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

The Ultimate Sacrifice

This story from the Greek oral tradition stands out as one of the most heinous crimes of the Trojan War. King Agamemnon made a foolish boast against Artemis after shooting a stag through the heart with a single arrow. She cursed his upcoming expedition against Troy unless he made a sacrifice: his eldest daughter Iphegenia. He obliged, and the war was ultimately successful, but the cruel king himself was murdered when he returned home by avenging family members. There is a similar story in the Bible's Old Testament centering around Jephtha, a Charismatic Judge who swore to sacrifice the first creature that approached him when he returned home if God would grant him a victory over the Philistines. The first creature was his daughter, whom he sacrificed to Yahweh, an event that stands completely alone in Judeo-Christian scriptures. The Greeks, Hebrews, and Romans had come to feel that human sacrifice was wrong by the 500's BCE or before, and kept it out of their worship, exiling it to their oral traditions as cautionary tales rather than promotional stories.

All this is to say that the Phoenicians were not alone in sacrificing people to their gods, but they were getting lonelier when they extended that practice into the early 100's CE. Carthage was the most powerful of the old Phoenician colonies, and by the 300's BCE its power was slowly being crushed under the weight of political corruption and a vacuum in leadership. Having almost no native military power because of their tendency to hire foreign mercenaries to do their fighting, they could only appeal to their gods when Scipio Africanus was at their gates.

The Phoenician deities were of a much older variety than the Greco-Roman gods, being much more like the savage Titans than the diplomatic Olympians. Ba'al was their chief deity, and his very name is derived from the Semitic word El, which means god, and is used in Hebrew words like El Shaddai or Elohim, referring to Yahweh and his angels. His partner goddess was Tanit, whose symbol included a crescent moon and star not unlike the modern Islamic symbol. The Romans identified Ba'al as Saturn, the father of Jupiter who had been usurped by the Olympians years ago, and it seems likely that they factored this into their ideas of superiority to the Carthaginians.

To me, the evidence of child sacrifice in Carthage is very clear. There are mass graves filled with children whose bones have been charred by sacrificial fire. Those who try and make the case that the children had already died of some disease or natural cause before being cremated are ignoring the fact that no evidence of any disease has been found among the remaining bones. I know very well the desire to demonize the Romans and try to rewrite history based on how we would have liked it, but the facts are the facts, and I see no benefit to these attempts at making the Carthaginians into something they are not.

In the cult of Ba'al, children were sacrificed to gain special favor from the gods. The idea was that only blood could show your true devotion to the gods' fame, and what better way to show your true devotion than giving your own child? The Romans and Greeks certainly were no strangers to the idea of blood sacrifice, often killing bulls, birds, and other animals in acts of worship and for divination, but human sacrifice of any kind had long since been outlawed by the Punic Wars.

That is not to say that the Carthaginians always sacrificed their own children. There are accounts (from 800 BCE) of aristocrats buying slave children to sacrifice in place of their own, but in times of famine, war, and hardship the priests would encourage parents to give their youngest child to the fires of Ba'al. Ba'al was associated with the sun, and by extension, fire, which is why the children were killed with a ceremonial knife before being thrown into the blaze.

One bit of evidence that often escapes Carthaginian apologists is the account of young Hannibal joining his father for a campaign in Iberia. It is written that he begged his father repeatedly to join him, and that his father, bitter from the recent defeats in the First Punic War, agreed to take Hannibal only if he would swear an oath against friendship with Rome. Hannibal responded by placing his arm over a nearby open firepit and swearing that he would use fire and steel to arrest the destiny of Rome. While this story is probably mostly fiction, it displays a practice that seems logical for a people who worship a god of fire. What better way to swear an oath by such a god than by allowing the fire to singe you just a little bit to prove your devotion?

No matter how antiquated or barbaric it seems to us, sacrificing animals to appease gods can certainly be said to contribute to the later spread of Christianity, which presented Christ, the sinless man who served as a blood sacrifice for all who believe.

Pax vobiscum