How Roman Emperors Became Gods

Author(s): ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO

Source: The American Scholar, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Spring 1986), pp. 181-193
Published by: The Phi Beta Kappa Society
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 How Roman Emperors
Became Gods
ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO

BING, THE DIRECTOR OF THE WARBURG INSTITUTE, used

GERTRUD to tell with great gusto a story that apparently has not found its way
into the biography of Aby Warburg by Ernst Gombrich. Bing happened
to be in Rome with Warburg, the founder and patron saint of the
Warburg Institute, on that day, February 11, 1929, on which Mussolini
and the Pope proclaimed the reconciliation between Italy and the
Catholic Church and signed a concordat, the first bilateral agreement to
be reached between post-Risorgimento Italy and the Church of Rome.
There were in Rome tremendous popular demonstrations, whether
orchestrated from above or from below. Mussolini became overnight the
"man of providence," and in such an inconvenient position he remained
for many years. Circulation in the streets of Rome was not very easy on
that day, and it so happened that Warburg disappeared from the sight of
his companions. They anxiously waited for him back in the Hotel Eden,
but there was no sign of him for dinner. Bing and the others even
telephoned the police. But Warburg reappeared in the hotel before
midnight, and when he was reproached he soberly replied something
like this in his picturesque German: "You know that throughout my life I
have been interested in the revival of paganism and pagan festivals.
Today I had the chance of my life to be present at the re-paganization of
Rome, and you complain that I remained to watch it."
Warburg's remarks may help to explain to people younger than
myself why some of the most original work on the Roman imperial cult
should have been done around the years 1929-34 in that ambiguous
atmosphere of the revival of emperor- worship in which it was difficult to
separate adulation from political emotion, and political emotion from
religious or superstitious excitement. E. J. Bickerman's seminal essay on
apotheosis appeared in 1929; L. R. Taylor's great book Divinity of the
Roman Emperor in 1931; A. Alfoldi's on the monarchic ceremonial in
1934; several of A. D. Nock's capital studies on the imperial cult and

O ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO, the distinguished historian, is professor emeritus at

University College, London; Alexander White Professor at the University of Chicago; and
Professore Ordinario, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. His latest English books are Studies
in Historiography and New Paths of Classicism in the Nineteenth Century.

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

related notions between 1930 and 1934, including his chapter in Cam-
bridge Ancient History X of 1934.
If one looks at these studies now, it is easy to notice two not
necessarily contradictory features. On the one hand, the authors are keen
to show how the imperial cult was grafted into the traditional patterns of
Greco-Roman religion. On the other hand, they are trying to keep the
imperial cult below and perhaps outside the zone of true religion. We
owe to A. D. Nock the much-repeated formulation that the emperor's
cult was homage, not worship. As James Frazer's Golden Bough had
made everyone familiar with primitive divine kings, the distinction
between homage and worship was therefore meant to define the differ-
ence between the alleged primitive confusion of god with king and this
later more sophisticated Greco-Roman phenomenon of ruler-cult. For
good or ill the imperial cult was seen as a symptom of absolutism and
treated more as an expression of political allegiance than of religious
emotion. This, incidentally, allowed scholars divided between their
Fascist sympathies and their religious convictions, such as A. Alfldi and
J. Carcopino, to avoid religious problems.
A marked reaction against the political interpretation of the imperial
cult was to be expected in the post-Fascist era, and at last we have it. If
anything is surprising, it is that it has taken so long to come, but we
classical scholars are notoriously slow-witted. A number of anthropologi-
cally minded scholars, taking their cue from the anthropological work of
Clifford Geertz - for instance in his essay "Centers, Kings and Charisma:
Reflections on the Symbols of Power" - have been arguing that to deny
the religious value of the imperial cult is equivalent to taking a
Christianizing view of religion.
I find the first clear expression of this view in the well-argued chapter
on the divine emperors in the 1978 volume Conquerors and Slaves by
Keith Hopkins. The most recent and complete expression is the book by
Simon Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia
Minor (1984), which has deservedly received much favorable attention.
But beyond this theoretical display, which has become characteristic of
classical scholars in fear of not being sufficiently up-to-date, there is the
serious purpose of discovering the meaning of the imperial cult by
analyzing the acts and the words that were the substance of the cult.
Much of Price's work is concerned with making sense of the com-
bination of public space and private time that characterizes the perform-
ance of the imperial cult. While the various monuments in honor of the
emperor placed him "within the physical framework of the city,"
according to Price, individual or group initiative conditioned the forms,
frequency, and emotional intensity of the cult in each place. This is
particularly evident in small communities, even villages, where the

