Roman imperial cult

The emperor Domitian's high handed treatment of the Roman senate may have led to accusations that he declared himself a living god (divus).

The Roman Imperial cult identified emperors and some members of their families with the divinely sanctioned authority of the Roman State. The framework for Imperial cult was formulated during the early Principate of Augustus, and was rapidly established throughout the Empire and its provinces, with marked local variations in its reception and expression. The cult proved a useful instrument to Vespasian in his establishment of the Flavian imperial dynasty following the death of Nero and civil war, and to Septimius in his consolidation of the Severan dynasty after the assassination of Commodus.

Emperors were expected to actively uphold the traditional values of Rome and its diverse provinces, in order to maintain the peace, security and prosperity of the Empire. A deceased Emperor voted worthy by the senate could be made a state divus (divinity) by an act of apotheosis. The granting of apotheosis therefore served religious, political and moral judgment on Imperial rulers and allowed living Emperors to associate themselves with a well regarded lineage of Imperial divinities from which unpopular or unworthy predecessors were excluded. In the development of Imperial rule from principate to Dominate, the role of the senate was increasingly marginalised and military loyalty became the key to Imperial authority. The focus of Imperial cult shifted from deceased divi to living emperors, who increasingly claimed the status and honours of divine monarchs.

The Imperial cult was a focus of Roman revivalist legislation under Decius, Diocletian and Julian. Christian apologists and martyrologists identified it as an instrument of "pagan" persecution. It therefore became a focus of theological and political debate during the ascendancy of Christianity under Constantine I. With the adoption of Christianity as Rome's State religion under Theodosius I "Imperial cult" was officially abandoned but many of its rites, practices and status distinctions were perpetuated in the Christian theology and politics of Empire.

The Roman imperial cult is sometimes considered a deviation from Rome's traditional Republican values, a religiously insincere cult of personality which served Imperial propaganda. Many modern historians disagree with this interpretation, and regard the Imperial cult as a well-integrated unifying feature of the Principate. Its ritual, organisational and ideological frameworks can be found as distinctive features of later institutions, especially those of Western monarchies and Roman Catholicism.

Background

Roman

Republican tradition (mos maiorum) was staunchly conservative and anti-monarchic. The senate offered its highest honours with great circumspection. Above all, Rome's survival depended on success in war, and an exceptional victor proclaimed imperator by his troops could be awarded a Triumph. Once he had surrendered his arms and authority to the senate, he could wear the archaic triumphal dress which elevated him to near-divine and near-kingly status and in this guise he was given cult. To end the ceremony he must piously offer his victory to Jupiter: he must be seen to triumph less for himself than for the benefit of Rome's gods, senate and people. His extraordinary status was strictly temporary, and he would have been closely scrutinised for warning signs that he might wish it otherwise.

Little attention appears to have been paid to popular cult honours to benefactors, unless their power (potestas) posed a threat. Plutarch describes the spontaneous and unofficial consecration of the places where the populist land reformers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were murdered by their opponents. Their supporters - the dispossessed casualties of land-grabbing elites - "fell down" and offered daily sacrifice at the statues of the Gracchi "as though they were visiting the shrines of the gods". In 86 BCE, cult offerings of incense and wine were made at Roman compita (crossroad shrines) to statues of the living Marius Gratidianus, a genuinely popular praetor credited with currency reforms.

Republican tradition was more fluid and adaptable than its conservative ideology. Cornelia, mother of the murdered Gracchi, was made an official diva (f. of divus). By at least the mid-1st century BC, Rome’s foundation-myth had been embellished by the apotheosis of Romulus as traditional co-founder, triumphant imperator and first King of Rome, and Romulus had been conflated with Quirinus as a god of the Roman state. Fishwick attributes the apotheosis of Romulus to his merit as founder and sustainer of Rome. Romulus was also made a son of Mars, which connected his romanitas to the highest martial virtues. In Vergil’s epic, Aeneas, a descendant of the goddess Venus , received apotheosis through his merit as ancestor of the Roman people and ascended into heaven with Romulus. Vergil drew on material in circulation some time before his poetic reinvention - in 69 BCE, Julius Caesar had claimed descent from ancient Roman kings (Marcii Reges) and Venus Genetrix, in a public eulogy at the funeral of his aunt Julia.

Graeco-Eastern

As Rome extended its control over the Eastern Mediterranean, the Roman state and its representatives were offered the isotheoi timai (god-like honours) traditionally accorded there to living monarchs, successful military commanders, statesmen and other exceptional benefactors: these had included Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic dynasties descended from his generals, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Selucids. Since at least 195 BCE, easterners had offered cult to dea Roma and tribute to Rome. Alliance was of mutual benefit, whoever was in charge of Rome's tottering Republic. Victorious Roman generals from Flamininus to Sulla, Pompey the Great, Mark Antony and Julius Caesar, were honoured as theos (θεός, = deity/divinity) and sôter (saviour) in the East by various poleis and koinon (civic assemblies) over a period that extended into the civil wars.

The divus Julius and his heir

Julius Caesar's first victories in the civil war brought him cult honours as theos and sôter in the East. In 48 BC, at the great temple of Zeus-Amun which overlooked Alexandria's harbour, he shared cult honours with Apollo as Epibaterios. For Roman commentators, such deistic excesses were tolerable in the East but Caesar seemed to be testing the water for his declaration as rex (king) and divus (divinity) in Rome itself - he might even be planning a despotic removal of power and wealth eastwards, perhaps to Alexandria or Ilium (Troy).

In 49 BC Caesar crossed the Rubicon to become the sole effective authority in Rome: his armies were on its doorstep, its senate was swollen by his equestrian appointees and he had overwhelming popular support. In 46 BC he held an unprecedented quadruple triumph of extraordinary splendour, was voted pater patriae (father of the fatherland) and was granted a statue, with a dedication cited by Cassius Dio as hẽmítheos. The following year, a statue of him was raised in the temple of Quirinus and inscribed deo invicto ("to the unconquered god"). Another was erected next to the statues of Rome's ancient kings. In Cicero's hostile account, Caesar's honours in Rome were unambiguously those of a god (deus).. In 44 BC Caesar was made dictator in perpetuity and on March 15 of the same year, he was murdered in the Senate house.

An angry, grief-stricken crowd gathered in the Roman Forum to see his corpse and hear Mark Antony's funeral oration. Antony appealed to Caesar's divinity and vowed vengeance on his killers. A fervent popular cult to divus Julius followed. It was forcefully suppressed but the senate soon succumbed to Caesarian pressure and confirmed Caesar as a divus of the Roman state. A comet interpreted as Caesar's soul in heaven was named the "Julian star" (sidus Iulium) and in 42 BCE, with the "full consent of the Senate and people of Rome", Caesar's young heir, Octavian, held ceremonial apotheoisis for his adoptive father. In 40 BCE Antony was appointed the first priest (flamen) of the divus Julius. Provincial cult centres (caesarea) to the divus Julius were founded in Caesarian colonies such as Corinth. Antony's loyalty to his late patron did not extend to Caesar's heir: but in the last significant act of the civil war, on 1 August 31 BCE, Octavian defeated Antony at Actium. The victory left Octavian in undisputed power.

