THE
DIVINITY
OF T H E
ROMAN
EMPEROR
THE DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
BY
LILY ROSS TAYLOR
PORCUPINE PRESS Philadelphia 1975
First edition 1931 ( M i d d l e t o w n : A m e r i c a n Philological Association, 1931) Reprinted 1975 by P O R C U P I N E PRESS, I N C . Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Taylor, Lily Ross, 1886The divinity of the Roman emperor. Reprint of the 1931 ed. published by the American Philological Association, Middletown, Conn., which was issued as no. 1 of Philological monographs. 1. Cultus, Roman. 2. Emperor worship, Roman. I. Title. II. Series: Philological monographs ; no. 1 . DG124.T3 1975b 292'.7 75-31647 ISBN 0-87991-606-0
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PREFACE The worship of the ruler in antiquity has attracted the atten tion of many scholars in recent years, and the work of Meyer, Wilcken, Kaerst, Pfister, Weinreich, Nock, Tarn, Ferguson, Scott, and others has done much to promote a proper under standing of one of the most characteristic features of the ab solute monarchy as we know it in the Hellenistic and Roman world. But scholars have been interested rather in the Hellen istic ruler cult as it took shape in the empire of Alexander and in the kingdoms of his successors than in the coming of the divine monarchy to Rome. The useful book of the Abbe Beurlier, Le culte imperial, son histoire et son organisation depuis Auguste jusqu'a Justinien (Paris, 1891), remains the only comprehensive study of the worship of the Roman emperor, and it is devoted primarily to the forms which the cult took throughout the empire, largely in the post-Augustan period, with little discussion of the origin and early develop ment of the worship. Hirschfeld (Sitzungsberichte der Preuss. Akad. 1888, 833-862, reprinted in Kleine Schriften, pp. 4 7 1 504) and Kornemann (Klio i (1902), 51-146) have made a fuller study of the origin of the cult, but both scholars were chiefly interested in the provincial cult in the West, and neither attempted a full investigation of the way the institution origi nated under Caesar and Augustus. Yet the period of Caesar and Augustus has the same interest for the Roman imperial cult that the time of Alexander and his first successors has for the Hellenistic ruler worship, for Caesar was the first divine ruler at Rome, and Augustus gave to the divinity of the ruler the form under which it was destined to endure for three centuries. This book will, it is hoped, supply the need of a study of the Roman imperial cult as it began under Caesar and as it gradually took shape during the long reign of Augusvii
viii
PREFACE
tus. The chief emphasis is placed upon the establishment of the worship in the formal cult of the state. The material for such a study was collected with remarkable thoroughness by Hubert Heinen and presented in outline form in a paper entitled, "Zur Begriindung des romischen Kaiserkultus" (Klio x i (1911), 129-177, referred to in these pages simply as Heinen), and I have found Heinen's careful work a valuable check in dealing with the masses of literary, inscriptional, and monumental evidence available for this investiga tion. Among the numerous books and articles which I have used in my work I should like to acknowledge particularly for my discussion of Caesar the aid which I have received from Eduard Meyer's Caesars Monarchie und das Principat des Pompeius; for Augustus the most valuable assistance has come from older books, from Gardthausen's Augustus und seine Zeit and from Mommsen's edition of the Res Gestae and his discus sions of the principate in the Romisches Staatsrecht. Through out the entire study I am constantly indebted to the books and articles of Franz Cumont, who more than any other scholar of our day has contributed to the understanding of the religious ideas that were current in the Roman world of Caesar and Augustus. I have made no attempt to be exhaustive in citations of the vast and increasing modern literature on the worship of the ruler. Two articles by Scott and one by Nock appeared too late to be considered fully, and the paper of D . M . Pippidi, " L e Numen Augusti" (Revue des Etudes latines, 1931, 1-29), reached me after the book was in page proof. It provides strong support for the identity of Numen and Genius on which I have insisted in the imperial cult. I am sorry that I have not been able to see Wilcken's Alexander der Grosse, which has just been announced (Leipzig, 1931). I have considered in some detail the Hellenistic ruler cult with its Greek and oriental background. In the discussion I have emphasized especially the features of the worship which seem to me of significance for the divinity of the Roman
PREFACE
ix
emperor. In particular I have devoted a large amount of at tention to the Persian cult of the spirit of the king, and to the Greek idea of the daimon, because they seem to me to provide an important background for the Roman conception of the ruler's Genius, which is usually interpreted as a new and pe culiarly Roman manifestation in the worship of the ruler. M y investigations have led me to results which seem of im portance for the Hellenistic ruler cult; particularly I hold, in opposition to the current belief, that the Persian worship of the ruler's spirit had its influence on the divinity of Alexander. M y views, already published in an article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, have called forth strong opposition from one of the most distinguished students of Hellenistic history, and his criticisms have led me to reexamine the evidence and to consider it in some detail in two appendices to this book. M y thanks for aid are due to the libraries of Harvard, Chi cago, Columbia, and Berlin Universities, the British Museum, the American Academy in Rome, and the American Numis matic Society in New York; most of all I am grateful for con stant assistance to the libraries of Vassar and Bryn Mawr Colleges. Miss Agnes Kirsopp Lake, now Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, has assisted in the preparation of Appendix in and of the index. Finally I am under deep obligation to the American Philological Association for under taking the publication of the book. The chairman of the Monograph Committee, Professor Frederick William Shipley of Washington University, has read the entire manuscript, and another member of the committee, Professor Tenney Frank of Johns Hopkins University, has read Chapters in to VIII. Both scholars have given me the benefit of suggestive comments and criticisms. Professor Joseph W illiam Hewitt of Wesleyan University, editor of the series, has labored with unfailing patience and friendliness over manuscript and proof and I wish to express to him my warm thanks for saving me from various errors and for bringing consistency and clarity into many pas sages in the text. The book is inscribed to a group of friends to T
PREFACE
X
whose stimulus and criticism I owed much during the years when I was making the preliminary studies and writing the first drafts of these chapters. LILY B R Y N M A W R , PENNSYLVANIA
June 26, 1931
Ross
TAYLOR
CONTENTS CHAPTER
I.
PAGE
The Divinity of Kings in the Hellenistic East
. . .
1
II.
The Divinity of M a n and King in Republican R o m e .
35
III.
Julius Caesar's A t t e m p t to found a Divine Monarchy .
58
IV.
Divus Julius enshrined in State Cult
V. VI. VII. VIII.
X.
78
The Strife to secure Caesar's Power
100
Augustus, Son of the Deified Julius The Formation of a State Cult
142 . 181
T h e Institution of the State Cult in Provinces and Municipalities
IX.
. . . . . . .
205
The Deification of Augustus
224
T h e Development of Augustus' Divinity
239
APPENDICES
I. II. III.
T h e Worship of the Persian King
247
Alexander and the Proskynesis
256
Inscriptions recording Divine Honors
267
xi
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIG.
1.
PAGE
Portrait of Flamininus.
Aureus
36
Bahrfeldt, Romische Goldmunzenpragung, 2.
PI. n, 24.
Equestrian Statue of Sulla on reverse of Aureus
39
Bahrfeldt, op. cit. PI. in, 6. 3.
Portrait of Pompey.
Bronze coin
40
J.H.S. x v m , PI. XII, 12. 4.
Portrait of Caesar.
Denarius
66
Grueber, Coins of the Roman Museum, 5.
Republic
in the
British
PI. LIV, 5.
Temple of Clementia Caesaris.
Denarius
69
Grueber, op. cit. PI. LIV, 22. 6.
Thunderbolt behind Head of Caesar. Willers, Romische Kupferpragung,
7.
Sun, M o o n , and five Planets.
Bronze coin.
. . .
71
PI. ix, 6.
Aureus
91
Bahrfeldt, op. cit. PI. v, 9. 8.
Altar of Divus Julius
97
Photograph from the R o m a n Forum. 9.
Caesar's Wreath and Chair.
Denarius
98
Grueber, op. cit. PI. civ, 12. 10.
Cleopatra as Aphrodite with Caesarion.
Cypriote bronze
coin
103
Svoronos, MiXnzen der Ptolemaeer, 11.
Cleopatra and Caesarion.
PI. L X I I , 26.
Rear wall, Temple at Dendera. 104
Weigall, Life and Times of Cleopatra, 12.
Portrait of Brutus.
p. 328.
Denarius
108
Grueber, op. cit. PI. cxi, 17. 13.
Portrait identified as Fulvia ( ? ) .
Bronze coin of Eumeneia. 117
British Museum Catalogue, Phrygia, PI. x x v n , 5. 14.
Tripod with Laurel Wreath.
Denarius
120
Grueber, op. cit. PI. cv, 13. 15.
Antony crowned with I v y ; Octavia and the cista
mystica.
Silver coin
122
Grueber, op. cit. PI. cxiv, 1. 16.
Octavian, Antony, and Octavia. Numism.
17.
Bronze coin of the East. 123
Zeit. x x x v m (1905), PI. i, 8.
Cleopatra as Thea Neotera and Antony. Svoronos, op. cit. PI. L X I I I , 22. xiii
Silver coin.
.
. 127
xiv
L I S T OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG.
PAGE
18. Antonius, Armenia Devicta, Cleopatra Regina Regum Filiorum Regum
128
Svoronos, op. cit. PL LXTJI, 31. 19. The young Caesar and his Symbols.
Aurei
131
Bahrfeldt, op. cit. PL x, 16 and 22. 20. Diana; Temple with Symbols of Sicilian Victory.
Aureus. 132
Bahrfeldt, op. cit. PL x, 2 1 . 21. Archaic Diana.
Denarius
132
Mattingly, Coins of the Roman Museum,
Empire
in the British
PL xi, 11.
22. Augustus as Pharaoh, Temple K , Philae
' . 144
Milne, A History of Egypt under Roman Rule, Fig. 1, p. 2. 23. Victory and Peace.
Silver coins of the East
145
Mattingly, op. cit. PL x v , 1 and 2. 24. Temple of the Asian League (Commune
Asiae).
Silver
coin
147
Mattingly, op. cit. PL x v n , 13. 25. I thy phallic Terminal Figure inscribed
IMP. CAESAR.
Denarius
152
Mattingly, op. cit. PL x v , 10. 26. Doors of Augustus' Palace with Civic Crown and Laurel Branches.