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 HOW ROMAN EMPERORS BECAME GODS

imperial cult is often found associated with ancestral gods. But perhaps
the need for personal initiative is most clearly demonstrated by those
places in which the imperial cult is absent, simply because the local
people were not Hellenized enough to want it. The concluding chapter
of Price's book is a very valuable attempt to explain the imperial cult as
an effort by the Greeks to make sense of "an otherwise incomprehensi-
ble intrusion of authority into their world."
The imperial cult, in Price's terms, stabilized the religious order of
the Greek world. As the imperial cult enhanced the dominance of local
elites over the lower classes, it was also a reaffirmation of the structure of
local power that was then coordinated at city level with the symbolism of
the imperial cult This is what Clifford Geertz would call the inherent
sacredness of sovereign power. In Geertz's words: "The gravity of high
politics and the solemnity of high worship spring from liker impulses
than might first appear." Clifford Geertz himself had an easy time
finding confirmation not only in Java, which he likes and knows so well,
but in Elizabethan England, in nineteenth-century Morocco, and in
American presidential elections.
In fact, however, the real difficulty we feel in interpreting the Greco-
Roman monarchic or ruler-cult is not now about questions of relations
between religion and politics. I think we can cope with these without
much trouble. In our contemporary world there is no lack of politically
religious emotions or of religiously political emotions; and it is our
personal responsibility as rational beings to decide whether we want
these emotions to prevail. What the Greco-Roman world contributes to
our education, or at least to our experience, is that such tangled emotions
had been kept remarkably under control for some centuries by both
Greeks and Romans. For a long time the Greeks and Romans did without
monarchy or at least divine monarchy. Even in Sparta the kings were not
gods. In the Greece w^ know from the seventh to the fourth century b.c.,
political power was in the hands of magistrates who were elected in
assemblies by their peers. Even tyrants had to receive legitimization
from assemblies. In Rome, monarchy disappeared toward the end of the
sixth century. Whatever this monarchy might have been, it was not
remembered as a monarchy by divine right. Why, then, was divine
monarchy resurrected in Greece and Rome in an- age of philosophic
discussion about th nature of the gods and about the place of men in the
world? The imperial cult prospered at a time in which a philosophically
minded doctor like Galen argued that true piety is not to be found in
bloody sacrifices to gods but in the study of nature. And how could a
monarch be at the same time a man and a god, and more precisely, in
Rome, a magistrate and a god?
I am not sure that I know the answer to these questions. But in the

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

following pages I shall try to argue a partial answer on the presupposi-

tion that people were finding it easy to call exceptionally powerful men
gods because they were, losing faith in the existence, or at least in the
effectiveness, of their traditional gods. One has to add, about the Roman
Empire, that these powerful men were aliens importing powerful alien
ideas and institutions, such as Roman citizenship and Roman peace. Not
by chance was the worship of Roman emperors associated with that of
Roman abstract ideas like Fides or Pax or Roma herself turned into a
goddess. In the provinces, the Roman rulers were the importers of an
alien system of values and habits that did not contradict, and might even
support, the extant polytheistic establishment. The association of an
obviously powerful emperor with gods whose power was not so obvious
might well reassure the believers in those gods.