In 30/29 BCE, the koina of Asia and Bithynia requested permission to worship Octavian as their "deliverer" or "saviour". This placed Octavian in a difficult position. Caesar's murder marked an hubristic connection between living divinity and death. He must respect the overtures of his Eastern allies and the nature and intent of Hellenic honours but avoid a potentially fatal identification in Rome as a monarchic-deistic aspirant. It was decided that cult honours to him could be jointly offered to dea Roma, at cult centres to be built at Pergamum and Nicomedia. Provincials who were also Roman citizens were not to worship the living emperor, but might worship dea Roma and the divus Julius at precincts in Ephesus and Nicaea.

In 29 BCE Octavian dedicated the temple of the divus Julius at the site of Caesar's cremation. Not only had he confirmed his adoptive father as a divus of the Roman state. He "had come into being" through the Julian star and was therefore the divi filius (son of the divinity). But where Caesar had failed, Octavian had succeeded: he had restored the pax deorum (divinely ordained peace) and re-founded Rome through "August augury". In 27 BCE he was voted - and accepted - the elevated title of "Augustus".

Religion and Imperium under Augustus

Augustus appeared to claim nothing for himself, and innovate nothing: even the cult to the divus Julius had a respectable antecedent in the traditional cult to di parentes. He re-invented the Roman Republic with due deference to the senatorial and consular tradition. His unique position within the senate as "primus inter pares" (first among equals) offered a curb to the ambitions and rivalries that had led to the recent civil wars. As censor and pontifex maximus he was morally obliged to renew the mos maiores by the will of the gods and the "senate and people of Rome" (senatus populusque romanus). As tribune he encouraged generous public spending, and as princeps of the senate he discouraged ambitious extravagance. He disbanded the remnants of the civil war armies to form new legions and a personal Imperial guard (praetorian guard): the patricians who still clung to the upper echelons of political, military and priestly power were gradually replaced from a vast, Empire-wide reserve of ambitious and talented equestrians. For the first time, senatorial status became heritable.

Augustan renewal of mos maiorum included the seating arrangements at theatres and games, sumptuary law, and family life. Ordinary citizens could circumvent the complex, hierarchic bureaucracy of the State, and appeal directly to his magnanimity and judgment. His name and image were ubiquitous - on State coinage and on the streets, within and upon the temples of the gods, and particularly in the courts and offices of the civil and military administration throughout Rome and its provinces. By the end of his reign, the official res gestae (achievements) of Augustus included his repair of 82 temples in 28 BCE alone, the founding or repair of 14 others in Rome during his lifetime and the overhauling or foundation of civic amenities including a new road, water supplies, senate house and theatres. Above all, his military pre-eminence had brought enduring peace, which earned him the permanent title of imperator,so the triumph became an Imperial privilege. He seems to have managed all this with a combination of personal brio, cheerfully veiled threats and self-deprecation as "just another senator".

Most tellingly, Rome's Imperial Mausoleum identified Augustus, his family (and later, his descendants) by name only, not as divi. In Rome, it was enough that the office, munificence, auctoritas and gens of Augustus were identified with every possible legal, religious and social institution of the city. Should "foreigners" or private citizens wish to honour him as something more, that was their prerogative, within moderation. The official acknowledgment of cult demonstrated the emperor's moral responsibility towards his subjects. This unitary principle laid the foundations for what is now known as "Imperial cult", which would be expressed in many different forms and emphases throughout the multicultural Empire.

Eastern provinces

In the Eastern provinces, cultural precedent ensured a rapid and geographically widespread dissemination of cult, extending as far as the Augustan military settlement at modern-day Najran.

The Eastern provinces offer some of the clearest material evidence for the Imperial domus and familia as official models of virtue and propriety. Centres including Pergamum, Lesbos and Cyprus offered cult honours to Augustus and the Empress Livia: the Cypriot Calendar honoured the entire Augustan familia by dedicating a month each (and presumably cult practise) to Imperial family members, their ancestral deities and some of the major gods of the Romano-Greek pantheon. Coin evidence links Thea Livia with Hera and Demeter, and Julia with Venus Genetrix and Aphrodite. In Athens, Livia and Julia shared cult honour with Hestia (equivalent to Vesta), and the name of Gaius was linked to Ares (Mars).

Western provinces

In the Western provinces - most of them only recently "Latinised" following Caesar's Gallic Wars - Rome encountered a range of "radically different" socio-political contexts. Polybius mentions a past benefactor of New Carthage in Republican Iberia "said to have been offered divine honours". Apart from such isolated and regional examples, the West offered few if any ready-made establishments (such as monarchic divinity and the greek koina) which might absorb the Imperial cult as a Romanising agency.

The first known Western regional cults to Augustus were established with his permission around 19 BCE in north-western ("Celtic") Spain and named arae sestianae after their military founder, L. Sestius Quirinalis Albinianus. Soon after, in either 12 BCE or 10 BCE, the first official Imperial cult centre in the West was founded at Lugdunum by Drusus as a focus for his new tripartite administrative division of Gallia Comata. Lugdunum set the type for official Western cult as a form of Roman-provincial identity, parceled into the establishment of military-administrative centres. These were strategically located within the unstable, "barbarian" Western provinces of the new Principate and inaugurated by military commanders who were - in all but one instance - members of the Imperial family.. The Western provincial concilia emerged as direct creations of the Imperial cult, which recruited existing local military, political and religious traditions to a Roman model. This required only the willingness of barbarian elites to "Romanise" themselves and their communities.

The first priest of the Ara (altar) at Lugdunum's great Imperial cult complex at Lugdunum was Caius Julius Vercondaridubnus, a Gaul of the provincial elite, given Roman citizenship and entitled by his priestly office to participate in the local government of his provincial concilium. Though not leading to senatorial status, and almost certainly an annually elected office (unlike the traditional lifetime priesthoods of Roman flamines), provincial priesthood in Imperial provinces thus offered a provincial equivalent to the traditional Roman cursus honorum.

Western provinces of Roman Africa

In the early Principate, an altar inscribed Marazgu Aug(usto) Sac(rum) ("Dedicated to Marazgu Augustus"), identifies a local Libyan (Berber) deity with the supreme power of Augustus. In the Senatorial province of Africa, altars to the Dii Magifie Augusti attest (according to Potter) a deity who was simultaneously local and universal, rather than one whose local identity was subsumed or absorbed by an Imperial divus or deity. Two temples are attested to Roma and the divus Augustus - one dedicated under Tiberius at Leptis Magna, and another (Julio-Claudian) at Mactar.

The Imperial succession

Julio-Claudian

Even as he prepared his adopted son Tiberius for the role of princeps and recommended him to the senate as a worthy successor, Augustus seems to have doubted the propriety of dynastic imperium. It was probably the only feasible course. On his death, the senate debated and passed a lex de Imperio which voted Tiberius princeps through his "proven merit in office", and awarded him the honorific "Augustus" as name and title.

