulius supported the religion until the 6th century.
In the mythological developments, an imperial house, gens Julia, was portrayed as the descendants of the hero Iulus, Venus and Jupiter. Virgil, befriended to Augustus, wrote the Aeneid. The first book of that poem contains a passage where Jove is portrayed as unfolding his decisions to Venus, containing these words:
Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar,
imperium oceano, famam qui terminet astris,--
Iulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo.
Hunc tu olim caelo, spoliis Orientis onustum,
accipies secura; vocabitur hic quoque votis. | |
Of Trojan stock illustriously sprung,
lo, Caesar comes! whose power the ocean bounds,
whose fame, the skies. He shall receive the name
Iulus nobly bore, great Julius, he.
Him to the skies, in Orient trophies dress,
thou shalt with smiles receive; and he, like us,
shall hear at his own shrines the suppliant vow. |
By sanctioning the cult of his adopted father, Augustus also prepared his own and set the pattern for himself and future emperors. He received similar honors even while still alive from the Senate. At the request of the senators, Augustus and Tiberius had each allowed a single temple to be erected in their honor during their respective lifetimes: such a temple would, however, not only contain a statue of the ruling emperor, that could be venerated in a god-like fashion, but the temples were also dedicated to the Roman people (the "City of Rome" in Augustus' case; the "senate" in Tiberius' case). Both temples were situated in the Asian part of the Roman Empire:
- Augustus' temple was situated in Pergamon;
- Pressed from several sides, Tiberius would not allow any other temple or statue in his honor, than a single one in Asia, following his predecessor's example. Tiberius declared before the senate he'd rather be remembered for his acts than by stone, but consented in 26 to the senate choosing Smyrna out of eleven candidate-cities to erect "his" temple.
On the contrary, other emperors were less subtle in their attempts to aggrandize themselves. Tiberius's successor Caligula, on his own instigation, constructed several temples and statues dedicated to himself, all of which were destroyed immediately after his death. His successor Claudius appears to have allowed a single temple in his honor, following Augustus' and Tiberius' example again, this time in Britain, after his successful conquest there.
Many emperors had personal guardian gods--especially popular were Hercules, Jupiter and Sol Invictus--which supposedly protected and guided them, but they generally avoided claiming the status of a deity in their own lives, even if some critics insisted they should. However, some worked hard to merge their own identity with those of their patron gods. Nero, for instance, maintained that he was of a miraculous and divine birth and erected the Colossus of Sol Invictus (sun-god) with his own facial features.
Most often, deceased emperors were the subject of worship during this period--at least, the ones who did not become so unpopular with their subjects that the populace considered their assassination a relief. Most emperors benefited from a speedy deification of their predecessor: if that predecessor was a close relative (even if only by adoption), that meant that the new emperor could count on a "near to deified" status of being a divi filius, without needing to be too presumptuous regarding his own godhead status. According to Suetonius, the last words of Vespasian were puto deus fio ("I think I'm turning into a god").
Civil religion until abolishment by Constantine
After Hadrian, the power of the emperors had become so absolute and consolidated that the later emperors could claim divinity during their own lives. During the persecution of Christians that took place in the Roman Empire, the imperial cult became an important aspect of that persecution. To the extent that participation in the imperial cult became a loyalty test, the imperial cult was a particularly aggressive sort of civil religion.
Loyal citizens of the Empire were expected to make a periodic offering of incense to the genius, or tutelary spirit, of the Emperor, and upon doing so they received a certificate that they had in fact demonstrated their loyalty by sacrificing. Christians, of course, refused to worship the Emperor, considering the cult to be idolatry. The sacrifice was used as a law enforcement tool to ferret them out.
The imperial cult was abandoned when Constantine I—who had adopted the Christian religion—became Emperor. From then on high religious claims by Roman and Byzantine emperors, no longer stated in terms of godhead of the Emperors, but in terms of challenging the religious authority of the highest non-secular leaders of the Church, would be indicated as Caesaropapism.
Translation
Those who were deified were referred to with the word divus
(Latin, noun, for "the divine/deified one"; feminine diva,
plural divi/divae) before their names. Thus, Claudius was called
divus Claudius. This word is often rendered as 'god' (i.e., "Claudius
the god") but that is something of an over-translation, as Latin had a separate and distinct word for gods (deus). A more accurate
translation might be 'divine' (i.e., "the divine Claudius") or 'deified',
a somewhat softer formulation that Roman intellectuals could
comfortably understand as metaphorical.
As time passed, this honour became more and more automatically associated with dead emperors, to the extent that by the time of the Dominate, it might just as well be understood as meaning "deceased". The fact that 'divus' had lost much of whatever truly religious meaning it had is made clear by the fact that it was used with names of early Christian emperors after their deaths, even after Constantine had technically abolished the practice of deification of emperors. "Divus Constantinus", therefore meant simply "the late Constantinus".
In literature
As apotheosis became a part of Roman political
life in the late Republic and early Empire, it began to be treated in
literary contexts. In the Aeneid, Virgil depicts Aeneas'
deification, saying he will be taken up to the stars of Heaven, and
mentions Caesar's apotheosis. Ovid also
describes Caesar's apotheosis in book XV of Metamorphoses
and looks forward to the glorification of Octavian.
Other Romans ridiculed the notion that a Roman emperor was to be considered a living god, or would even make fun of the deification of an emperor after his death: Lucius Annaeus Seneca parodied
the notion of apotheosis in his only known satire The Pumpkinification of Claudius, in which
notoriously clumsy and ill-spoken Claudius is transformed not into a god but into a pumpkin, revealing an irreverence towards the idea of a ruler cult, at least
among Rome's educated classes. In fact, bitter sarcasm was already effected at the Emperor's funeral in 54.
Further reading
- Fishwick , Duncan. The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, (Brill), I.1 and I.2 (1987), II.1 1991.
- Gradel, Ittai. Emperor Worship and Roman Religion. Oxford (Oxford University Press). 2002.
- Price, S. R. F. Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge University Press) 1984.
- Weinstock, Stefan. Divus Iulius. Oxford (Clarendon Press/OUP). 1971.
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