Aureus
161
Bahrfeldt, op. cit. PL x i v , 7. 27. Clupeus Virtutis.
Aureus
162
Bahrfeldt, op. cit. PL xi, 20. 28. Eagle with Civic Crown and Laurel Branches.
Aureus. . 165
Bahrfeldt, op. cit. PL x i , 1. 29. Capricorn.
Aureus
166
Bahrfeldt, op. cit. PL xi, 2. 30. Altar from Carthage.
T h e goddess R o m a
University of Wisconsin,
169
Classical Studies, Series n, PL i.
31. Altar from Carthage, Apollo
170
Ibid. PL I I . 32. Altar from Carthage, Aeneas with Anchises and Ascanius. 170 Ibid. PL in. 33. Augustus and Artavasdes in. British
Museum
Silver coin
Catalogue,
Galatia,
171
Cappadocia,
and
Syria, PL x i v , 3. 34. Altar of Fortuna Redux.
Aureus
173
Bahrfeldt, op. cit. PL x n , 18. 35. Drawing of Breastplate, Augustus of Prima Porta. Rom. Mitt, x x v (1910), 3 1 , A b b . 1.
.
.
.179
L I S T OF ILLUSTRATIONS
XV
FIG.
PAGE
36. Altar of the Belvedere, Front
187
Amelung, Vatican Katalog, Vol. n, Tafeln, PL x v , 87a, b. 37. Altar of the Belvedere, Rear
188
Ibid. 38. Altar of the Belvedere, Side
189
Ibid. 39. Altar of the Belvedere, Side
190
Carcopino, Virgile et les Origines d'Ostie, PL x v m . 40. Candelabrum.
Aureus
195
Bahrfeldt, op. cit. PL X I I I , 17. 4 1 . Augustus placing a Star on Agrippa's Head.
Denarius.
. 197
Mattingly, op. cit. PL iv, 14. 42. Terra Mater.
Ara Pacis, East
Photograph.
198
Florence, Uffizi.
43. Aeneas about to sacrifice the Sow Photograph.
199
Rome, National Museum.
44. Venus Genetrix, MarsUltor, and Divus Julius.
Relief from
Carthage
203
Rev. Arch, x x x i v (1899), PL n. 45. Altar of R o m a and Augustus at Lugdunum.
Bronze coin.
209
Mattingly, op. cit. PL x x , 20. 46. Temple of the Genius Augusti at Pompeii M a u , Pompeii, 47. G e m m a Augustea Photograph.
217
p. 108, fig. 45. 226 Museum, Vienna.
CHAPTER I T H E DIVINITY OF KINGS IN THE HELLENISTIC EAST
The divine right which absolute rulers claim as a legitimiza tion of their power was expressed in the polytheistic religion of the Romans by the addition of the emperor as a new god to the unlimited state pantheon. The conception of the emperor's divinity developed as did the empire itself after the old republican form of government had proved itself in adequate to the rule of a wide domain. It grew up at a time when Rome was in close contact with the ideas of the civilized world and particularly with the life and thought of the East. There the world ruler, who now came into being at Rome, had an ancient tradition, which still lived on in the kingdoms of Egypt and of western Asia. But the empire of Rome had little in common with the effete kingdoms of the East which depended for their very existence on the recognition of Rome. It was rather a revival of the great world power out of which those kingdoms had grown—the empire established by Alex ander and destined after his death to be divided among the aspirants for his supremacy. Caesar and Augustus were the real successors of Alexander, and to understand the basis of their power it is essential to go back to the monarchy of Alexander and to consider his position as a theocratic monarch and the tradition that he passed on to his successors. The monarchy that Alexander established was itself a com bination of the oriental absolute rule with Greek and Mace donian traditions. In the great Persian empire Alexander encountered the oriental conception of the king as an absolute power, the ideal representative of his people in every secular and religious office. The great king of the Persians was the successor of a long line of rulers of oriental empires, Babylonian and Hittite and Assyrian, all of whom had ruled as beings set far above their subjects by a divine power that made their 2
1
2
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
every word unquestioned law. They seem not always to have been divine beings in themselves. T o be sure the great Semitic rulers of the third millennium before Christ had been gods, depicted with the symbol of divinity, and the Hittite sovereigns had been thought of as incarnations of the sun god. But the immediate predecessors of the Persians, the great Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian kings, were apparently not thought of as deities in themselves. They were rather the shepherds or stewards of the great local gods of their lands. But as the sole vicars on earth of Assur of Assyria or Marduk of Babylon these eastern kings had a majesty that the greatest of divine monarchs could not surpass. They passed on their conception of absolutism to the Persians, and the great king of the empire that Alexander conquered w as the heir to the majesty and the unlimited power that had from the earliest times characterized the sovereign of the East. In saluting the king the subject in abject obeisance cast himself upon the ground and kissed the earth. The Greeks of Alexander's day and earlier interpreted this attitude as worship, and Greek envoys at the Persian court refused to perforin the usual obeisance before the king because they deemed such an act unsuitable before a mortal man. Modern scholars have questioned the interpretation. The Achaemenidae, the dy nasty to which Alexander's foe Darius belonged, were, they point out, by their religion under the domination of a single all-powerful god—a divinity who was far more universal than the local gods of Assyria and Babylon. T o this god, Auramazda, the kings attribute their thrones and all their con quests, all their power. " B y the grace of Auramazda I am 1
r
2
1
See Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. i, index s.v. Kingship. On the cult of the Egyptian king see Moret, Du caractere religieux de la royaute pharaonique (1902), with Blackmail's criticism, J. Egypt. Arch, xi (1925), 201. Cf. ErmanRanke, Aegypten und aegyptisches Leben, passim. The best material for the cult of kings of the oriental monarchies is found in the records of the kings, available in translation for Egypt in Breasted's Ancient Records of Egypt, for Babylon, Assyria, and Persia in the Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek. 2 Hdt. VII, 136. Cf. Xen. An. in, 2, 13; Plut. Art. 22; Nepos, Conon 3.
DIVINITY OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
3
king," says Darius in the remarkable inscription on the great rock at Behistun. But the Greek belief that the Persians worshipped their king is substantiated by certain definite practices which are attested for the Persian court. At Persian banquets the king, even when absent, was regarded as spiritually present, and obeisance was made before his spirit. The courtiers set up a special table for the king's spirit and placed on it offerings of food and drink. Before the king in solemn processions was borne an altar with a fire burning upon it which seems to have been a symbol of the king's power. The worship of the king's spirit and the symbol of fire which accompanied him are in remarkable accord with what we know of Persian religious ideas. The Persians, as is clear from the Avesta, believed that for every man there existed before his birth, during his lifetime, and after his death, a spirit called the fravashi. The fravashi of the just, those who are dead, those who are now alive, and those who are still to be born, all receive worship in the Avesta. If scholars are right in believing that the fravashi represents an old Persian religious conception, we can interpret the cult of the living king's spirit as the worship of the fravashi. The fire that was borne before the king accords with another Persian religious conception, the idea of the hvareno, kingly glory, described in the Avesta as like a flame. The king's spirit and his glory were both symbols of the super natural power which raised the king far above the ordinary mortal. Yet the king himself was never named with Auramazda or even with the other gods, Mithra and Anahitis, who in later times had their place in prayer beside the great god of the Persians. The king was in the position of a saint rather than of a god. 3
Moreover, the Persians accorded a cult to at least one of their dead kings. Cyrus, the founder of the dynasty, received a daily offering of a sheep at his great tomb at Pasargadae and a monthly offering of a horse. The king in power main3
For the evidence for the cult of the Persian kings see Appendix I.
4
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
tained the cult, keeping magi at the tomb to care for the sacrifices. When Cyrus' tomb was plundered, Alexander himself had it restored and the cult was apparently still kept up in Roman times. The worship was not unlike the Greek hero cult in its most highly developed form. But the dead king, like the living, is never, as far as we know, named with the heavenly gods. His position is perhaps analogous to that of a canonized mediaeval king, Charlemagne, for instance. If the Persian king in the days of Alexander was venerated more as a saint than as a god in his own realm, such was not the type of cult accorded the king in the ancient kingdom of Egypt which Persia had conquered. There the idea of the absolute divine monarch was rooted in immutable tradition. On earth the king was an incarnation of the majesty of the gods. In the hymn of victory to Thutmose III the God Ammon is represented as saying, " I have come causing thee to smite the princes of Zahi. . . . I have caused them to see thy majesty as lord of radiance, so that thou hast shone in their faces like my image." At his death the king was thought of as joining the gods in heaven. In the tale of Sinuhe the death of Amenemhet I is thus described: " D e parted the god into his horizon, the king of upper and lower Egypt . . . He ascended to heaven, joined with the sun. The divine limbs were mingled with him that begat him." It was by virtue of his divinity that the king ruled, and the foreign conqueror could only maintain his power by taking over the forms of deity that had belonged to the ancient Egyptian kings. The Persian Cambyses, in doing so, was following the example of Hyksos kings of many centuries earlier and of Nubian rulers of a time not long previous. 4
5
The Egyptian priests of the days of Alexander had a mass of sacred lore about their gods. Once the great powers of their pantheon had been kings of Egypt, they said. The last of these kings were Osiris and Horus. The later kings, as 4
6
Breasted, Ancient Records n, p. 264. lb. i, p . 235.