Tiberius proved a capable and efficient administrator but could not match Augustus' extraordinary energy and charisma. Roman historians described him as morose and mistrustful. With a self-deprecation that may have been entirely genuine, he encouraged cult to his father, and discouraged his own. He allowed a single temple in Smyrna to himself and the genius of the senate in 26 CE - eleven cities had competed for the honour. His lack of auctoritas allowed increasing praetorian influence over the Imperial domus, the senate and through it, the state. In 31 CE, his praetorian prefect Sejanus - by now a virtual co-ruler - was implicated in the death Tiberius' son and heir apparent Drusus, and was executed as a public enemy. In Umbria, the Imperial cult priest (sevir Augustalis) memorialised "the providence of Tiberius Caesar Augustus, born for the eternity of the Roman name, upon the removal of that most pernicious enemy of the Roman people". In Crete, thanks were given to "the numen and foresight of Tiberius Caesar Augustus and the Senate" in foiling the conspiracy - but at his death, the senate and his heir Caligula chose not to officially deify him.

Caligula's rule exposed the legal and moral contradictions of the Augustan "Republic". To legalise his succession, the senate was compelled to constitutionally define his role, but the rites and sacrifices to the living genius of the emperor already acknowledged his constitutionally unlimited powers. The princeps played the role of "primus inter pares" only through personal self restraint and decorum. It became evident that Caligula had little of either. He seems to have taken the cult of his own genius very seriously, and is said to have enjoyed acting the god - or rather, several of them. However, his infamous and oft-cited impersonations of major deities may represent no little more than his priesthood of their cults, a desire to shock and a penchant for triumphal dress. Whatever his plans, there is no evidence for his official cult as a living divus in Rome or his replacement of state gods, and none for major deviations or innovations in his provincial cult. His reported compulsion of priesthood fees from unwilling senators are marks of private cult and personal humiliations among the elite. Caligula's fatal offense was to willfully "insult or offend everyone who mattered", including the senior military officers who assassinated him. The histories of his reign highlight his wayward impiety. Perhaps not only his: in 40 CE the senate decreed that the "emperor should sit on a high platform even in the very senate house". Claudius (his successor and uncle) intervened to limit the damage to the Imperial house and those who had conspired against it, and had Caligula's public statues discretely removed.

Claudius was a praetorian nominee, and the senate may have resented him for it. He caused further offense by awarding cash for military loyalty. Claudius adopted the cognomen Caesar, deified Augustus' wife, Livia, 13 years after her death and in 42 CE was granted the title pater patriae (father of the fatherland)/ In Livia's apotheosis ceremony, the living emperor's genius was mentioned, but Claudius appears to have refused cult to his own genius. As the offer of cult simultaneously acknowledged the high status of those empowered to grant it and the extraordinary status of the princeps, Claudius' repeated refusals may have been interpreted as offensive to senate, provincials and the Imperial office. Claudius chose his domestic Imperial procurators from his among own trusted freedmen: but those closest to the Emperor held high status through proximity and Claudius therefore inverted and offended the traditional hierarchy.

It has been assumed that he allowed a single temple for his cult in Britain, following his conquest there. The temple is certain - it was sited at the colonia-capital of the Iceni under their client king, Prasutagus, and was a focus of British wrath during the Boudiccan revolt of 60 CE. But cult to the living Claudius there is very unlikely: he had already refused Alexandrine cult honours as "vulgar" and impious and cult to living emperors was associated with arae (altars), not temples. The British "worship" offered him as a living divus is probably no more than a cruel literary judgment on his worth as emperor. Despite his evident respect for Republican norms he was not taken seriously by his own class and in Seneca's fawning Neronian fiction, the Roman gods cannot take him seriously as a divus - the wild British might be more gullible. In reality, they proved resentful enough to rebel, though probably less against the Claudian divus than against brutal abuses and the financial burden represented by its temple.

Claudius died in 54 CE and was deified by his adopted son and successor Nero. After an apparently magnificent funeral, the divus Claudius was given a temple in Rome, but it was sited on the disreputable Mons Caelus and may have been left unfinished by his successor. Fishwick remarks that "the malicious humour of the site can hardly have been lost by those in the know... the location of Claudius' temple in Britain (the occasion for his "pathetic triumph") may be more of the same".

Once in power, Nero allowed the cult of Claudius to lapse, built his Domus Aurea over the the unfinished temple and allowed the cult of his own genius as paterfamilias of the Roman people. When his sister Drusilla died, he had her deified, much to the scorn of later historians - after Nero's suicide, her cult was simply allowed to fade. Senatorial attitudes to him appear to have been largely negative, and he was overthrown in a military coup. Otherwise, he seems to have been a popular emperor, particularly in the Eastern provinces. Tacitus reports a senatorial proposal to dedicate a temple to Nero as a living divus, taken as ominous because "divine honours are not paid to an emperor till he has ceased to live among men". Pliny the Elder remarked that the head of Nero's Colossus was very like the Emperor's own: but his observation flattered a later and more modest emperor.

Flavian

Nero's death saw the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and Imperial tenure as a privilege of ancient Roman (patrician and senatorial) families. In a single chaotic year, power passed from one to another of four Emperors. The first three promoted their own genius cult. The fourth, Vespasian - son of an equestrian from Reate - renewed the Imperial cult of divus Julius, and secured his Flavian dynasty through reversion to an Augustan form of principate which respected senatorial "Republican" values. Vespasian dedicated state cult to genio populi Romani (the genius of the people of Rome) and further repudiated Neronian practise by removing various festivals from the public calendars, which had (in Tacitus' unsparing assessment) become "foully sullied by the flattery of the times". Vespasian was respected for his "restoration" of Roman tradition and the Augustan modesty of his reign. He may have had the head of Nero's Colossus replaced or recut for its dedication (or rededication) to the sun god in 75CE. Following the first Jewish Revolt and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE he imposed the didrachmon, formerly paid by Jews for their Temple's upkeep but re-routed to Jupiter Capitolinus as victor over them "and their God". Jews who paid the tax were exempt from cult to Imperial state deities. Those who offered it were excluded from their own communities. Vespasian appears to have approached his own impeding cult with dry humour - according to Suetonius, his last words were puto deus fio ("I think I'm turning into a god").

Pliny the younger's panegyric of 100 CE claims the visible restoration of senatorial authority and dignity throughout the empire under Trajan, and praises the emperors modesty but does not disguise the precarious nature of this autocratic gift. Under Trajan, the office of emperor was increasingly interpreted as an earthly viceregency of the divine order.

Within two weeks of accession, Domitian restored the cult of the ruling emperor's genius. He remains a controversial figure, described as one of the very few emperors to scandalously style himself a living divus, as evidenced by the use of "master and god" in Imperial documents. However, there are no records of Domitian's personal use of the title, its use in official address or cult to him, its presence on his coinage or in the Arval Acts relating to his state cult. It occurs only in his later reign and was almost certainly initiated and used by his own procurators (who in the Claudian tradition were also his freedmen). Like any other paterfamilias and patron, Domitian was "master and god" to his extended familia, including his slaves, freedmen and clients. Pliny's descriptions of sacrifice to Domitian on the Capitol are entirely consistent with the entirely unremarkable "private and informal" rites accorded to living emperors. Domitian was a traditionalist, severe and repressive but respected by the military and the general populace. He admired Augustus and may have sought to emulate him but made the same tactless error as Caligula in treating the senate as clients and inferiors, rather than as the fictive equals required by Augustus' principate. His assassination was planned and implemented from within his court, and his name erased (officially but rather unsystematically) from inscriptions.