II

There was a notion of the hero among the Greeks that connected (in
an obscure way for us but, no doubt, more clearly for the Greeks) the
zone of the gods with the zone of men. The heroes were dead men of
special value whose tombs received the tribute of some sort of cult. The
Spartans chose Orestes as a hero, and the Thebans imported the bones of
Hector for that purpose - and of course the Athenians had Theseus and
Oedipus. The presence of the bodies of such men was considered a
blessing for the place. Real or imaginary founders of a city were naturally
entitled to such tomb-worship by the city concerned. That the range was
vast is indicated by the example of the Spartan Brasidas who, in 422 b.c.,
was rewarded with a cult of this kind at Amphipolis, where he had died
defending the interests of Sparta. We may also remind ourselves that at
the beginning of the fifth century the mad boxer Cleomedes, according
to Pausanias, received such a cult at Astypalaia after having mysteriously
disappeared in a homicidal bout. The Delphic priestess proclaimed him
"the last of the heroes. . . . Honour him with sacrifices as being no longer
a mortal/' As Thucydides confirms, games and yearly sacrifices were the
most obvious forms of cult for heroes.
But though Cleomedes was by no means to remain the last of the
heroes, the Delphic priestess intimated more than she could know with
that adjective last. In the fourth century the notion of hero lost in
importance compared with that of divine man or indeed of man recog-
nized to be god. It is an essential aspect of the ruler-cult in Hellenistic
and Roman times that it develops this notion of divine man and is not
founded upon the notion of hero. One excellent reason, among others, is
that the ruler-cult, though interested in past rulers, was basically
oriented toward living sovereigns: it was meant to explain, justify, and

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 HOW ROMAN EMPERORS BECAME GODS

recognize present, not past, power. If the oracle of Delphi, according to

Herodotus, had difficulty in deciding whether Lycurgus, a legislator in
Sparta, was a man or a god, fourth-century people seem to have had less
difficulty in deciding that the Spartan Lysander, having destroyed the
Athenian empire, deserved in his lifetime altars like a god, a hymn
(paean) sung to him, and the transformation of a festival for the goddess
Hera into a festival for Lysander (the Lysandreia). Attempts were made
to adapt the notion of a dead hero to a living man; for instance, Dio of
Syracuse was considered to be a hero while alive.
But the trend was toward blurring the distinction between man and
god. Thus King Philip, the father of Alexander, got a sanctuary at
Olympia while alive and a statue to keep company with the statues of the
Twelve Olympian Gods. We have here the transition to the frank
demand in 324 by Alexander the Great that the Grek cities should
recognize him as a god. We do not know exactly what his envoys said,
and even less what the poor Greek cities actually answered. We do not
even know whether Demosthenes was talking tongue in cheek when he
suggested leaving to Alexander the choice between being the son of
Zeus or the son of Poseidon. We happen to know that the sons of
Poseidon did not enjoy a very good reputation, but the text that reports
Demosthenes' words - Hyperides' speech against Demosthenes - is
badly fragmented at this point. Perhaps what matters most for our
purpose is that in ordinary parlance, both in Greece and in Rome, the
word god or godlike could be attached to a "man" without thinking
twice - in affection, in admiration, or in adulation. If Speusippus and
Cicero called Plato a god, Cicero could also call the father of P. Lentulus
"deum ac parentem fortunae et nominis mei," and of course Virgil says
in a private context* "namque erit ille mihi semper deus." After all, even
Epicurus could be a god to Lucretius.
Hellenistic kings had their dynastic cults in various forms, while
individual cities were able to introduce the cult of individual kings, not
necessarily their own rulers. Individuals were free to display loyalty
or gratitude by acts of cults to sovereigns. Acts of cult varied from
building temples and setting up statues to performing sacrifices and
organizing festivals; but perhaps sacrifices were the most obvious sign of
cult. There were territorial and local differences. In Pergamum they
seem to have built temples only to dead kings and to have treated living
kings as Synnaoi, as associates in a temple, of traditional gods. Synnaoi
to gods have been made famous by a classic piece of research by A. D.
Nock in Harvard Studies of 1930. Roman magistrates and governors soon
joined or replaced Hellenistic kings in the divine honors among Greek
and HeHenized people. A list of cults of Roman magistrates in Greek
cities is given by G. W. Bowersock in Augustus and the Greek World. It