DIVINITY OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
5
Egyptian records show, were all incarnations of Horus, and at the same time were sons of all the gods and goddesses of the pantheon. Particularly they were, from the fifth dynasty on, the sons of the sun god Re of Heliopolis; to his shrine they went at their accession and on his priest's declaration that they were the sons of Re they depended for the formal legitimization of their rule. It was as the "divine emanation of R e " that they were represented in the regular symbol of royalty, the winged disc of the sun—the same sun disc that also appears on Persian royal monuments. Their cult was in general not independent, but was associated with the cult of all the gods and goddesses who were their fathers and mothers. Their statues were set up in all the temples of the land. The Egyptians also had a conception that was very much like the Persian fravashi. They believed in a divine double or guardian spirit called a ha. This double existed in Egyptian religion for every god, every king, and every man. The living man tried to create joy and avoid distress for his ka; a toast was drunk to a man's ka; the dead went to his ka in the tomb, which was the house of the ka; the priest of the dead had the word ka in his name. For the king's ka there was a special cult which befitted the position of the king as the representative of the people. In scenes of the king's birth the creation of the king's ka is sometimes depicted; in life the ka is represented beside the king, sometimes as an identical figure, again as a small figure behind him; in still other cases he is represented by the two uplifted hands which are the hieroglyphic sign for ka. Again the bull, a word sign for ka, is used as a name of the king, apparently with a play 6
1
8
• See A. D . Nock, "Zbvvaos Geos," H.S.C.P. XLI (1930), 1 ff. This interest ing article appeared too late for me to make full use of it. On the ka see Steindorf, " D e r Ka und die Grabstatuen," Zeitsch.f. Aegypt. Sprache XLVIII (1911), 152ff.;Erman-Ranke, op. cit. pp. 345ff.;W . M . FlindersPetrie, Religious Life in Ancient Egypt (1924), pp. 110 ff. Perhaps the idea of a ka for every man was a development from the ka of the king, though this theory is purely conjectural. See Steindorf, op. cit. p . 153. 7
8
6
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR 9
on the word. The worship of the ka was all-important both in life and in death. With the vagueness that characterizes all religious con ceptions, the Egyptian king seems to have had two forms of cult that doubtless merged—the worship of the king as an incarnate god and the cult of his ka which was like the Persian fravashi. The Achaemenidae, with the toleration that marked their rule, accepted the worship under the forms which the Egyptians accorded to them. It is clear then that Alexander found definite cult practices in Persia that showed a worship of the king as a saint and a formal cult of the king as a god in Egypt. But there was a far more powerful factor than cult in moulding popular fancy and in creating a widespread faith in the divine ruler. That was the mighty body of legend that gathered about the world ruler. There were stories of his divine birth, his wonderful youth, his miraculous powers. There were signs and portents without end that foretold his destiny as ruler of the world. This mass of material passed on from nation to nation and from people to people. The Persians, however much they may have abstained in formal cult from acknowl edging the king as the sun god, were affected by the ideas of other peoples and endowed their king with the qualities of their own sun god, Mithra, whose growing power in the later period of the Achaemenidae threatened the supremacy of Auramazda. No consideration of the ideas of the world ruler in the East w ould be complete without some reference to this mass of story. Intangible, uncorrelated, far harder to trace than the definite functions of cult, it was none the less a very potent factor in establishing the worship of the king. Alexander the Great was not without preparation in his own experience for the idea of the divine king which he encountered in the East. It is well to consider what these traditions were, T
10
9
See Flinders-Petrie, op. cit. p . 111. The king is called the bull from the time of Amenhotep I until the twenty-second dynasty. 10
See J. Kampers, Vom Werdegange der abendlandischen Kaiser my stik (1924).
DIVINITY OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
7
for essentially on them depended the success of his efforts to establish a divine monarchy in Greek as well as in Persian and Egyptian territory. The young Macedonian had been brought up in Greek traditions and manner of thought. He was familiar with the Greek legends which represented the gods as beings in the form of men, mingling and mating with mortal men and producing mortal offspring. He knew and loved his Homer with all the traditions of men who were godborn and god-nurtured and like the gods in their beauty and prowess. He was himself said to be descended on his mother's side from the bravest of Homer's heroes, Achilles. On his father's side an even more eminent ancestry was attributed to him, for legend had it that the kings of his line were Greeks descended from the greatest of Greek heroes, Heracles. 11
He was familiar with the cult which the Greek cities offered to their supposed founders and to the dynasties of kings who had once ruled in them. Some of them were the heroes of the epic tradition; with them were associated other names of purely local fame as kings or great men. He had doubtless visited many of their shrines and had seen their relics. He knew their worship, either as gods or as heroes. If they were gods, the offerings were made by day and the place where they were made was called a temple. If they were heroes, a lower order of divine beings rather like the saints, their sacrifices were made by night and the place where they were offered was the tomb. The cult followed the regular forms of the worship of the dead. It was the Greek equivalent of the reverence paid today at tombs of men like Washington and Napoleon. But in a religion where the line between gods and heroes was not sharply drawn, the reverence could de12
11
See the discussion by A. R. Anderson, H.S.C.P. x x x i x (1928), 7 ff. On the Greek hero cult see Deneken in Roscher, s.v. heros: Eitrem in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v.; Foucart, Le culte des heros chez les grecs (1918); Farnell, Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality (1921). The most comprehensive collection of material will be found in Pfister, Der Reliquienkult im Altertum, Religionsgesch. Versuche u. Vorarbeiten v, 1 and 2 (1909 and 1912). See also the recent article of Weinreich, "Antikes Gottmenschentum/' Ncue Jahrb. n (1926), 633 ff. 12
8
T H E D I V I N I T Y OF THE R O M A N EMPEROR
velop in a way not possible in a religion that tends toward monotheism. A hero could pass into the realm of the gods. Some men famed in legend had cults both as gods and as heroes. That was true for instance of both of Alexander's reputed ancestors, Achilles and Heracles. The latter, it will be remembered, is described in the eleventh book of the Odyssey as being among the gods while his shade encounters Odysseus in the lower regions. It is clear then that for men of the legendary past Alexander was familiar with an official cult in the Greek cities either as heroes or as gods. But he had also seen heroic honors given to men who were known not from legend but from a credible historical record, for in the historical period the founder of a new colony or the citizen to whom a city looked as a saviour sometimes had the cult at his tomb taken over by the state who replaced the family in fulfilling the offices of the dead. Such a cult was, like all formal Greek worship, essentially an affair of the individual city. Alexander probably knew the official cult of that type which the polemarch of Athens rendered to the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and to the soldiers who died for Athens at Marathon. Those were heroic honors in their simplest forms. But the more extensive forms of heroic honors such as were given to the founders of cities were also well known to him in instances within the memory of men. These included the erection of a tomb in the agora and the giving of yearly games for the deceased. In that way the Amphipolitans honored as their new founder and their saviour the Spartan Brasidas who was slain in the battle which he commanded at the city. Moreover, Alexander was apparently familiar with heroic honors for living men as well. Homer used the Greek word heros freely for his heroes while they were still alive, and, 13
14
15
13
For Heracles, cf. Hdt. n, 43-44; Diod. iv, 39; Paus. n, 10, 1. For Achilles, cf. Philostratus, Her. 741 ff. See Pfister, op. ext. n, pp. 466 ff. w Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 58, 1. Cf. Poll, VIII, 91. Thuc. v, 11. The Amphipolitans displaced their original founder Hagnon in favor of Brasidas, and tore down the buildings erected in his honor. 15
DIVINITY OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
9
though in Greek literature of a later time the term is usually confined to men whom death has removed from the envy and the rivalry of their fellows, there was an occasional man of distinction w ho was called founder or saviour of a city and who received from the whole citizen body a form of cult during his lifetime. Such a man was Dion to whom the Syracusans in 356 gave heroic honors while he was still alive. About twenty years later Timoleon received similar distinc tions in Syracuse; they prepared the way for the extensive heroic honors that came to him after his death. The details that are given us about Timoleon's honors provide the best clue to the character of heroic honors for the living. He was called saviour and his birthday became a public celebration. He dedicated to agathos daimon the house which the grateful Syracusans gave to him, and set up in the house a shrine to a goddess of chance, Automatia, a form of Tyche. Now agathos daimon and agathe tyche are two divinities who are represented in literature of the fourth century as accompanying every man through life. Tyche is a new abstraction who comes to be thought of as a personal deity shadowing every human being, but agathos daimon is simply a new form of the personal daimon, man's guiding spirit, who is known in Greek literature as early as Pindar as a divinity of the same T
16
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18
19
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21
16
If, as is generally believed (cf. Sundwall in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Hagnon), the original founder of Amphipolis is identical with the Hagnon who attested the treaties in Thuc. v, 19 and 24, Amphipolis was paying honor to a living founder in 422. But Muller-Striibling's arguments against the identity of the two men are strong. See Aristophanes und die historische Kritik, pp. 717 ff. Diod. x v i , 20. Diodorus is very careful in his distinctions between Ti/zcu iaodeoi and rifxal ripooiKal. For Dion as saviour see Plut. Dion 46. Plut. Timol. 39; Diod. xvi, 90, 1. See Nepos, Timol. 5. This is the earliest public celebration of a birthday known in Greek records. Plut. Mor. 542 E : KOKGJS 8e Tip.u\kow kv S u p a K o u a a i s AVTOIACLTICLS &uip.6v Idpvaa/jLevos eirl r a t s irpa^eat Kai rr\v oituav 'AyaOu AaifioPL K a 0 i e p c o < r a s : cf. also Plut. Timol. 36: ewl 8e rrjs OLKLCLS iepdv ISpvaafxevos A u r o / z a r t a s Wvev, avrrjv 8k Tr\v OLKLCLV iep$ 8alixovt KaOikpuaev. See Ganschinietz in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Agathodaimon, Suppl. in; Jacobsson, Daimon och Agathos Daimon (Lund, 1925). On Tyche see the excellent discussion of Ruhl in Roscher. 17
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type as the Persian fravashi and the Egyptian ka and even more closely related to the Roman Genius. From the house hold shrines of Delos and Thera and from Hellenistic in scriptions it is clear that agathos daimon as the guardian spirit of the master of the house came to have much the same place in the family cult that the Genius had in the Roman house. It would seem that Timoleon enjoyed the distinction at Syracuse of having his daimon made an object of public cult, and the festival of his daimon, his birthday, a public festival. We do not know how far the household cult of the daimon had gone at the time, but if it had kept pace with the attitude toward the daimon that we find in the contemporary plays of New Comedy, what we have is perhaps an assumption by the state of the family cult of the daimon in much the same way that the state took over the honors at the tomb. As we shall see when we consider the worship of Alexander, the form of Timoleon's worship may be, for his time at least, typical of the cult offered the founders and the saviours of cities while they were still alive. Timoleon, by the way, in establishing these public shrines of agathos daimon and the goddess of chance, let it be known that he believed in thanking the gods instead of himself for what he had done. These were days when men constantly emphasized their own divine guidance. Socrates attributed to such a power the inspiration that gave him insight into life, 22