Nervan-Antonine

The Emperor Hadrian's Hispano-Roman origins and marked pro-Hellenism changed the focus of Imperial cult. His standard coinage still identifies with the genius populi Roman, but other issues stress his identification with Hercules Gaditanus, and Rome's Imperial protection of Greek civilisation. Commemorative coinage shows him "raising up" provincial deities (thus elevating and "restoring" the provinces). In 131-2 CE he sponsored the exclusively Greek Panhellenion. He was said to have "wept like a woman" at the death of his young companion Antinous, and arranged his apotheosis. Dio claims that Hadrian was held to ridicule for this, particularly as he had delayed the apotheosis of his sister Plotina after her death. Hadrian imposed Imperial cult (to himself and Jupiter) in Judaea following the Bar Kokhba revolt. He was predeceased by his wife Vibia Sabina. Both were deified.

The cult of Antinous would prove one of remarkable longevity and devotion, particularly in the Eastern provinces. Bithynia, as his birthplace, featured his image on coinage as late as the reign of Caracalla. His popular cult appears to have thrived well into the 4th century, when he became the "whipping boy of pagan worship" in Christian polemic. Vout (2007) remarks his humble origins, untimely death and "resurrection" as theos, and his identification (and sometimes misidentification by later scholarship) with the images and religious functions of Apollo, Dionysius/Bacchus, and later, Osiris. In Rome itself he was also theos (on two of three surviving inscriptions) but was more closely associated with hero-cult, which allowed direct appeals for his intercession with "higher gods".

Marcus Aurelius' tutor, Fronto, offers the best evidence of Imperial portraiture as a near ubiquitous feature of private and public life. Though evidence for private emperor worship is as sparse in this era as in all others, the cult of the living emperor is more likely than that of the divi.

Commodus succumbed to the lures of self-indulgence, easy populism and rule by favourites. He described his reign as a "golden age", and himself as a new Romulus and "re-founder" of Rome, but was deeply antagonistic toward the senate - he reversed the standard "Republican" Imperial formula to populus senatusque romanus (the people and senate of Rome). He increasingly identified himself with the demi-god Hercules in statuary, temples and the arena, where - to the horror of the senate and (probably) the delight of the plebs - he liked to entertain as a bestiarius in the morning and a gladiator in the afternoon. He may have been contemplating his declaration as a living god some time before his murder on the last day of 192 CE. In the last year of his life he was voted the official title "Romanus Hercules". The state cult to Hercules acknowledged him as heroic, a divinity or semi-divinity (but not a divus) who had once been mortal.

The Nervan-Antonine dynasty ended in chaos. The senate declared damnatio memoriae on Commodus. His city prefect Pertinax was declared Emperor by the praetorian guard in return for the promise of very large donatives. Pertinax had risen through equestrian ranks by military talent and administrative efficiency , to become senator, consul and finally Emperor, until murdered by his praetorians for attempting to cap their pay. He was replaced by Didius Julianus, who had promised cash to the praetorians and restoration of power to the senate. Julianus began his reign with an ill-judged appeal to the memory of Commodus, a much resented attempt to bribe the populace en masse and the use of praetorian force against them. In protest, a defiant urban crowd occupied the senatorial seats at the circus maximus. Against a background of civil war among competing claimants in the provinces, Septimius Severus emerged as a likely victor. The senate soon voted for the death of Julianius, the deification of Pertinax and the elevation of Septimius as Emperor.

Severan

"Sit divus dum non sit vivus" (let him be a divus as long as he is not alive). Attributed to Caracalla, before murdering his co-emperor and brother Geta.

In 193 CE Septimius Severus triumphaly entered Rome and gave apotheosis to Pertinax. He cancelled the senate's damnatio memoriae of Commodus, deified him as a frater (brother) and thereby adopted Marcus Aurelius as his own ancestor through an act of filial piety. Severan coin images further re-enforced Septimius' association with prestigious Antonine dynasts and the genius populi Romani.

Septimius' reign represents a watershed in relations between senate, Emperors, and the military. Senatorial consent defined divine imperium as a Republican permission for the benefit of the Roman people, and apotheosis was a statement of senatorial powers. Where Vespasian had secured his position with appeals to the genius of the senate and Augustan tradition, Septimius over-rode the customary preferment of senators to senior military office, increased plebian privilege in Rome and stationed a loyal garrison there. He selected his own commanders and gave personal attention to the provinces as sources of revenue, military manpower and unrest. Following his defeat of Clodius Albinus at Lugdunum, he re-founded and reformed its Imperial cult centre: dea Roma was removed from the altar and confined to the temple along with the deified Augusti. Fishwick interprets the obligatory new rites as those due any paterfamilias from his inferiors. Septimius' own patron deities, Melquart/Hercules and Liber/Bacchus, took pride of place with himself and his two sons at the Saecular games of 204 CE. Septimius died of natural causes in 211 CE at Eboracum (modern York) while on campaign in Britannia after leaving the Empire equally to Caracalla and his older brother Geta, along with advice to "be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men."

By 212 CE, Caracalla had murdered Geta, pronounced his damnatio memoriae and issued the Constitutio Antoniniana: this gave full Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire. and was couched as a generous invitation to celebrate the "victory of the Roman people" in foiling Geta's "conspiracy". In reality, Caracalla was faced by an endemic shortfall of cash and recruits. His "gift" was a far from popular move, as most of its recipients were humiliores of peasant status and occupation - approximately 90% of the total population. Humiliores they remained, but now liable to pay taxes, serve in the legions and adopt the name of their "liberator". Where other emperors had employed the mos maiorum of family obligation at the largely symbolic level of genius cult, Caracalla literally identified his personal survival with the state and "his" citizens. Caracalla inherited the devotion of his father's soldiery but his new citizens were not inclined to celebrate and his attempts to court popularity in Commodan style seem to have misfired. In Philostatus' estimation, his embrace of Empire foundered on his grudging, parochial mindset. He was assassinated in 217 CE, with the possible collusion of his praetorian prefect Macrinus.

The military hailed Macrinus as imperator, and he arranged for the apotheosis of Caracalla. Aware of the impropriety of his unprecedented leap through the traditional cursus honorum, from equestrian to Emperor, he respectfully sought senatorial approval for his "self-nomination". It was granted - the new emperor had a lawyer's approach to Imperium. His foreign policy proved too cautious and placatory for the military. After little more than a year he was murdered in a coup which replaced him with an emperor of Syrian background and Severan descent, Varius Avitus Bassianus, more usually known by the Latinised name of his god and his priesthood, Elagabalus.

The 14 year old emperor brought his solar-mountain deity from his native Emesa to Rome and into official Imperial cult. In Syria, the cult of Elagabalus was popular and well established. In Rome it was a foreign and (according to some ancient sources) disgusting Eastern novelty. In 220 CE the priest Elagabalus replaced Jupiter with the god Elagabalus as sol invictus (the unconquered Sun) and thereafter neglected his Imperial role as pontifex maximus. According to Marius Maximus, he ruled from his degenerate domus through prefects who included (among others) a charioteer, a locksmith, a barber, and a cook. At the very least, he appears to have been regarded as an unacceptably effete eccentric by the populace and military alike. He was assassinated at the age of 18, and subjected to the fullest indignities of damnatio memoriae. The praetorians replaced him with his young cousin Alexander Severus, who reigned for 13 years until killed in a mutiny. He was the last "Severan" Emperor.