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

begins with M. Claudius Marcellus in Syracuse at the end of the third

century b.c. and ends in the early first century a.D., oddly enough at
Miletus, in a cult for the governor of Egypt, Cn. Vergilius Capito. A cult
of a Roman magistrate could last three centuries, like that of Titus
Flamininus, who had the reputation of having proclaimed the freedom of
the Greeks, or could last only a few years, such as that of Sulla in Athens.
It is worth remembering that Cicero, though vain, firmly declined
worship when he was a provincial governor. During the time of Augus-
tus, the cult of Roman provincial governors disappeared to the exclusive
benefit of the cult of the emperor.
But the cult bestowed on the Roman governors in the Greek prov-
inces that they ruled or visited was not always a simple application of
Hellenistic ruler-cult. The Greeks, or rather some Greek city, put Dea
Roma among their gods; so did Smyrna, according to Tacitus, as early as
195 b.c. Fides was also acceptable to Greeks as a goddess personifying
Roman rule. Plutarch tells us in his account of Titus Flamininus that he
was invoked in a hymn at halkis together with Zeus or Jupiter, Roma
and Fides, and that, though he had his own priest, he shared a temple
with Herakles and Apollo. About the end of the second century b.c. three
cities of Asia Minor agreed not to harm the Romans and put this
agreement under the protection of Zeus, Concord, and Dea Roma.

Ill

If the intervention of Dea Roma and Fides shows that it was not
simply a question of Hellenistic ruler-cult transferred to Roman rulers,
we have also to take into account the existence in Rome itself in the last
centuries of the Republic of a need for legitimization of exceptional
power. The problem was bound to present itself as soon as the military
leaders and conquerors began to claim privileges that were incompatible
with the traditional aristocratic structure of the Roman Republic. Scipio
Africanus, like Alexander, was supposed to have been born from the
intercourse of his mother with a non-human being, a divine snake.
Another member of the gens Cornelia, Sulla, was Felix and a protg
of Venus, while his rival Marius received homage of food and drink in
Rome like a god. Caesar went beyond all of them, first because the Julii
claimed descent from Venus, and second because he received religious
honors before his death, the limits of which are in dispute, and full
deification after his death. In 45 b.c., while he was alive, his cult-statue
was placed in the temple of Quirinus with the inscription "To the
Invincible God." His dementia had a cult. That he was alive when he
was given a priest, a "flamen" in the person of Antony seems to be put
beyond doubt by Cicero in Philippics. Octavian, being Caesar's adopted

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 HOW ROMAN EMPERORS BECAME GODS