23
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A number of Carian inscriptions preserve dedications to the ayadol dai/jLoves of individuals (C.I.G. 2700, b, c; Ath. Mitt, x v (1890), 276 f.; B.C.H. xiv (1890), 628). The term seems here to be almost equivalent to the Latin Di Manes. Its most interesting use is found in the will of a certain Poseidonius (Dittenberger, Syll. 1044), a document that dates not later than the third century B.C. It makes provision for sacrifices by his household to the agathos daimon of himself and his wife. Jacobsson, op. cit. argues that the idea of the personal daimon came to the Greeks from the Persians and the Romans. On the birthday as a festival of the daimon and on the significance of Timoleon's birthday celebration see W . Schmidt, Geburtstag' im Altertum, Religionsgesch. Versuche u. Vorarbeiten, vn, pp. 1, 10, 18, and Pfister, Deut. Literaturz. x x x (1909), 1486 ff. z
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11
and Isocrates gave a similar power credit for the floods of his eloquence about the welfare of Greece. The general belief in the divine guardians of every man and the special confidence that both the public and the out standing man himself felt in his own particular divine guardian ship had before the time of Alexander prepared the way for the worship of the superman not simply as daimon but as god. Significantly enough, though the transition to god was not unfamiliar for the heroes of legend, it is a living, not a dead man whom we first find securing worship as a god in the historical period. The Hellenistic historian, Duris of Samos, definitely states that the Spartan Lysander, the first man to secure widespread power in the Hellenic world, was the first man to be so worshipped. After the victory of Aegospotamoi the Samians renamed Lysandreia the games celebrated in the ancient cult of Samian Hera. They sang a paean in his honor and paeans belonged to the gods. At the same time cities of Ionia erected altars to him as a god and instituted sacrifices. The honors that were conferred on him sound as if they were spontaneous, but they were probably not alto gether so. Lysander was fond enough of adulation to keep a poet in his train to celebrate his deeds and he had a plan to break the succession of Sparta's shadowy kings and have himself chosen in their place. Very likely there was an element of self-deification in his worship. Incidentally he was a man to whom Alexander might naturally look back as a forerunner of his power in the Greek world. 24
25
26
Shortly after Lysander lost his power the Spartan king Agesilaus refused the divinity that was offered him by the people of Thasos. He is said to have asked the envoys who came to announce his divine honors whether they had the 2 4
For the power that Socrates calls TO dainoviov pov see Zeller, Philosophie der Griechen n , pp. 75 ff. See Isoc. Phil. 149. Cf. Taeger, Gnomon i (1925), 91. Plut. Lys. 18. On Lysander's strife for power see Plut. Lys. 7 ff.; Polyaenus i, 45, 3 ; Diod. x, 9, 1. For the monument of Lysander in Delphi see Pomtow, PaulyWissowa, Suppl. iv, 1209. 4
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2 6
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T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
power of making men into gods. Receiving an affirmative reply, he said, " G o make yourselves into gods first. Then I will believe that you can make me one too." Quite different from Agesilaus in his attitude toward divinity was Clearchus, tyrant of Heraclea on the Black Sea (363-352), who, in toxicated by wealth and power, "forgot that he was a human being. He called himself the son of Zeus and evi dently thought of himself as Zeus in person. He dressed like the image of the gods and called his son Thunderbolt (Keraunos). He deliberately made use of his divine pre tensions to strengthen his tyrannical rule, and his overconfident claims roused two noble youths, like Roman liberators of a later day, to slay him in order to free their city. 2 7
,,
28
But before Alexander's father, Philip of Macedon, acquired his power in Greece, there was, as far as we know, no case where a man was given divine honors in a city of the Greek mainland. The instances cited belong to Ionia and the Black Sea, and even in those regions there seems no case where the worship passed into permanent cult. The explanation for the absence of such worship in Greece proper may be due in part to the fact that the two men who acquired the greatest power in the half century before Philip—Agesilaus and Epaminondas —were by nature opposed to the adulation that such honors would have brought. But the need of a saviour that was constantly felt and expressed at this time makes it apparent that the Greek cities were ready to go to great lengths in honoring as daimon or god the man who might bring order to their harassed world-. Isolated instances of divine honors given to Philip are pre served to us in the fragmentary tradition. A faction in the city of Amphipolis seems to have secured worship for him as a god in the city, and a group of Athenians gave him similar honors in the gymnasium of Cynosarges. Philip himself 29
2 7
Plut. Mor. 210D. Memnon ap. Phot. Bibl. 222; Suidas, s.v. Klearchos; Justin xvi, 5, 8-12. Aristides 38, p. 480; Clem. Alex. Protrepticus iv, 58 b. For divine honors accorded after his death to Philip's father, Amyntas, see Schol. Dem. Olynth. 1, 10, 20. 2 8
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D I V I N I T Y OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
13
was ready to see his house and his own person glorified; he was proud of his descent from Heracles and he built a great monument of his house at the Greek national shrine in Olympia. But he went further than that. At the magnificent celebration- of his daughter's wedding, he had his statue in the guise of a god brought into the theatre with the statues of the twelve gods. Here was self-deification, clear and unabashed. But Philip demanded no recognition of his divinity from the cities of Greece. His relation with the cities at the time when he represented himself as the thirteenth god was that of an ally—a position hardly compatible with that of godhead. As leader and general of the newly formed Corinthian league, he was about to conduct an expedition of Greeks and Macedonians against the Persian king. The orator Isocrates, in urging him to undertake an expedition, had said, " I f you make the barbarians helots of the Greeks and force the king called great to do your command . . . then nothing remains for you except to become a god." Perhaps Philip might have made claim for official recognition of god head if he had lived to attain the dominion for which Isocrates urged him to strive. 30
31
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The young Alexander was probably present when his father's statue as the thirteenth god was brought into the theatre. He was moreover prepared for the idea of the divinity of the ruler by the training which he had received from Aristotle. The philosopher addressed to Alexander a treatise on monarchy. His attitude in it can probably be inferred from a well known passage in the Politics in which he says that the man of preeminent political insight is to be followed as " a god among men" for whom there is no law. 33
3 0
Diod. xvi, 92, 5: et8co\a T&V dcodeKa decov kirbixirtve . . . crvv 5k TOVTOLS rod <J>iXt7T7rou rpi(JKo.ihkKa.TOV kiropireve Oeoirpeirks el8
, avvQpovov kavrov 6.7rodeLKPWTOS TOVfiaaiXkuisr o t s duodena Oeols. See Wilcken, "Beitrage zur Geschichte des Korinth. Bund," Sitzb. konigl. Akad. zu Miinchen, 1917. Isoc. Epist. 3; cf. Phil. 132. See Wilcken, Sitzb. d. Preuss. Akad. 1929, 291 ff. Aristotle, 1284a. For the growth of the political idea of the king as 'animate law' see E. R. Goodenough, Yale Classical Studies i (1928), 55 ff. CLITOV
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Alexander was moreover aware of the ideas of the divinity of man that were in the air. He was deeply under the influence of his passionate highspirited mother Olympias, and she, a later story tells, was a devotee of the cult of Dionysus. When in her Maenad revels she was under the possession of the god, she was said to handle great serpents. The story is probably an invention, but Olympias was inseparably connected with serpents in popular tradition. She seems herself to have encouraged the tale, current before Alexander's death, that Alexander was the son, not of Philip, but of a god who had come to her in the form of a serpent. In the first years of Alexander's reign we hear nothing of the suggestion that he was himself divine. T o be sure he remembered his divine ancestors. When he visited the Troad he made offerings at the grave of Achilles, the ancestor of the Epirote royal line from which his mother sprang. On his coins he continued, as had his Macedonian predecessors, to represent the figure of Heracles, the ancestor of the Mace donian kings. After the victory of Issus he asked the Tyrians to let him make a sacrifice of thanksgiving in the great temple of Heracles, the chief god of their city. Their refusal was at least the pretext for Alexander's long siege of Tyre, and his victory was signalized by a splendid celebration of the sacrifice to his ancestor that he had not been permitted to make before. But divine forebears were too common in those days to give one a claim to distinction. Quite different was Alex ander's first experience w ith personal divinity which came when he went to Egypt in 332. He marched into the land that formed part of the Persian realm to take possession of it after his first great victories over the Persians. He met with no resistance from the Egyptians, who had been completely 34
35
36
r
34
On Olympias' attitude toward Alexander's divinity and the probability that the myth began during Alexander's lifetime see Wilcken, Sitzb. d. Preuss. Akad. 1928, 586, 589. Plut. Alex. 15; Diod. x v n , 17; Arrian, An. I, 12. Diod. x v n , 40 and 46; Arr. An. n, 16 and 18; in, 6, 1. 33
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15
subdued by the second Persian conquest, and he seems immediately to have been recognized as king by the priests who were the great power of Egypt. At once on that recogni tion he found himself a god like the Pharaohs of old. As hieroglyphic records show, he acquired a Re name and a Horus name and the other three names that make up the Egyptian king's divine title. A popular story soon grew up that Alexander was really the son of Nectanebus, the native ruler who for a brief period about the time of the birth of Alexander had thrown off Persian rule. It was like a story that had been told of the Persian Cambyses long ago. The Egyptian story of Alexander's birth was associated with the supposed claim of his mother that he had been the son of a serpent, and the two tales later took form in the fantastic story of Alex ander's birth told in the Alexander Romance. 37
The godhead that Alexander received at the hands of the Egyptians can have produced little or no effect on the Greek world. It is not even mentioned in the Greek tradition and would not be known except for the Egyptian records. Of far greater importance in Greece was the declaration of his divine birth that came to him from the oracle of Zeus Ammon in the Libyan desert, which Alexander visited on a long and perilous journey from Egypt. The oracle of Ammon was famed in the Greek world for its incorruptibility. Lysander had sought in vain for its aid in his plans to become king of Sparta. After Delphi came under the influence of Philip, Athens constantly had recourse to it, maintaining a special ship to convey her envoys to Africa. In going to the oasis Alexander was visiting the most trusted oracle of his day. At the same time he was following the example of his mythical ancestors Perseus and Heracles 38
3 7
See Maspero, "Comment Alexandre devint dieu en Egypte," Annuaire de Vecole pratique des hautes etudes, 1897. See Wilcken's important discussion, op. cit. pp. 577 f. Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 61, 7. There was a shrine of Ammon in Athens in 337. Cf. Dittenberger, Syll. I , 281. On the Ammonium see Meyer, Kleine Schriften, p. 303; Wilcken, op. cit. p. 581, especially n. 2. 3 8
