The Evolution of Emperor Worship

As you may have read a few weeks ago, Augustus Caesar was the first Emperor, whose authority was more of a subtle, de facto kind of rule, rather than the flamboyance of his descendants. He was also the first person to introduce the concept of a living divine leader into Roman politics, which had for almost five hundred years avoided deifying their leaders, unlike the Greeks and Egyptians. When Julius Caesar was deified post mortem by a guilty Senate, Augustus wasted no time in adding “son of god” to his list of many titles. As such, people were much more hesitant to go against him, for fear that their anger at his naked power grabbing might be perceived as impiety by the masses who adored him.

This is not to say that the Romans were all Agnostic pragmatists before Augustus Caesar, far from it. Many a popular assembly was disrupted or canceled because some appointed Pontifex claimed ill omens, signs which only seemed to appear when the assembly favored policies which the Senate opposed. Sometimes, this was seen for the crass undemocratic interruption that it was, but other times it succeeded.

Gaius Marius claimed to have found an eagle's nest with seven baby chicks in it – a large number of baby eagles for a single nest. He and his followers claimed that this was a sign from the gods that he was meant to serve seven terms as Consul, something that helped to sway Plebeian support for the unorthodox multiple terms that he served. The people of Rome recognized, for better or worse, that there was a law higher than the Roman codes.

Augustus took things a step further by claiming to be God's son, since God was Julius Caesar. By endowing himself with divine status, confirmed by the Senate's own apotheosis, he set the stage for the later Emperors and the Popes after them to claim infallibility. He also removed a key element to becoming a deity within his culture: dying. He was to his people a living, breathing divine entity, capable of bringing great good to his allies and terrible wrath upon his enemies.

It is really no wonder that this sort of thing got carried way too far by those who came after. It wasn't long before people were required to burn incense to the images of the sitting Emperor in order to enter local marketplaces as far away as Palestine and Asia Minor. But even deification couldn't save some Emperors from disfavor and assassination, as it seems even Roman piety had its limits.

Pax vobiscum