son, became divi filius in 42 b.c. For a while he had to compete with
Antony, who paraded as a new Dionysus in Athens and elsewhere. In
the East he was soon associated with the cult of Rome.
But Octavian was presenting himself as a restorer of the Roman
republican traditions. There was a limit to the divinity of an alleged
republican leader. In Rome itself, therefore, he was satisfied with being
the son of a god and being called Augustus, which was a borderline
qualification between heaven and earth. Besides, he was a protg of
Apollo. Yet forms of his cult crept in even in Rome through individuals
and groups: they were even more obvious in the rest of Italy and in the
Western provinces, not to speak of the East. On the Western side the cult
of the ruler's genius became especially acceptable. I wish we really
knew what a genius was, a sort of guardian angel, perhaps even mortal
like his possessor, if we have to follow Horace (Epist. 2,2,188).*
Generally speaking, the emperor had to approve, to limit, and
occasionally to refuse ruler-cult. He had to be worshipped, and yet he
had to remain a man in order to live on social terms with the Roman
aristocracy of which he was supposed to be the "Princeps." It suffices to
remember that, on the formal side, the emperor was also the "Pontifex
Maximus" of the Roman state: being both the first of the priests and a
god was not so obvious. Emperors who acquired a bad reputation, such
as Caligula, Nero, Domitian, and Commodus, are also those who, in our
tradition, appeared to have requested or received more than their decent
share of worship. Emperors had to decide at every step how far they
could go. They knew instinctively that what suited Egypt would not suit
Rome, but the intermediate stages were not self-evident. Cult after death
was perhaps easier: it had a recognized model in the apotheosis of
Romulus; it had something to do with ancestor cult; it had a Roman
ritual; it was easily acceptable everywhere as a sign of the stability and
continuity of the Empire. Yet even apotheosis, harmless as it was, could
provoke irony and criticism, as Seneca's Apocolocyntosis against the
divinization of Claudius shows.
It is probably fair to say that the emperor during his lifetime was
more of a god in his absence than in his presence, and that the success
(for success it was) of the imperial cult in the provinces was owing to the
presence with which it invested an absentee sovereign. His statues, his
temples, his priests, the games, sacrifices, and other ceremonial acts that
were performed in his honor helped to make him present: they also
helped people to express their own interest in the preservation of the
world in which they lived. We have an obvious difficulty in assessing
how distant the power of Rome appeared to the provincials. After all,
Rome was not a police state: internal security of towns was only
moderately ensured by the central government. The army was of course

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

very strong, but it was usually stationed at the boundaries of the Empire
and interfered little with city life. Solidarity was hardly created by war
efforts, except in emergencies. Tax collecting was a tangible, and
inevitably unpopular, reality: few can have been aware of what they got
in return for taxation. If the tribute was supposed to be for the emperor, it
would not improve the image of the emperor. Again, the emperor was
known to make laws and regulations and to answer petitions of various
kinds. The great amount of paperwork passing from center to periphery
and vice versa (about which we have now the learned work by Fergus
Millar) was not the kind that would strike the imagination and create
widespread loyalty. It was not in the language of the Roman adminis-
trative machine that people could express ambitions, pray for peace and
prosperity, or dream of victory and greatness, even if vicariously.
Occasionally no doubt, though very seldom, the emperor appeared.
His adventus, his arrival, would give scope for emotional outbursts and
even for miracles, as the case of Vespasian in Egypt shows. But the
adventus itself, to which I shall return, was already conditioned by the
recognized method of facing the Roman emperor while not seeing him,
which was the imperial cult. The adventus presupposed the imperial
cult, not vice versa. I leave out here certain technical difficulties that one
has to deal with in grasping the imperial cult - for instance, the types of
sacrifice that were available to the worshipper - though not indiscrimi-
nately. The imperial cult is fraught with terminological little traps. For
instance, though Greek makes a distinction between a real cult-statue,
an agalma, and an image with only complimentary implications, an
eikon, it is by no means evident that the distinction is invariably
observed and that, consequently, we know that a text alludes to a cult-
statue. But there is one aspect of the imperial cult that must be stressed
because it is essential. An element of its strength was paradoxically the
fact that it was not universally accepted. Indeed it was often imposed on
indifferent or reluctant subjects by zealous governors. The Acts of the
Christian Martyrs will soon remind us that there was an element of
brutal imposition in the imperial cult. Not everybody liked it. After all,
even Vespasian joked about becoming a god after death, and it was not a
cheerful joke.
Other intellectuals, among them Tacitus, spoke of the ruler-cult as
Graeca adulatio, and we may assume that the idea was shared by many
cultivated Greeks. In the third century a Greek historian such as Dio
Cassius could attribute to Maecenas a total condemnation of the imperial
cult. Apart from these intellectuals who were annoyed or who smiled at
the notion that a mortal became a god because of his office, there were of
course those who hated the Roman Empire or an individual emperor.
Most naturally, if something went wrong, portraits of the emperor,