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and his predecessor Cambyses in Egypt. The story of his journey was of great interest to the Greek world and it was written in full detail by his official historian, Callisthenes, the nephew of Aristotle. Callisthenes, and after him Ptolemy and Aristobulus, told of the difficult journey to the Ammonium and of the crows—or was it serpents?—which guided the king when his way through the seas of sand was uncertain, of the rain which by unheard-of mercy Zeus sent into the desert when the expedition was perishing of thirst. The story of the aid that heaven accorded him on his journey lent faith to the account of what the oracle said to the king. That Alexander himself wished to have shrouded in mystery, for he wrote his mother that the words of the god were for her ear alone. But whatever the king asked the god, and whatever the reply, the detail of the expedition which later gained the greatest credence was that Alexander was saluted as the son of Zeus Ammon. Here was divine fatherhood that was to have an influence that the Egyptian declarations of Alexander's divine parentage could not attain. According to Callisthenes, confirmation of it soon came from Greek sources. Messengers came from the Milesians to say that the oracle of Apollo at Branchidae, which had been silent since Xerxes had despoiled it, had spoken and had declared that Alexander was the son of Zeus and had made predictions about his future conquests. The Erythrean Sibyl also confirmed the fact that Zeus was the father of Alexander. 39
40
41
42
Whether or not the journey to the Ammonium was prompted by the desire of Alexander to secure confirmation of the divine parentage which had been accorded the king in Egypt, 43
3 9
Quoted by Strabo x v n , 814 and Plut. Alex. 27. See Jacoby, Frag. Gr. Hist, II B, 645. ° Plut. Alex. 27. Plut. Alex. 27. On the genuineness of the letter see Jacoby, op. cit. n D , 421 and Wilcken, op. cit. p. 586. Callisthenes in Plut. I.e. See Tarn, Camb. Anc. Hist, vn, p . 398. For the view that the journey to the Ammonium was undertaken by Alexander to establish his fatherhood see Meyer, op. cit. pp. 302 ff. For a different interpretation see Tarn, Camb. Anc. Hist, vi, p. 377 and the recent 4
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the expedition at any rate resulted in giving him such con firmation. It thus provided him with the consecration which enabled him to proceed on his conquests with an assurance of the favor of heaven which had great weight among his Greek allies. The declaration that Alexander was the son of a god did not give him actual divinity. It carried with it no cult, no sacrifice, no priesthood in his honor, for these could have come to him only through the vote of the individual cities. But it did accord him potential divinity. As the language of the fourth gospel shows, it is easy to transfer the qualities of father to son, and subsequently the fact that Alexander was the son of Ammon became the very foundation of his divinity. For the moment, if we may believe Plutarch, it was only toward the barbarians that "he bore himself haughtily and as one fully persuaded of his divine birth and parentage," while with the Greeks "it was within limits and somewhat rarely that he assumed his divinity." But the painter Apelles at least was conscious of the possibilities of the divine fatherhood when he painted Alexander in the Artemisium at Ephesus with his father's thunderbolt in his hand. 44
45
46
r
There was another act of Alexander's in Egypt which w as of great importance for his cult. At one of the mouths of the Nile he founded the city of Alexandria, the first of a long series of towns to bear his name. There he must have received a cult as founder according to the regular traditions of the Greek city. If our interpretation of the character of such a cult is correct, we should expect it to be directed toward detailed investigation of Wilcken, "Alexanders Zug in die Oase Siwa," Sitzb. d. Preuss. Akad. 1929, to which reference has already been made. Against Wilcken's belief that Alexander's divine fatherhood was a by-product rather than an object of the journey see Berve, Gnomon v (1929), 370 ff. (answered by Wilcken, Sitzb. d. Preuss. Akad. 1930) and the articles of Lamar and of LehmannHaupt, Klio x x i v (1930), 63 ff. and 169 ff. Even the most careful sifting of sources can hardly be expected to attain certainty in uncovering Alexander's motives. See Kaerst, Gesch. d. Hellenismus i , pp. 564 f. « Plut. Alex. 28. Cic. Verr. iv, 135; Pliny, N.H. x x x v , 92; Plut. Mor. 360D. 44
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Alexander's guardian spirit, his daimon. Now it so happens that one version of the Alexander Romance associates Alex ander's worship in this city with the temple ©f agathos daimon, the protecting divinity of Alexandria. The god was identified in popular fancy with a serpent slain on the site when the city was built. Evidently the god was at the same time the genius loci and the guardian spirit of Alexander, and at his shrine sacrifices were made to the founder of the city. The analogy with Timoleon's cult of agathos daimon is noteworthy, and the association of Alexander with agathos daimon in the city which he founded provides\support for the view that the Greek city worshipped the living hero and par ticularly the living founder by making state sacrifices to his daimon such as, in Hellenistic times at least, the family made to the master of the house. At first the cult was probably no more than hero worship, but later in Alexandria Alexander became a god. The king must have had a similar cult in numerous other cities that he founded. The prominence which Alexandria on the Nile subsequently attained gave its cult a very peculiar preeminence. 47
In the autumn after Alexander returned from Egypt came his decisive victory over Darius at Gaugamela. After the death of Darius he assumed the position of lord and began his system of combining Persian and Greek into one empire. Attendant upon that combination came in 327 an event which has been as much discussed as any in connection with Alexander's divine honors, namely the attempt to introduce among his Greek and Macedonian subjects the Persian proskynesis. The Greek word proskynesis denotes an act of devotion to a god that consisted either in kissing the hand toward the image or—less often—in kissing the ground before it. The Greeks used the word to describe the Persian 4 7
See Class. Phil, x x n (1927), 162 ff. and W. W. Tarn's criticisms, J.H.S. XLVIII, 213 ff., of my use of the material from the Armenian version of the Alexander Romance. Ausfeld's readings which I used have been supported by Robert Blake's interpretation of the Armenian. See my note on "Alexander and the Serpent of Alexandria" in Class. Phil, x x v (1930), 375 ff.
DIVINITY OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
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custom of greeting the king by bowing down and kissing the earth. Alexander's conquest of the great Persian empire had brought him into close contact with Persian customs and manners, and in general he found it wise to adopt them. He left many of the Persian satraps in office and incorporated into his empire much of the imperial system of Persia. More and more definitely he developed his plans of amalgamating Greeks and Macedonians with the Persians. He took an important step when in 327 he married the beautiful Roxane, the daughter of a Bactrian noble; he went much further when at the great marriage festival in Susa some three years later he celebrated his own union with a daughter of Darius and at the same time the marriage of numbers of his Mace donians with Persian women. Even before that he had adopted Persian dress and had assumed for his Persian subjects all the pomp and magnificence of the oriental king, a splendor of which the Greek and Macedonian world of his day knew nothing. It was a new conception of monarchy, and one that accorded with Alexander's remarkable achievements. He was in the natural routine of court ceremony greeted by the Persians with obeisance, and he conceived the idea of intro ducing a similar form of salutation among his Greek and Macedonian subjects. The attempt to introduce the pros kynesis is very important for the development of Alexander's position as divine monarch, for, whatever the attitude of the Persians toward their king, the Greeks and doubtless the Macedonians interpreted the proskynesis as an act of worship, and Alexander's desire to have the ceremony observed before him was equivalent to a request for worship. There are two stories of the attempt to introduce the proskynesis. One of them relates that at a banquet at Bactra, where Alexander spent the winter of 328-327, the deeds of the king were praised as far in excess of the achieve ments of the demigods, Heracles and the Dioscuri, and one of the company made the proposal, already agreed upon with the king, that all present should follow him in prostrating
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themselves before the king, as a sign of his godhead; Callis thenes in a speech which showed that divinity was not for living men opposed the proposal and, since many of the Macedonians quite evidently agreed with him, it was aban doned. The other story records another incident. It re lates that at a banquet Alexander drank from a cup and passed it to a friend. His friend rose, drank, and then faced the hearth, and, after performing the proskynesis, kissed Alexander as he lay on the banquet couch and sat down again. All the others present did the same thing in turn except Callisthenes who drank and kissed the king but neglected to perform the proskynesis. The toast followed the regular form of the toast to an individual at the Greek banquet; it differed from the ordinary toast only in that it was accompanied by a proskynesis. Now the Greeks were familiar with a toast accompanied by a proskynesis. It was their custom to drink at their banquets a toast to agathos daimon, and to accompany the ceremony with a proskynesis. The Greeks who were present would naturally have seen in the ceremony an associ ation of Alexander with agathos daimon. 48
This ceremony is an adaptation to Greek banquet customs of the honor to the daimon of the Persian king which, as we have seen, was familiar at the Persian court. It was then a union of Greek and Persian elements such as characterized much of the ceremonial of Alexander's court. It associated the king with the good daimon who was usually identified with Dionysus. But it made him a daimon rather than a god, and so, like the cult he enjoyed in the cities he had founded, it was probably heroic rather than divine in character. It is noteworthy that in one of the cities, Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile, the cult was, as in this banquet ceremony, associated with agathos daimon. In its character it may have been not unlike the cult that the Achaemenidae enjoyed, for that, as we have seen, was like the cult of heroes rather than that of gods. The proskynesis under this form was probably not a 4 8
See Appendix n.
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21
failure. It is likely that it continued to accompany the toasts to Alexander that were drunk at banquets. It was natural from the tendencies of the times that the cult should go further and become divine in character, but that could only come about through formal decrees of the Greek cities. Within three years the Athenians, in response to a demand of Alexander, passed a decree declaring Alexander to be a god. And the god with whom they and perhaps other Greek cities identified him seems to have been the god of unmixed w ine, Dionysus, the true son of his father Zeus. The incidents attending the decrees are worth consideration. The development was perhaps aided by spontaneous honors. Certain Greek cities, more particularly the Ionian cities lately under Persia, had, we have seen, already shown a readiness to call their protectors gods, and it is probable that the cities newly freed from Persian rule expressed their gratitude to Alexander by divine honors such as we see them bestowing on his successors a few years later. Perhaps it was before Alexander's death that the league of the Ionians which he founded instituted yearly games, presumably on Alexander's birthday, at a grove near Teos. But the worship was undoubtedly furthered among the Greeks by Alexander him self. The days when he had gone forth to war against Asia as the leader of the Corinthian league were over. After he sent the Greek soldiers back from Persepolis in 330, he had no more need of the old alliance, and, though he probably never dissolved it, his attitude was henceforth a different one. In 324 when he sent to the Greek cities, apparently through the league, the demand to make him a god, he had "made the barbarians helots of the Greeks," as Isocrates had once urged Philip to do, and there was nothing more except for him to become a god. But the soul went out of the old relation with the Greek cities when the demand was made. T
49
Echoes have come down to us of the opposition which the proposed decree caused both at Sparta and at Athens. One 4 9
Strabo xiv, 644. See Kaerst, op. cit. p. 345 ff.