Imperial crisis and the Dominate

This section provides an overview of developments most relevant to cult: for a full listing of Emperors by name and date, see List of Roman Emperors.

The end of the Severan dynasty marked the breakdown of central imperium. Against a background of economic hyperinflation and latterly, endemic plague, rival provincial claimants fought for supremacy and failing this, set up their own provincial Empires. Most Emperors seldom even saw Rome, and had only notional relationships with their senates. In the absence of coordinated Imperial military response, foreign peoples seized the opportunity for invasion and plunder.

Maximinus I (reigned 235-8 CE) sequestered the resources of state temples in Rome to pay his armies. The temples of the divi were first in line. It was an unwise move for his own posterity, as the grant or withholding of apotheosis remained an official judgment of Imperial worthiness but the stripping of the temples of state gods caused far greater offense. Maximinus's actions more likely reflect a need in extreme crisis rather than impiety, as he had his wife deified on her death but in a rare display of defiance the senate deified his murdered predecessor then openly rebelled. His replacement, Claudius Gothicus reigned briefly but successfully and was made a divus on his death. A succession of short-lived soldier-emperors followed. Further development in Imperial cult appears to have stalled until Philip the Arab, who dedicated a statue to his father as divine in his home town of Philipopolis and brought the body of his young predecessor Gordian III to Rome for apotheosis. Coins of Philip show him in the radiate solar crown (suggestive of solar cult or a Hellenised form of Imperial monarchy), with Rome's temple to Venus and dea Roma on the reverse.

In 249 CE, Philip was succeeded (or murdered and usurped) by his praetorian prefect Decius, a traditionalist ex-consul and governor. After an accession of doubtful validity, Decius justified himself as rightful "restorer and saviour" of Empire and its religio: early in his reign he issued a coin series of Imperial divi in radiate (solar) crowns. Philip, the three Gordians, Pertinax and Claudius were omitted, presumably because Decius thought them unworthy of the honour. In the wake of religious riots in Egypt, he decreed that all subjects of the Empire must actively seek to benefit the state through witnessed and certified sacrifice to "ancestral gods" or suffer a penalty: only Jews were exempt. The Decian edict required that refusal of sacrifice be tried and punished at proconsular level. Apostacy was sought, rather than capital punishment. A year after its due deadline, the edict was allowed to expire. Shortly after, Decius died.

The Decian edict appealed to whatever common mos maiores might reunite a politically and socially fractured Empire. Within its multitude of cults, no ancestral gods need be specified by name. The offer of sacrifice by loyal subjects would define them and their gods as Roman. Crisis had helped reformulate what Empire was, and what it was not: in the earliest days of the principate, Livy had been convinced that the problems of the late Republic stemmed from impiety. The principate of Augustus had been justified by its restoration of peace and the mos maiorum. Then, as now, devotion to private and mystery cults was acceptable, within limits, but excessive devotion to one cult robbed Rome's gods of their dues from its citizens. Valerian (253-60) singled out the largest and most stubborn of these cults: he outlawed Christian assembly and urged Christians to sacrifice to Rome's traditional gods. His son and co-Augustus Gallienus, himself an initiate of Eleusian mysteries, also identified himself with traditional Roman gods and the virtue of military loyalty. Aurelian (270-75) appealed for harmony among his soldiers (concordia militum), stablised the Empire and its borders and successfully 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) but his intolerance of military corruption led to his murder by the praetorians. Aurelians immediate successors consolidated his achievements: coinage of Probus (276-82) shows him in radiate solar crown, and his prolific variety of coin types include issues showing the temple of Venus and Dea Roma in Rome.

These policies and preoccupations culminated in Diocletian's Tetrarchy. This divided the empire into Western and Eastern administrative blocs: each had its Augustus (senior emperor), helped by a Caesar (junior emperor) as Augustus-in-waiting. Provinces were divided and subdivided: their Imperial bureaucracy was extraordinary in size, scope and attention to detail but their senior Augustus was fundamentally conservative. On his accession in 284 CE, he held games in honour of the divus Antinous. Where his predecessors preferred persuasion and coercion of recalcitrant sects, Diocletian launched a series of ferocious reactions known in Church history as the Great Persecution. According to Lactantius, this began with a report of ominous haruspicy in Diocletian's domus and a subsequent (but undated) dictat of placatory sacrifice by all the military. A date of 302 is regarded as likely and Eusebius also says the persecutions of Christians began in the army. However Maximilian's martyrdom (295) came from his refusal of military service, and Marcellus' (298) for renouncing his military oath. Legally, these were military insurrections and Diocletian's edict may have followed these and similar acts of conscience and faith. An unknown number of Christians appear to have suffered the extreme and exemplary punishments traditionally reserved for rebels and traitors.

The nature and intent of Imperial cult under Diocletian are hard to discern through the taints of his notoriety but his expanded Imperial collegia seems to have had major implications. While the division of empire and Imperium catered to a peaceful and well-prepared succession, its unity still required the highest vestiture of power and status in one man. In matters of titulature and ceremonial alike, the hyperinflation of Imperial honours distinguished both Augusti from their Caesars and Diocletian (as senior Augustus) from his colleague. An elaborate choreography of etiquette surrounded the approach to the Imperial person and Imperial progressions. The senior Augustus in particular was made a separate and unique being, accessible only through those closest to him. By this period, low-born, trusted imperial eunuchs played a major procuratorial role and as in Claudius' time, their proximity to the source of Imperium was resented.

Diocletian's avowed conservatism almost certainly precludes a systematic design toward personal elevation as a "divine monarch". Rather, he formally separated the Imperial office within the divine order of empire and elevated emperorship as the supreme instrument of the divine will. The idea was Augustan, or earlier, expressed most clearly in Stoic philosophy and the solar-cult, especially under Aurelian. At the very beginning of his reign, before his tetrarchy, Diocletian had adopted the signum of Jovius: his co-Augustus adopted Herculius. In the Tetrarchy, the titles were multiplied, but with no clear reflection of implicit divine seniority: in one case, the divine signum of the Augustus is inferior to that of his Caesar. These divine associations may have followed a military precedent of emperors as comes to divinities (or divinities as comes to emperors). Moreover, the title appears to have been used in the fairly narrow context of panegyric and etiquette within the civil administration. It makes no appearance on coinage.

The context and precedents for Imperial Cult

The Augustan settlement was promoted by its contemporary apologists as restorative and conservative rather than revolutionary. Official cult to the genius of the living princeps as "first among equals" elaborated the mos maiorum to justify the unprecedented range and permanence of his powers. The official grant of Caesar's apotheosis in a stable Republic justified the future cult of Imperial divi.

The official offer of divine honours weighed the god-like powers of the princeps against his powers of self-restraint and pious respect for Republican tradition: "good" emperors rejected the offer with every appearance of gratitude and humility. Claims that later emperors sought and obtained divine honours in Rome reflect their bad relationship with their senates. In Tertullian's day, it was still "a curse to name the emperor a god before his death". On the other hand, to judge from the domestic ubiquity of the emperor's image, private cults to "good" living emperors are as likely in Rome as elsewhere and as Gradel observes, no Roman was ever prosecuted for sacrificing to his emperor.