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 HOW ROMAN EMPERORS BECAME GODS

whether agalmata or eikones, would be the first target, as the story of the
Four Emperors in a.d. 69 shows and the famous Antiochian riots of the
fourth century confirm. Second, there was an increasing number of
subjects of the Empire who had religious objections to the imperial cult.
They were the Jews and, soon, the growing number of Christians. The
Jews, especially after the attempt of Gaius to place his own statue in the
Temple of Jerusalem, were more or less exempt from direct cult: they
only prayed for the emperor. But, as the complicated story of the great
Jewish rebellions shows, this was not enough to keep the Roman
government pleased or the Jewish subjects quiet. The feeling that the
Jews did not deserve their privileges must have been widespread. As a
well-known passage in Mishnah, Abodah Zarah, 3, shows, statues were
felt by the Jews to be potential troubles. The problem was basically
the one we have mentioned: how would you recognize a cult-image if
you saw one? As for the Christians, there was no privilege for them.
The accusation that they did not worship the emperors - "deos non
colitis et pro imperatoribus sacrificia non penditis" - is for Tertullian
(Apologeticum 10) the standard accusation. The rest of the tradition
largely confirms his contention. It is unnecessary here to quote the well-
known texts, such as the letter of Pliny the Younger to Trajan (10,96), or
the most reliable Acts of the Martyrs, such as those of the Scyllitan
martyrs or of Pionius or of Polycarpus, where the test of loyalty to the
emperor is precisely the recognition of his cult.
After all, ordinary men took an oath to the emperor and his genius
even in private transactions. We all remember the poor Alexandrian
sailors who emotionally saluted the emperor, as Suetonius tells us: "per
ilium se vivere, per ilium navigare." The poor sailors knew about Roman
peace, if not about ruler-cult. But nothing is emotionally acceptable if it
does not provoke contrasts, and it can hardly be doubted that the
imperial cult gained from the existence of dubious characters, such as
the Jews and the Christians, outsiders whether by birth or by choice,
who did not worship the emperors. What happened to the imperial cult
when the Christians conquered the Empire under Constantine and
turned the tables on the pagans and the Jews is a story to which I shall
soon return.
For now let me add that other sectional differences contributed to the
imperial cult. The slaves who were entitled by law to take refuge near
the statue of an emperor to protest against ill-treatment by their master or
his injunction to prostitute themselves had their own emotional interest
in the sacredness of these imperial statues. On the other hand, even a
governor could seek refuge near the statue of his emperor when he was
persecuted by rioters who wanted to burn him alive. (The story is told by
Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius ofTyana - 1,15.) Rich people, as

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

we know from so many inscriptions, found satisfaction in erecting their

monuments in honor of the emperor. As there was scope for individual
fancies and combinations, each donor had reasonable freedom in ex-
pressing his preference. He could worship the emperor alone or asso-
ciate him with his favorite god. What can we say about those two
Spaniards who chose or invented Aesculapius Augustus and Iuppiter
Pantheus Augustus that crop up in Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 2,
2004 and 2008?
Even better: there were theological questions about these newfan-
gled gods, the emperors. How much were they affected by astrology?
Correspondingly, could anyone endanger an emperor by getting hold of
his horoscope? The story of how emperors were afraid of astrologers and
of those who used the astrologers to learn about the destiny of emperors
is a well-known one. Horoscopes of emperors were certainly made and
preserved, whether retrospectively or not. The opinion we find in
Firmicus Maternus in the fourth century that the emperor is not subject
to the stars because his destiny is determined by higher authority
(Mathesis 2, 30) is somewhat isolated, though not unique. Firmicus
Maternus wrote that opinion when he was on the way to becoming a
Christian. More frequently there was tension between astrology and
worship of emperors as gods, and that again did no harm to the imperial
cult. Theological difficulties have always contributed to making beliefs
more interesting.
What we know about least is the pleasure that the various groups
derived from setting up statues, building temples, performing sacrifices,
composing speeches, arranging banquets to honor the sovereign or the
genius of the sovereign or the gods connected with the sovereign.
Athletes would be given prizes, musicians and poets would be em-
ployed, children and adolescents would be involved in performances.
Each community and group had its own calendar; different military units
would differ in their worship, as would different cities; but probably no
one would have felt a complete stranger if he traveled from one military
unit to the next or from one city to another. In the Hellenized provinces
of the Empire, where the cult of local rulers had preceded the emperor's
cult, ordinary people were confirmed in their habit of adding new gods
to the old gods. In the provinces of Western Europe and Northern Africa
people were offered the new pleasure of getting nearer to the gods
through earthly divine rulers. Most remarkably, we even have some
evidence, albeit vague, that H. W. Pleket collected years ago (in Harvard
Theological Review, 58, 1965, 331 ff.) that some groups were treating the
imperial cult as a mystery religion. In some inscriptions priests called
sebastophantai appear: they seem to have the task of revealing some
secrets about emperors. I wish we knew more about this.