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proposal for the decree at Sparta was, " If Alexander wishes to be a god, we grant that he is a god." At Athens discussion waxed hot and heavy, and the decree was for a time postponed • Demosthenes opposed it at first, declaring that none but the native gods should be worshipped. Later he changed his attitude, and stated in a public speech that there was no necessity for opposing divine honors to Alexander. " Let him be the son of Zeus and of Poseidon too, if he wishes it," he urged. During the same discussion Demades told the Athenians to beware lest in keeping a guard on heaven they lose the earth. There is a saying attributed to the cynic Diogenes which has been used as an indication of the form the decree took. When the Athenians voted Alexander to be Dionysus, his remark was, " Y o u might also make me Sarapis." The story, like many others about Diogenes, is probably untrue, for Sarapis at the time would not have been sufficiently well known to give point to the saying. Never5 0
51
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53
5 4
55
5 0
Plut. MOT. 219 E. Ael. V. H. n, 19 gives the decree: kireidq 'A\k£av8pos PovXerai Beds elvai, earcc Beds. Timaeus ap. Polyb. x n , 12b, 2; Dinarchus, in Dem. 94. "Hyperides i, 31, 17. Val. Max. vn, 2, 13; Gnomol. Vat. 236, ed. Sternbach (Wien. Stud, x (1888), 221). Other references to the discussion in Athens are found in Aelian, V.H. v, 12; Ath. vi, 251 B ; Plut. Mor. 804 B; 842 D. Diog. Laert. vi, 63: ^r}t(Tap.€v<jov 'Adrjpalojv A\k£av8pov kibvvaov, " K<x/ze," €0r;, " Xapairiv TroirjaaTe." See A. D . Nock's article, J.H.S. XLVIII (1928), 21 ff. As far as Diogenes' own date is concerned, the remark is possible, for he and Alexander are said to have died on the same night (Demetrius ap. Diog. L. vi, 79), though the famous story of the meeting of the two men after Alexander's world conquests is impos sible. I do not agree with Nock that the improbability of the story is an indication that the statement about the decree is impossible. Apocryphal sayings are usually placed in a plausible setting. Take another one attributed to Diogenes. We may doubt whether when he saw the votive offerings in Samothrace he said, "There would be many more if those who were not saved had also made dedications," but we need not therefore doubt that there were votive offerings in Samothrace. The decree probably enrolled Alexander in state cult as 'A\ei;ap8pos Aids vlos and the words of Diogenes Laertius indicate that in the popular mind the decree was tantamount to an identification with Dionysus. It is of course possible, as Nock suggests, that the popular associa tion of Alexander and Dionysus began later but there is no way of attaining certainty on that point. Vollgraff, Bull. Corr. Hell, LI (1927), 423 ff. has sug51
8 3
54
55
1
DIVINITY OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
23
theless it is perhaps revealing for the popular interpretation of the decree. Alexander's own name was apparently used alone as his divine title, but it appears from the words attributed to Demosthenes that the fact that he was the son of Zeus was incorporated in the decree. Now Dionysus also was son of Zeus and it was probably at this time that men began to make the identification between Alexander and Dionysus that became popular later. After the decree had been passed, ambassadors came to Alexander in Babylon. They came wearing the crowns that belonged to the ambassadors sent to the oracles of the gods and the great Greek games. They crowned Alexander with golden crowns. They approached him then as the god whom their decrees had made. 56
At last Alexander was a revealed god on earth, a praesens deus. Speedily there grew up a legend of Alexander, the god. There was abundant material for it, for never was mortal more truly the stuff of which gods are made. In the legend he was pictured as Dionysus incarnate, the unconquered god, journey ing to the uttermost parts of the earth. On his Indian journey, which made the same sort of appeal to the imagination that the discovery of America did centuries later, he was described as travelling in all the splendor of a Dionysiac procession. Plutarch's description is explicit: "Alexander himself was conveyed along slowly by eight horses w hile he feasted day and night continuously with his companions on a dais built upon a lofty scaffolding . . . and wagons without number followed, some with purple and embroidered canopies, others protected from the sun by boughs of trees which were kept fresh and green. These conveyed the rest of his friends and commanders, who were all garlanded and drinking. Not a shield was to be seen, not a helmet, not a spear, but along the whole march, with cups and drinking horns and flagons the soldiers kept dipping wine from huge casks and mixing bowls, T
gested a restoration of the Delphic paean to Dionysus which would make the identification much earlier than the decrees of 323, but his arguments do not seem convincing. Arr. An. vn, 23, 2. 5 6
24
T H E DIVINITY OF THE R O M A N EMPEROR
and pledging each other, some as they marched along, others lying down, while pipes and flutes, stringed instruments and song and revelling cries of women filled every place with abundant music." The sober-minded Arrian notes that he can find no word of these Dionysiac revels in the reliable accounts of the expedition. Nevertheless it was as Dionysus that Alexander lived on. His achievements even affected the legends of the god who henceforth, like Alexander, was credited with an Indian journey. About Alexander himself in the role of Dionysus gathered a great body of story that lived on in the East and inspired a great cycle of medieval romances in the western world. Somehow the stories took firmer hold of his associations with Dionysus, though his successors emphasized equally strongly his relation to Zeus. When Alexander died in Babylon in 323 he was heir to the worship of the Pharaohs of old in Egypt; he had succeeded to the veneration accorded by his subjects to the Great King in the vast empire of the Persians; he had a cult as founder in Greek cities variously estimated at from twenty to seventy in number, scattered through every part of the vast empire he had founded, and finally he was in possession of newly decreed divinity from the cities of the Greek mainland. His great conquests had moreover created a legend of his mi raculous personality which tended to increase the belief in his divinity, and there were stories abroad of a serpent god as his father and of divine manifestations supposed to have revealed his destiny in his youth and to have accompanied him in all his 5 7
58
59
60
6 7
Plut. Alex. 67. The translation is from Perrin's version, Loeb text. Arr. An. vi, 28, 1. Nock, op. cit., noting that the stories of Alexander as Dionysus cannot be traced back to one source contemporary with Alexander, concludes that the identification grew up after his death. Arrian's statement is certainly to be accepted as proof of the legendary character of the story of the Indian journey, but the absence of other earlier evidence does not prove that the identification is dated later than Alexander's lifetime. Legends do not necessarily begin with our earliest evidence for them. See Nock's admirable account of the growth of the legend of Dionysus, op. cit. 23 ff. See V. Tscherikower, " D i e hellenistischen Stadtegriindungen von Alex ander dem grossen bis auf die Romerzeit," Philol. Suppl. x i x . 5 8
6 9
6 0
DIVINITY OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC
EAST
25
vast journeyings and conquerings. He was heir at once to the oriental legends that surrounded the world ruler, the emanation of the sun god, and to the Greek belief in the divine in man and the Greek hope for the saviour to bring order out of the chaos that had enveloped the city state. His early death increased the power of the legend surround ing his name and made him a god more effectively than a thousand decrees. A man past the reach of envy and hatred has a far better chance of retaining divinity than the man who can still be attacked by the hatred and malice of other men. His death was described not as a termination of his life but as a change. He had exchanged the life among men for a life with the gods. Like the Egyptian Pharaohs who had preceded him, he had as a god " departed into his horizon. . . . His limbs had mingled with the god that had begat him." He was no longer incarnate among men but con tinued to exercise his divine power with the gods. It was not yet the custom, as it had been in Egypt, to emphasize the translation of the deified man to heaven, but the way was prepared for the idea to develop. It was on Alexander's divinity that his successors attempted to establish their power. His very name became the name of a god without any prefix such as Caesar later required to make his apotheosis apparent. His generals, after the Greek Eumenes set up the royal tent with his throne and sceptre as a place of worship, offered sacrifices to him. They used his 61
62
63
61
On the Parian Stone (inscribed 264-263) where the verb TeXevT&v is used for the death of the earlier kings, Alexander's death is called neraXXayr]. Similarly Eratosthenes, as quoted by Clement of Alexandria, Strom, i, 336 B speaks of Philip's reXevrri and Alexander's neraXXayq. The idea seems to date from the time of Alexander's death, for the decree of the Nesiotes (Ditt. O.G.I.S. 4) has the words 'AXel-avdpos 5idX[Xa£ej> TO/X fxer* dpdp6)]iru)v PLOP. Cf. Diod. XVIII, 56, 2 : ' AXe^dvdpov )U€raXXd£a*>ros k£ kvdp&irctiv. The verbs SiaXXdrreu', IxeraXXciTTeLi/* vedlaraadai, are used of the death of later Hellenistic kings, some times with the phrase ets Oeovs. See especially the monument of Canopus, Ditt. O.G.I.S. 56, 1, 95, and the material collected by Krispi, Ath. Mitt, XXII (1897), 186, and Kornemann, Klio I (1901), 61, n. 1. Wilcken, Gott. Gel. Anz. 1895, 141. Diod. XVIII, 61, 1. On the interpretation of the passage see Farneil, 62
6 3
J.H.S.
X L I X (1929), 79 ff.