Divus, deus and the numen

The place of the divi among state deities is far from clear. They had precedent in the di parentes, who were elevated to "godhead" by their sons and accorded ancestral rites, but dead ancestors, no matter how honoured, remained manes of the underworld. A mortal did not normally possess the divine power (numen), which according to Gradel "can also be synonymous with deus". Official divi were politico-religious creations. As long as the correct rituals and sacrifice were offered, the gods were obliged to receive them. What the divus was supposed to be or do in heaven was left to imagination, not theology. Popular belief held that the divus Augustus would be personally welcomed by Jupiter but in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis, the unexpected arrival of Claudius creates a problem for the Olympians. They have no idea who or what he is and when they find out, they cannot think what to do with him. Seneca's sarcastic wit - an unthinkable impiety towards a deus - freely portrays the divus Claudius as just a dead, ridiculous and possibly quite bad emperor. Later Roman divi range from "dead but not guilty emperor" to "emperor of fond memory". Though their images were sacrosanct, the divi could be made, unmade or simply forgotten. Augustus and Trajan appear to have remained the ideals for longer than any, and cult to "good" divi appears to have lasted well into the late Imperial dominate. In Rome's state cult, deceased divi were not credited with "personal" divine power - this was reserved for their divine patrons - but they may have functioned as intercessors.

Official cult to the genius of the living princeps was a lesser innovation than the principate itself. Once the princeps was acknowledged as paterfamilias to an Empire, he was entitled to genius cult from his familia. The cult to his numen was quite another matter and might be interpreted as no less than a statement of divine monarchy. Imperial responses to its first overtures were extremely cautious. Much later, the living emperor Caracalla could be openly described as numen praesens (the numinous presence).

The obscure relationship between deus, divus and numen in Imperial cult might simply reflect its origins as a pragmatic, respectful and somewhat evasive Imperial solution. For Beard et al, a practicable and universal Roman cult of deified emperors and others of the Imperial house must have hinged on the paradox that a mortal might - like the semi-divine "heroic" figures of Hercules, Aeneas and Romulus - possess sufficient measure of numen to rise above their mortal condition and be in the company of the gods, yet remain mortal in the eyes of Roman traditionalists.

Res divinae, res humanae and religio

Main article: Res divina

In the Late Republican era, Cicero speculated in Stoic terms on a distinction between res divina ("divine matters"), which were spiritual and godly, and res humanae ("human affairs"), which were material and temporal. Balancing intellectual skepticism with his role as augur and senator, Cicero concludes that it is better to honour the gods, even if there is no incontrovertible evidence of their existence. Religio was a matter of transactional reciprocity (do ut des, "I give, that you may give"), and piety was a system of offering honors and receiving benefactions. State religion provided a bridge between the divine will and the ordering of human affairs, with the city as earthly home to the gods and the center of Roman order. Public religion at Rome incorporated local and regional cults from the earliest period; as the empire expanded, gods and cults of both allies and the conquered were imported. The simultaneous preservation and subordination of others' religions facilitated unity under Rome rule and fostered mutual religious tolerance within the hierarchy.

Sacrificium

Main article subheading: Sacrifice

"Sacred offerings" (sacrificium) formed the contract of public and private religio, from oaths of office, treaty and loyalty to business contracts and marriage. Participation in sacrificium acknowledged personal commitment to the broader community and its values, which under Decian became a compulsory observance. Religious law focused on the sacrificial requirements of particular deities on specific occasions. Livy believed that military and civil disasters were the consequence of error (vitium) in augury, neglect of due and proper sacrifice and the impious proliferation of "foreign" cults.

In Julio-Claudian Rome, the Arval priesthood sacrificed to Roman state gods at various temples for the continued welfare of the Imperial family on their birthdays, accession anniversaries and to mark extraordinary events such as the quashing of conspiracy or revolt. On January 3 they consecrated the annual vows: sacrifice promised in the previous year was paid, as long as the gods had kept the Imperial family safe for the contracted time. If not, it could be withheld, as it was in the annual vow following the death of Trajan. In Pompeii, the genius of the living emperor was offered a bull: presumably a standard practise in Imperial cult. In later cult, minor and bloodless offerings (incense and wine) were also made.

Augury, pax deorum and ira deorum

Main article: Augur

Octavian's honorific title of Augustus indicated his achievements as expressions of divine will. Obedience to divine ordinance brought divine peace (pax deorum). Impiety provoked heavenly disorder and wrath (ira deorum). In Roman tradition, presiding magistrates sought divine opinion of proposed actions through an augur, who read the divine will through the observation of natural signs in the sacred space (templum) of sacrifice. Magistrates could use their right of augury (ius augurum) to adjourn and overturn the process of law, but were obliged to base their decision of the observations and advice of the auger. For Cicero, this made the augur the most powerful authority in the Late Republic.

In the later Republic, augury came under the supervision of the college of pontifices, a priestly-magistral office whose powers were increasingly woven into the cursus honorum. The office of pontifex maximus eventually became a de facto consular office. When the consul Lepidus died, his office as pontifex maximus passed to Augustus, who took priestly control over the State oracles (including the Sibylline books), and used his powers as censor to suppress unapproved oracles.

Genius and "household" cults

The mos maiorum established the near-monarchic authority of the paterfamilias ("the father of the family"), his obligations to family and community and his priestly duties to his lares and domestic penates. His family (including slaves and freedmen) owed a reciprocal duty of cult to his genius.

Genius was the guiding spirit and generative power within an individual and their clan (gens (pl. gentes), such as the Julli ("Julians") of Julius Caesar and - by adoption - of Augustus. The genius of emperors expressed the will of the gods through Imperial actions. In 30 BCE, libation-offerings to the genius of Octavian (later Augustus) became a duty at public and private banquets, and from 12 BCE, state oaths were sworn by the genius of the living emperor.

The paterfamilias offered daily cult to the lares, and penates as "domestic" shades of the departed, and to the di parentes/divi parentes, in the fires of the household hearth. During the 1st century BCE, these semi-divinities were increasingly personalised and venerated. As goddess of hearths, Vesta's cult was thus both a "public" and "private" duty, supervised by the pontifex maximus from a state-owned house near the temple of Vesta. In Vergil's Aeneid, Aeneas brought the Trojan cult of the lares and penates from Troy, along with the Palladium which was later installed in the temple of Vesta. When Augustus became pontifex maximus in 12 BCE he gave the Vestals his own house on the Palatine. His penates remained there as its domestic deities, and were soon joined by his lares. His gift therefore tied his domestic cult to the sanctified Vestals and Rome's sacred hearth.

The traditional familia structure and rites of adoption helped develop and justify Imperial cult despite often violent changes of dynasty, and the affairs of the Imperial domus were accounted in deliberations for and against apotheosis - against, because like any other domus, the Imperial household might be seen as a potential hotbed of sexual immorality, disloyalty, unhealthy role-reversal (such as the "henpecked" paterfamilias or disobedient children), and outright conspiracy.