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 HOW ROMAN EMPERORS BECAME GODS

IV

Rule by the grace of God was the only form of rule compatible with
the Christian faith: indeed there had been pagan emperors like Aurelian
who had thought on those lines. But is it not difficult to see that the
Christian emperors were in no hurry to eliminate the imperial cult. It
had taken root, it had become an organic part of the relation between
sovereign and subject: indeed, it indicated the exact point at which the
subject felt himself to be a subject. Sacrifices, perhaps, had to be elimi-
nated by Christian emperors. The ecclesiastical historian Philostorgius
is explicitly critical of Christians who offered sacrifices to the statue of
Constantine in Constantinople. When Constantine wrote his letter to the
citizens of Hispellum in Umbra to authorize the building of a temple to
himself and to his family, he had to stipulate that the cult should not be
polluted by the deception of any contagious superstition. He must have
meant sacrifices, though he did not say so. Another text, this time by
Constantius in 341, makes it evident that Constantine had in fact tried to
prevent "the madness of sacrifices," but the precise occasion is not
indicated. The imperial cult, however reformed, went on.
We know that in the early sixth century there was still in the small
African town Ammaedara a good man who was proud of calling himself
flamen perpetuas Christianus, without realizing that there was some
contradiction between flamen and Christianus. As G. W. Bowersock was
quick to point out, what really minimized the importance of being
"divus" for a Christian emperor was the chance of becoming "sanctus"
Constantine himself was treated in the East like a saint, indeed like one
of the apostles, soon after his death. When prayers for the performance of
miracles began to be addressed to saints, paradoxically the last barrier
which separated a deified emperor from an old Olympian god fell down,
or at least was occasionally broken down. As has been well known since
at least A. D. Nock's chapter on religion in Cambridge Ancient History X
(1934), there is a characteristic absence of evidence that prayers were
offered to emperors to perform a miracle (or even to induce a dream). Ex-
voto inscriptions registering acts of grace by emperors after prayers to
them are few and unclear for the three pagan centuries of the Empire.
To make things worse, there is some evidence that the boyfriend of
Hadrian, Antinous, who was deified to please Hadrian, did accomplish
miracles after his death. We have an explicit ex-voto in that sense from
Bithynia. So a mere Antinous was better than the Emperor Hadrian in
performing miracles after death. But it must be a consequence of the
new atmosphere of the fourth century - when an emperor could perform
miracles qua a saint - that even a pagan emperor became capable of
authentic miracles after death. We learn from Libanius that worshippers