26
T H E DIVINITY OF THE R O M A N EMPEROR
name with the names of the gods as watchword on the battle field. Those who claimed to succeed to his power placed his portrait with the horns of the god Ammon on the coins that his ancestor Heracles had once adorned. In two of the great kingdoms formed from his empire, Syria of the Seleucids and Egypt of the Ptolemies, his cult became the centre of the organization of the state. In Egypt it became even more important than in Syria, for his body was taken there for burial. Its original destination was the Ammonium, but a convenient oracle led Ptolemy, the Macedonian satrap of Egypt, to determine to inter it instead in the city of Alexandria, destined perhaps from that very fact to become the greatest centre of culture and trade of the Hellenistic world. Alexander was buried first at Memphis and later, after the construction of a great Mausoleum, his body was removed to Alexandria. At the tomb he received heroic honors such as were due to the great dead. Like his ancestor Heracles, who was at the same time a shade and a member of the concourse of immortals, he was honored both as a god and as a mortal hero who had died. His birthday became a great national festival both in Egypt and in the kingdom of the Seleucids. His divinity was supported from Egypt by semi-romantic essays, the appearance of which may perhaps be due to organized propaganda such as the official form of his cult indicated. Soon after his death a Macedonian, Leon of Pella, wrote his account of the gods of Egypt in the form of a letter that purported to have been written by Alexander to his mother Olympias. It gave the supposed revelations of an Egyptian priest to Alexander as to the nature of the gods. They had, the priest declared, once been men; they were simply great dynasties of kings of former times. They were all benefactors of men, but of their number none had so greatly aided the human race as Dionysus Osiris, the god, be it noted, with whom Alexander was identified. Shortly 64
65
6 4
6 5
Diod. XVIII, 28, 4. Cf. Aug.
Civ. Dei
VIII, 5; x n ,
Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Leon.
11; Min.
Fel. Oct. 21, 3.
Cf. Geffcken in
DIVINITY OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
27
afterwards Hecateus of Abdera in his Aegyptiaca also repre sented the gods as great kings of the past, and Dionysus Osiris as the foremost civilizing force. Then came the Sacred History of Euhemerus with the same interpretation of the gods and the insistence on the fact that in attempting to 'mould about themselves a certain overwhelming and divine power/ they had been instrumental in deifying themselves. In his romance it was Zeus who was made the chief of these gods—the father of Alexander with whom the king was also identified. These writings, which contributed to the growing scepticism by bringing the gods to the level of men, supported the godhead of Alexander by declaring that the other gods had once been men like him and at the same time gave aid to the claims to divinity that the new kings themselves speedily made. It was only in Alexander's own Macedonia that his divinity apparently found no favor. Antipater, the greatest of his Macedonian generals, was the only one who after the death of the king refused to call him a god; he declared it impious to do so, and apparently the Macedonian dynasty set up by Demetrius' son Antigonus Gonatas gave no divine worship to their king whom the rest of the world spoke of as a god. Macedonian coins continued the old Heracles types. In Greece too, usually under Macedonian control in the next century and a half, there seems to have been no enduring 66
67
68
69
70
66
Hecataeus is known chiefly from the account of Egypt in the first book of Diodorus. See Schwartz, Rh. Mus. XL (1885), 223 ff. Euhemerus ap. Sext. Emp. arfu. Math, ix, 17: aveirXaaav irepi avrovs virepPaWovo-av re KCLI Beiav bvvap.iv, evBev nai rots iroWols tvoyXaB'qaa.v Beol. On the significance of Leon, Hecetaeus, and Euhemerus see Kaerst, Gesch. d. Hellenismus II , pp. 178 ff.; Jacoby in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Hekataeus of Abdera, and s.v. Euemeros. Jacoby, ib. s.v. Euemeros 967 does not think that Euhemerus was carrying on propaganda for the new regimes because there was no hint of selfdeification in the Diadochoi of his day. (He dates the Sacred History about 280). But, as we shall see, there has been too great a tendency to deny selfdeification among the earlier Diadochoi. Suidas, s.v. Antipatros. See Tarn, Antigonos Gonatas, pp. 250, 390, 435. 6 7
2
6 8
6 9
7 0
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T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
cult of the great conqueror, though people in the unending quest for a saviour gave divine honors to other men with a readiness that was indicative of the training that Alexander's honors had given them. Even the Macedonian kings received in Greece homage that seems to have been denied to them at home. It was partly the readiness of the Greek cities of the main land and of the Ionian coast and islands to welcome a saviour that gave rise to the cult of the successors of Alexander. Divine honors were given to them even before they took the name of king—to Craterus who was honored with a paean at Delphi perhaps before his death in 3 2 1 ; to Antigonus who had a festival, a contest, an altar, and a divine image at Scepsis, in the Troad, as early as 3 1 1 ; to Ptolemy who was hailed by the island league as a saviour. But the honors became more widespread after the chief men assumed the title of king in 306. The Athenians hailed Demetrius and Antigonus as saviour gods and appointed a priest for them; they added two new tribes to the city and named them for the special rulers; they named a month and a special day for Demetrius and called their Dionysia Demetria thus associ ating their new saviour with the god with whom they had probably identified Alexander. The Sicyonians renamed their city Demetrias and made Demetrius their new founder with honors that are specifically described as divine —not heroic, as honors for the founder usually were. The people of Ilium 71
72
73
7 4
75
71
Hermippus ap. Ath. xv, 696 E. Geyer, in Pauly-Wissowa, Suppl. iv, s.v. Krateros suggests that this paean was not sung until after the death of Craterus. Dittenberger, O.G.I.S. 6. Ditt. Syll* 390; see n. 13 there. For a full discussion of the evidence for the cult of Demetrius see Kenneth Scott, A.J.P. XLIX (1928), 137 ff.; 219 ff. The investigation is important for the material that it supplies for the worship of one of the early kings during his lifetime. The best known detail of his worship is the famous Ithyphallus of 290 B.C. in which he was hailed as an incarnate god (Ath. vi, 253 c ) . The association of Demetrius with Dionysus is of special interest. Diod. x x , 102, 3. 72
73
74
76
DIVINITY OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
29
erected an altar and instituted sacrifices and an agon for Seleucus and named a month in his honor. The Rhodians received express permission from the oracle of Ammon to worship Ptolemy as a god —a permission that the oracle had not given to Alexander for the honors which he wished to give to his friend Hephaestion. The people of Priene and of Samothrace erected altars to Lysimachus. It would be easy to add to the instances of divine honors. Moreover to these honors, which must have been, in part at least, spontaneous, was added the encouragement which the new monarchs in their desire to establish their rule gave to their own worship. They followed Alexander's example and established numerous new cities named for themselves, their wives, their parents, and their children. In these cities they had cults as founders, and, as was the case with Demetrius, at Sicyon, it is probable that worship was given to them as gods rather than as heroes. They probably had eponymous priests instituted in their honor in these cities. For Cassander there is a record of such a priest in the Thracian city that he founded and called by his name. After his death in 2 9 8 the priest went over to the cult of his successor, Lysimachus. These widely scattered cities, with their cults of Alexander's successors, provided the kings with a ready form of deifica tion which they themselves no doubt encouraged. But the strongest reason for assuming that they followed Alexander in making godhead a fundamental part of their system is found in their coins, on which in the latter part of their rule the first Ptolemy and the first Seleucus began to substitute their own 76
77
78
79
80
7 6
Ditt. O.G.I.S. 212; 444. Paus. i, 8, 6. Ditt. O.G.I.S. 11; Syll* 372. On the growth of the honors see E. R. Bevan, " T h e Deification of Kings in the Greek Cities," Eng. Hist. Rev. xvi (1901), 625 ff. See also Ferguson's im portant recent treatment, Camb. Anc. Hist, vn, pp. 13-22. In this whole discussion I am much indebted to Kaerst's admirable appendix on the Hellen istic iuler cult in Gesch. d. Hellenismus n , pp. 376 ff. Ditt. Syll* 332 and 380. The first document, which belongs to the life time of Cassander, is dated simply tylepews. 7 7
7 8
7 9
2
8 0
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
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portraits for the image of Alexander and other gods. It was with Zeus that Ptolemy and Seleucus particularly identified themselves. Ptolemy placed the god's aegis and his thunder bolt on the coins of Egypt and on his own image and, like Clearchus, named his ill-fated eldest son Thunderbolt; Seleucus received, perhaps before his death, the cult title of Zeus Nicator; at Lemnos the people named a libation Seleucus Soter. The fact that under the first Ptolemies and the first Seleucus there is no evidence for the official state cult that later existed in both kingdoms is usually interpreted as meaning that the first kings were not formally deified until after their death. But the state cult as we know it later seems to be simply a development of the worship given the kings in the cities which they themselves had founded. Their eponymous priests in the cities became the priests of a whole province or region with official charge of the worship of the reigning king and the earlier representatives of his dynasty. For the empire of the Seleucids we have no knowledge of the Persian organiza tions which may already have existed as a basis for the worship, but the cult as we see it seems Greek in that it apparently starts from a city organization. In Egypt there were two forms of the cult. One was the ancient Egyptian type which with its unchanging traditions saluted the Ptolemies, as it had the Pharaohs, as sons of all the gods and goddesses and sharers with them in the worship in their temples. That form of the cult is attested by the fulsome language of priestly decrees preserved in trilingual forms—the most famous of them being the well-known Rosetta stone. But there was also an official state cult in which the Egyptian priest had no 81
82
81
Phylarch. ap. Ath. vi, 255 A. See Bevan, J.H.S. x x (1900), 26 ff.; Stein in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Seleukos. The manifold possibilities of connections with gods are apparent from the fact that Seleucus was also reported to be the son of Apollo. Dittenberger, O.G.I.S. 90. Cf. also the Canopic decree, ib. 56, and the recently discovered stele of Ptolemy IV. For the latter see H. Gauthier and H. Sottas, Un decret trilingue en Vhonneur de Ptolemee iy, Cairo, 1925. For a summary see Klio x x i (1927), 107 f. 82
DIVINITY OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
31