Imperial cult in the military

The praetorians stood to gain immensely from their unique proximity and personal loyalty to the emperor and proved a source of anxiety for the people, senate and emperors alike. Where the senate and people must rely on due process of law and Imperial permissions, the praetorians could create, support or remove the head of state. Tiberius' praetorian prefect Sejanus appears to have approached the legions for support in his alleged plot and Suetonius implicates his replacement Macro in Tiberius' death. Septimius' preatorian prefect Plautianus, "the clarissimus praetorian prefect and our kinsman" was executed after an alleged attempted coup. Whatever the truth of these accusations, Praetorian prefects exercised dangerously charismatic influence. For Sejanus and Plautianus this may have extended to their own cult: both were certainly included in the annual vows to the Imperial familia.

Despite the Augustan reforms, the citizen legionaries appear to have maintained their Marian traditions. With customary staid obedience, they gave cult to Jupiter for the emperor's well-being and regular cult to State, local and personal divinities. Cult to the Imperial person and familia was generally held on Imperial accessions, anniversaries and renewal of annual vows: a bust of the ruling emperor was kept in the legionary insignia shrine and attended by the designated military imaginifer. By the time of the early Severans, the legions offered cult to the state gods, the Imperial divi, the current emperor's numen, genius and domus (or familia), and special cult to the Empress as "mother of the camp"

Altars and temples

In Fishwick's analysis, cult to Roman state divi was associated with temples, and cult to the genius of the living emperor was offered at his altar. In both cases, the image of the emperor focused attention on his person and attributes, and its siting within the sacred precinct underlined his position in the divine and human hierarchies. Expenditure on the physical expression of Imperial cult was vast, and was only curbed by the Imperial crisis of the 3rd century. As far as is known, no new temples to state divi were built after the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

Saviours and monotheists

Greek philosophies had significant influence in the development of Imperial cult. Stoic cosmologists saw history as an endless cycle of destruction and renewal, driven by fortuna, fatum and logos. The same forces inevitably produced a sôter (saviour) who would transform the destructive and "unnatural disorder" of chaos and strife to pax, fortuna and salus, and is thus identified with solar cults such as Apollo and Sol Invictus. Livy (in the early to mid 1st century BCE), and Lucan (in the 1st century CE) interpreted the crises of the late Republic as a destructive phase which led to religious and constitutional "renewal" by Augustus and his restoration of "good fortune", safety and peace. Augustus was therefore a "messianic" figure who personally and rationally instigated a "golden age" - the pax Augusta. Augustus was officially identified with a range of solar deities as patron, priest and protege.

Contemporary Jewish sources on Emperors, polytheistic cult and the meaning of Empire are fraught with interpretive difficulties. In Caligula's reign, Jews resisted the placing of Caligula's statue in their Temple and pleaded their compliance with his cult through offerings and prayer to Yahweh on his behalf. According to Philo, Caligula was unimpressed because the offering was not made directly to him (whether to his genius or his numen is never made clear) but the statue was never installed. Philo does not challenge the Imperial cult itself: he commends the god-like honours given Augustus as "the first and the greatest and the common benefactor" but Caligula shames the Imperial tradition by acting "like an Egyptian".

Long before the civil war, Jews and Judaism had been tolerated in Rome by diplomatic treaty with Graeco-Judaean rulers. Judaism was brought to new prominence and deeper scrutiny after Judaea's enrollment as a client kingdom following Pompey's siege of Jerusalem in 63 BCE. The diaspora that followed may have laid pathways of community for dispersal of early "Judaic" Christianity. In the second half of the 1st century CE, Judaism's highly developed textual tradition would offer a model for the propagation of Pauline Christianity's distinctively "non-Jewish" literary-religious narrative.

After the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (and most of the city) in the first Jewish revolt, Hadrian rebuilt both in Greek style, dedicated the rebuilt Temple (in Dio's account) to Jupiter, renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and sought a ban on circumcision as impious disfigurement. Jewish resentment erupted in the Bar Kokhba revolt, which completely overwhelmed the Roman military occupation and destabilised much of the Empire. For almost three years, Judea was an independent state, led by the "messianic" commander Simon Bar Kokhba. Then it was obliterated by the Imperial armies. Christians described their persecution under Bar Kokhba. Jews described theirs in its aftermath at the hands of "pagans" and Christians alike. Bar Kokhba's initial success and ultimate catastrophic failure had far-reaching effects. Jewish messianism retreated into abstraction, and a Jewish nation-state became an ideal. Christians were less inclined to identify with the Judaic roots of their religion: some actively repudiated them. Hadrian erased Judea from the Roman map by renaming it Syria Palaestina.

The Imperial cult and Christianity

...You should never permit gold or silver images of yourself to be made... Neither should you ever permit the raising of a temple to you... For it is virtue that raises many men to the level of gods, and no man ever became a god by popular vote. Hence, if you are upright as a man and honourable as a ruler, the whole earth will be your hallowed precinct, all cities your temples, and all men your statues, since within their thoughts you will ever be enshrined and glorified. Therefore, if you desire to become in very truth immortal, act as I advise; and, furthermore, do you not only yourself worship the divine Power everywhere and in every way in accordance with the traditions of our fathers, but compel all others to honour it. Maecenas' address to Augustus: idealised advice to an idealised Emperor, written by Cassius Dio, Proconsul under the Severans during the rise of Christianity.

Dio's problem is not the Augustan principate, but what it has become under Septimius, Commodus and their successors. His criticism is necessarily oblique: to an honourable, virtuous emperor the panoply of cult should be worthless. Might Rome and its emperors might have been better without it? Like others before him, Dio cannot explain the relationship between Rome, her emperors and gods. He can only advise his emperor to maintain traditional piety and if necessary enforce it on others. In marked contrast, St. Matthew provides the clearest possible statement of how these things should stand for a Christian:

"Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s" (Matthew.22.19)

Christianity had ample need and opportunity to develop theological and philosophical responses to the enveloping apparatus of Roman Imperium. Under the reign of Nero or Domitian, the author of the Book of Revelation could represent Rome as the "Beast from the sea", Judaeo-Roman elites as the "Beast from the land" and the charagma (official Roman stamp) as a sign of the Beast. Christians of a later period could point out the providential timing of Christ's birth, at the very beginning of the Empire that brought peace and laid paths for the spread of the Gospels: the same Empire had destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple to punish the Jews for refusing Christ. .

In comparison, "pagan Imperial theology" remained static, undeveloped and unable to offer effective refutation. Pliny the Younger's report on Christian practice in Pontus (Asia Minor) described is as "a degenerate superstitio carried to extravagant lengths", but otherwise - to his apparent surprise - inoffensive to law and public morality. For Tacitus, it was an evil, novel kind of superstitio based on the teachings of an executed Jewish criminal and must be forcefully suppressed. It seemed to infect the lowly and marginal - women and slaves (the essential and potentially unstable heart of the domus), landless labourers, and the urban poor (the populus mobile) who could always be tempted into conspiracy.