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

were given miracles by Julian after his death. As A. D. Nock immedi-

ately perceived when M. P. Charles worth directed his attention to that
passage by Libanius, it must have been competition with Christian
saints that endowed the dead Julian with such power.
Even Theodosius II, who took his Christianity seriously, still had to
recognize in 425 the reality of the statues, images, and games for an
emperor, though he wanted these honors "without the vainglorious
heights of adoration." The limits between worship and homage re-
mained unclear.
But we must consider the adventus, the moment when the emperor,
usually remote and unseen, would become present to his subjects. The
moment was solemn and therefore a frequent subject on monuments.
Since 1938 we have had marble reliefs found beneath the Palazzo della
Cancelleria in Rome that have been dated to the reign of Domitian. One
panel presents Rome presiding over the adventus of the emperor
Vespasian. But several other scenes of adventus - for Trajan, Hadrian,
Marc Aurei, etc. - had been known before. The adventus of an emperor
might happen in a moment of need, when his position was not yet safe.
Such was the case of the adventus of Vespasian at Alexandria in 69.
Tacitus notices that Vespasian was still lacking "auctoritas et maiestas."
He acquired it there by performing miracles in collaboration with
Serapls. He did not have the king's touch by right, as legitimate
monarchs of later ages had: he was just lucky at that moment.
Normally, adventus was not an occasion for miracles, but for elo-
quence, rejoicing, and religious ceremonies. Eloquence for adventus was
theorized, and we hear plenty about it in the third-century treatise by the
rhetorician Menander - a book that has come back into fashion among
classicists in recent years. But it is, perhaps, more important to refer to
the long tradition of religious acts that would greet the visitor. It had of
course precedents in the reception of Roman leaders in the provinces.
Metellus Pius, we are told by Valerius Maximus, had his adventus in
Spain greeted with altars and incense. Augustus tried to arrive incognito
to avoid giving trouble. Sacrifices are noted by Suetonius for the
adventus of the Emperor Gaius. They must have happened for almost
every emperor who traveled about. If we know more about adventus in
the third or fourth century, it is partly a question of sources: most of the
imperial panegyrics belong to that period, and they are, as we have said,
particularly sensitive to adventus. But it may well be that the new
religious atmosphere, combined with the new military situation, gave
adventus a greater, though perhaps different, share in the imperial
ceremonial. We know from Ammianus that Julian was received in
Antioch "like some divinity with public prayers." In any case, as the
emperor was seldom in Rome in the fourth century, his appearance in

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 HOW ROMAN EMPERORS BECAME GODS

Rome became a ceremony of special significance. Constantius's entry

into Rome in 357 was memorably described by Ammianus; and we have
one of the speeches written for the occasion by Themistius. According to
Ammianus's description, Constantius "kept the gaze of his eyes straight
ahead and turned his face neither to right nor left." He was seeing things
rather than seeing people. Sabine MacCormack in Art and Ceremony in
Late Antiquity has already observed that there was in fact an increasing
tendency, especially in figurative art, to emphasize the presence rather
than the arrival of the emperor. How can we explain this?
One element is perhaps to be found in the new climate of modified
emperor-worship by Christians. There was less one could do in terms of
cultic ceremonies as such. The crowd could no longer take part in
sacrifices or direct prayer. The crowd, therefore, tended to recede in the
descriptions of the adventus - whether in literature or in monuments.
There remained the emperor in a new solitude - present rather than
arriving. But his presence was still, or perhaps more so, a divine
presence: the presence of a lonely superior being. Thus the adventus
was involved in the difficulties that surrounded the imperial cult in a
Christian empire. For a while adventus and the modified imperial cult
supported each other, in the sense that the adventus supplied the
imperial cult with an immediate presence of the divine being, and the
modified imperial cult supplied the adventus with something of the
sanctity of the Christian sovereign. In the long run, both adventus and
the imperial cult were doomed. The introduction of the patriarch into
the ceremony of coronation (first perhaps with Leo I, in 457) made it
definitely clear that the emperor could be a saint, but not a god.
People were again seriously believing in a god or gods. On the one
hand, the emperors were no longer the victorious and efficient rulers
they used to be; and, on the other, they were no longer felt to be an alien
power where they were still ruling. The imperial cult was primarily a
sign of indifference or doubt or anxiety about the gods; it was, further-
more, an expression of admiration for efficient, but alien, rule.

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