Encounters between Roman cult officials and early Christian thinkers show their mutual incomprehensibility and antipathy. Compulsory sacrifice under Decius represented loyalty to the broad polytheistic sweep of Roman tradition and the diverse unity of its Empire. Refusal was treasonous. Christians identified "Hellenistic honours" as parodies of true "worship". With the abatement of persecution, Jerome could acknowledge Empire as a bulwark against evil but insist that "imperial honours" were contrary to Christian teaching. His was a minority voice: most Christians showed no qualms in the veneration of even "pagan" emperors. The peace of the emperors was the peace of the church and of God. Internal dissent and schism were a far greater problem, in which Constantine's intervention proved a masterstroke. As pontifex maximus he favoured the "Catholic Church of the Christians" because:

it is contrary to the divine law... that we should overlook such quarrels and contentions, whereby the Highest Divinity may perhaps be roused not only against the human race but also against myself, to whose care he has by his celestial will committed the government of all earthly things. Official letter from Constantine, dated 314 CE.

In this change of Imperial formula, Constantine officially recognised his responsibilities to an earthly realm whose discord and conflict might arouse the ira deorum, but recognised the power of the new Christian priestly hierarchy in determining what was (in traditional Roman terms) auspicious - or in Christian terms, what was orthodox.

Legacy

The function and nature of the Imperial cult remains contentious. Roman historians variously employed it as a topos for Imperial worth and Imperial hubris. It has been interpreted as an essentially foreign, Graeco-Eastern institution, imposed cautiously and with some difficulty upon a Latin-Western Roman culture in which the deification of rulers was alien, if not obnoxious. In this viewpoint, the essentially servile and "un-Roman" Imperial cult was established at the expense of the traditional Roman ethics which had sustained the Republic and inevitably weakened the institutions it was meant to sustain. For Christians and secularists alike, it represented the ultimate spiritual and moral bankruptcy of paganism which led to the triumph of Christianity as Rome's state religion. Very few modern historians would now support this point of view.

Imperial cult emerged from a long period of civil instability and strife, and appealed directly to the Republican mos maiorum. Some historians - among them Beard et al - reject "Imperial cult" as a distinct category within the religio-political life of Empire. Cult to living or dead emperors was an adjunct of state religion, as commonplace and unremarkable as cult to other deities. Its significance to ordinary Romans is almost entirely lost in the critical interpretations of philosophically literate Romans and Greeks, whether Christian or Hellene.

Cult to emperors served the hierarchal unity of the state. It was actively and successfully fostered by Imperial authorities to legitimise their rule in times of instability, rather than foist on a culturally unsympathetic populace. With rare exceptions this was a successful policy, because cult in the provinces - as in Rome - was founded within existing local traditions and focused on the Emperor and the meaning of Empire according to local interpretations of romanitas. Until its confrontation by fully developed Christian orthodoxy, it needed no systematic or coherent theology. Its part in Rome's continued success was sufficient to justify, sanctify and "explain" it to most Romans. Constantine matched the Augustan achievement by absorbing Christian monotheism into the Imperial hierarchy. The traditional religions which preceded and then included the Imperial cult also laid the political and administrative foundations for later Christian institutions.

References and further reading

• Ando, Clifford, Imperial ideology and provincial loyalty in the Roman Empire, illustrated, University of California Press, 2000. ISBN 0520220676
• Beard, M., Price, S., North, J., Religions of Rome: Volume 1, a History, illustrated, Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0521316820
• Beard, M., Price, S., North, J., Religions of Rome: Volume 2, a sourcebook, illustrated, Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0521456460
• Beard, Mary: The Roman Triumph,The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England, 2007. (hardcover). ISBN 9780674026131
• Bowersock, G., Brown, P. R .L., Graba, O., (eds), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, Harvard University Press (1999) ISBN 9780674511736
• Bowman, A., Cameron, A., Garnsey, P., (eds) The Cambridge Ancient History: Volume 12, The Crisis of Empire, AD 193-337, 2nd Edn., Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0521301998
• Brent, A., The imperial cult and the development of church order: concepts and images of authority in paganism and early Christianity before the Age of Cyprian, 1999, illustrated, BRILL, ISBN 9004114203
• Cannadine, D., and Price, S., (eds) Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, reprint, illustrated, Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN 0521428912
• Chow, John K., Patronage and power: a study of social networks in Corinth, Continuum International Publishing Group, 1992. ISBN 1850753709
• Collins, Adela Yarbro, Crisis and catharsis: the power of the Apocalypse, Westminster John Knox Press, 1984. ISBN 0664245218
• Elsner, J., "Cult and Sculpture; Sacrifice in the Ara Pacis Augustae", in the Journal of Roman Studies, 81, 1991, 50-60.
• Ferguson, Everett, Backgrounds of early Christianity, 3rd edition, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0802822215
• Fishwick , Duncan. The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, volume 1, 1991, BRILL. ISBN 9004071792
• Fishwick , Duncan. The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, volume 3, 2002, BRILL. ISBN 9004125361
• Gradel, Ittai. Emperor Worship and Roman Religion, Oxford (Oxford University Press), 2002. ISBN 0198152752
• Haase, W., Temporini, H., (eds), Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt, de Gruyter, 1991. ISBN 3110103893
• Harland, P., "Honours and Worship: Emperors, Imperial Cults and Associations at Ephesus (First to Third Centuries C.E.)", originally published in Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses 25, 1996. Online in same pagination:[31]
• Harland, P., "Imperial Cults within Local Cultural Life: Associations in Roman Asia", originally published in Ancient History Bulletin / Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 17, 2003. Online in same pagination: [32]
• Howgego, C., Heuchert, V., Burnett, A., (eds), Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces, Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 9780199265268
• Lee, A.D., Pagans and Christians in late antiquity: a sourcebook, illustrated, Routledge, 2000. ISBN 0415138922
• Martin, Dale B., Inventing superstition: from the Hippocratics to the Christians, Harvard University Press, 2004. ISBN 0674015347
• Morton, Jamie, The role of the physical environment in ancient Greek seafaring, 2001, illustrated, BRILL. ISBN 9004117172
• Niehoff, Maren R., Philo on Jewish identity and culture, Mohr Siebeck, English trans GW/Coronet Books, 2001. ISBN 9783161476112
• Price, S.R.F. Rituals and power: the Roman imperial cult in Asia Minor, 1986, (reprint, illustrated). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052131268X
• Rehak, Paul, and Younger, John Grimes, Imperium and cosmos: Augustus and the northern Campus Martius, illustrated, University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. ISBN 0299220109
• Rosenstein, Nathan S., Imperatores Victi: Military Defeat and Aristocractic Competition in the Middle and Late Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. [33]
• Momigliano, Arnaldo, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, reprint, Wesleyan University Press, 1987. ISBN 0819562181
• Severy, Beth, Augustus and the family at the birth of the Roman Empire, 2003, Routledge. ISBN 041530959X
• Smallwood,E. Mary, The Jews under Roman rule: from Pompey to Diocletian : a study in political relations, 2001, illustrated, BRILL. ISBN 039104155X
• Theuws, Frans, and Nelson, Janet L., Rituals of power: from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, 2000, BRILL. ISBN 9004109021
• Vout, Caroline, Power and eroticism in Imperial Rome, illustrated, Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 0521867398
• Weinstock, Stefan. Divus Iulius. Oxford (Clarendon Press/OUP). 1971.
• Wiedemann, Thomas. Adults and Children in the Roman Empire, Taylor & Francis Ltd. ISBN 9780415003360