part, a worship that was Greek in form. That cult centered in lower Egypt about Alexander as he was worshipped in Alexandria, and the first Ptolemy did not allow any worship of himself to interfere with the conqueror's divine isolation. Instead, in the kingdom of Upper Egypt he founded a city Ptolemais to bear his own name, and there instituted his own worship and his own priest. The cult eventually became the centre of the ruler worship in Upper Egypt. In Alexandria Ptolemy seems not to have had divine w orship until his son consecrated him there after his death. But Alexandria as the real capital of the new kingdom was not long to remain without the cult of the living monarch. The second Ptolemy and his much loved sister-wife were, probably in the year 2 7 1 , formally enshrined in state cult with the founder Alexander. Later the priest of Alexander had under his care the worship of all the Ptolemies—living sovereigns, queen as well as king, and all the dead members of the dynasty. From this time on the living monarchs as well as the dead were officially termed gods. The reigning Seleucids, though they rarely called the living king god, assumed other cult titles that belonged to divinity. They were apparently the first to use the con spicuous epithet Epiphanes, which emphasized their claim to be revealed gods on earth; from them the Ptolemies took it over. 83
84
85
r
86
83
The eponymous priest in the earliest documents dating in the reign of Ptolemy Soter does not bear the name of Alexander, but it is now generally agreed that he was priest of the founder. For the evidence see Kaerst, op. cit. pp. 385 ff. For the attitude of Alexander's successors toward his distinctions as a city founder see Strabo's comments on Alexandria Troas (XIII, 593): tdoi-e yap eu(T€/3cs tXvai TOVS 'AXe^audpou 8iad€^ap.evovs, eKelvov irporepov Kri^ecv eiruvvpovs iroXeis, eZ0' kavr&v. Ptolemais was known in Egyptian as Psoi, the name of a god who was equated with the Greek agathos daimon. The name seems to suggest that Ptolemy himself was identified with the serpent god, as we have seen Alexander was at Alexandria. There is no evidence for an eponymous priesthood for the region until the reign of Ptolemy IV (see Plaumann, in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. hiereis (1437 f.), but it is likely that the priest of Ptolemy, like the priest of Alexander at Alexandria, goes back to a much earlier period. See Pfister in Pauly-W issowa, Suppl. iv, s.v. Epiphanes. 84
85
8 6
T
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
30
portraits for the image of Alexander and other gods. It was with Zeus that Ptolemy and Seleucus particularly identified themselves. Ptolemy placed the god's aegis and his thunder bolt on the coins of Egypt and on his own image and, like Clearchus, named his ill-fated eldest son Thunderbolt; Seleucus received, perhaps before his death, the cult title of Zeus Nicator; at Lemnos the people named a libation Seleucus Soter. The fact that under the first Ptolemies and the first Seleucus there is no evidence for the official state cult that later existed in both kingdoms is usually interpreted as meaning that the first kings were not formally deified until after their death. But the state cult as we know it later seems to be simply a development of the worship given the kings in the cities which they themselves had founded. Their eponymous priests in the cities became the priests of a whole province or region with official charge of the worship of the reigning king and the earlier representatives of his dynasty. For the empire of the Seleucids we have no knowledge of the Persian organiza tions which may already have existed as a basis for the worship, but the cult as we see it seems Greek in that it apparently starts from a city organization. In Egypt there were two forms of the cult. One was the ancient Egyptian type which with its unchanging traditions saluted the Ptolemies, as it had the Pharaohs, as sons of all the gods and goddesses and sharers with them in the worship in their temples. That form of the cult is attested by the fulsome language of priestly decrees preserved in trilingual forms—the most famous of them being the well-known Rosetta stone. But there was also an official state cult in which the Egyptian priest had no 81
82
81
Phylarch. ap. Ath. vi, 255 A. See Bevan, J.H.S. x x (1900), 26 ff.; Stein in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Seleukos. The manifold possibilities of connections with gods are apparent from the fact that Seleucus was also reported to be the son of Apollo. Dittenberger, O.G.I.S. 90. Cf. also the Canopic decree, ib. 56, and the recently discovered stele of Ptolemy IV. For the latter see H. Gautbier and H. Sottas, Un decret trilingue en Vhonneur de Ptolemee / y , Cairo, 1925. For a summary see Klio x x i (1927), 107 f. 82
DIVINITY OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
part, a worship that was Greek in form. That cult centered in lower Egypt about Alexander as he was worshipped in Alexandria, and the first Ptolemy did not allow any worship of himself to interfere with the conqueror's divine isolation. Instead, in the kingdom of Upper Egypt he founded a city Ptolemais to bear his own name, and there instituted his own worship and his own priest. The cult eventually became the centre of the ruler worship in Upper Egypt. In Alexandria Ptolemy seems not to have had divine worship until his son consecrated him there after his death. But Alexandria as the real capital of the new kingdom was not long to remain without the cult of the living monarch. The second Ptolemy and his much loved sister-wife were, probably in the year 271, formally enshrined in state cult with the founder Alexander. Later the priest of Alexander had under his care the worship of all the Ptolemies—living sovereigns, queen as well as king, and all the dead members of the dynasty. From this time on the living monarchs as well as the dead were officially termed gods. The reigning Seleucids, though they rarely called the living king god, assumed other cult titles that belonged to divinity. They were apparently the first to use the con spicuous epithet Epiphanes, which emphasized their claim to be revealed gods on earth; from them the Ptolemies took it over. 83
84
85
86
83
The eponymous priest in the earliest documents dating in the reign of Ptolemy Soter does not bear the name of Alexander, but it is now generally agreed that he was priest of the founder. For the evidence see Kaerst, op. cit. pp. 385 ff. For the attitude of Alexander's successors toward his distinctions as a city founder see Strabo's comments on Alexandria Troas (XIII, 593): Uo£e y a p evvefies eluai TOVS 'AXe^avd pov 8ia8€i-ap.evovs, kKelvov irporepov KTt£eii> kwcopvpovs 84
7r6X€ts, e!0' 85
kavr&v.
Ptolemais was known in Egyptian as Psoi, the name of a god who was equated with the Greek ayathos daimon. The name seems to suggest that Ptolemy himself was identified with the serpent god, as we have seen Alexander was at Alexandria. There is no evidence for an eponymous priesthood for the region until the reign of Ptolemy IV (see Plaumann, in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. hiercis (1437 f.), but it is likely that the priest of Ptolemy, like the priest of Alexander at Alexandria, goes back to a much earlier period. See Pfister in Pauly-Wissowa, Suppl. iv, s.v. Epiphanes. 8 6
32
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
With this worship of the king as a revealed god on earth there persisted the belief in the king's daimon. It was not easy to separate the forms of heroic and divine honors, and moreover there was the Egyptian belief in the ka and the Persian idea of the fravashi to keep the conception from dying out. A recently published papyrus shows us a man toward the end of the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus taking oath by the daimon of the king and the queen. Of greater im portance w as the idea of Tyche, the goddess of chance, who was thought of as presiding over every king and every city. From the beginning of the reign of the Seleucids dates the first of the famous personifications of cities, the Tyche of Antioch, Seleucus' famous foundation on the Orontes. The Fortune of the King and the Fortune of the city were often not clearly distinguished from each other, and sometimes the cult of Tyche with the king was in a sense an association between king and city. It was by the king's Tyche rather than by his daimon that oaths were usually taken in the kingdoms of Egypt and Syria. In the conception of Tyche there may have been something of the idea of kingly glory that had surrounded the Persian king in the peculiar conception of the Persian hvareno which is prominent in the Avesta; apparently as a symbol of this idea, the kings seem to have had the sacred fire carried before them in their processions. 87
r
88
89
The cities of the Ionian coast and the islands were free in giving divine honors to their lords of the moment without discrimination as to whether they were Ptolemies or Seleucids. Moreover, there arose a new house of princes to claim such honors in Asia Minor, the rulers of Pergamum, one of whom, 87
Pap. Soc. Ital. iv, 361. The oath is not of formal official character and for that reason is a more valuable indication of popular belief. See also Aegyptische Urkunden aus den Museen zu Berlin v, p. 1257, 10, as quoted by Preisigke, Worterbuch, s.v. dalnoov. The daimon of a Parthian king, probably Phraates IV who came to the throne in 37 B.C., is named in an important new inscription from Susa. See Appendix i, n. 32. See Ruhl in Roscher, s.v. Tyche. See Otto, 'ETrtruMjStoi/ (in honor of Swoboda), pp. 197 ff. But the fire seems more closely related to the fire of Hestia. See Appendix i. 8 8
8 9
D I V I N I T Y OF K I N G S IN THE HELLENISTIC E A S T
33
Attalus, after his victory over the Galatians in 240, assumed the title of king. But the form of the cult which signalized his rule was less pronounced than was the worship in Egypt and Syria. The king was not divine during his life time but after his death he was enrolled in official state cult as a god. The coins did not have on them the portrait of the reigning king, but regularly showed the features of Philetaerus, the first prince of the line. Yet when the power of Pergamum extended over a large section of Asia Minor in the reign of Eumenes II, this condition of affairs was not destined to last. The king's portrait began to appear on the coins and an eponymous priest of the reigning king was established. But still it was only the dead kings who were called gods. The case is important in its relation to the subsequent cult of Augustus. 90
The cult in Pergamum is also of special interest because of the association of the king with Dionysus. Attalus the First was called the son of a bull or the bull-horned in token of his supposed descent from Dionysus, and there was an im portant cult in the city offered to Dionysus Kathegemon, the ancestor of the house. The connection of the dynasty with Dionysus is perhaps indicated by the cista, the emblem of the god, which appears on the "cistophoric" coins issued from the mints of Pergamum and other cities for general currency in Asia. 91
In Greece proper, mainly under the influence of Macedonia, there was more tendency to worship the kings than there was in Macedonia. The ruling monarchs had their sacrifices and their regular festivals at Athens and the city tribes established in honor of the ancestors of the Macedonian dynasty, De metrius and Antigonus, continued in existence until Mace donian power waned. In time the Macedonian sacrifices and festivals were done away with, and in place of the tribes of 9 0
See Cardinaii, II Regno di Pergamo. As has been noted, the Seleucids were sparing in their use of 6e6s for the living king, but they regularly had priests of the living king. Von Prott, Ath. Mitt, x x v n (1902), 161 ff.; 265 f. 4 91
34
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
Demetrius and Antigonus a new one was named for Attalus of Pergamum. The two great leaders of the Achaean league, Aratus and Philopoemen, had honors that rivalled those offered to the kings. Aratus in his native Sicyon was hailed as agathos daimon by the people to whose houses he came; the title suggests an informal hero cult in his life time. The extensive honors that were accorded to him after his death— they included a priest and a tomb in the agora of Sicyon, for the erection of which the Delphic oracle granted special permission—seem to have been given to him as a god rather than as a hero. Such was certainly the case with Philopoemen, the other great general of the Achaean League, who was buried with great pomp in the agora of his city Megalopolis. 92
93
94
92
Polyb. xvi, 25. Polyb. VIII, 14; Plut. Arat. 53; Paus, n, 8, 1; n, 9, 4. Plut. Philop. 21; Diod. x x i x , 18; Livy, x x x i x , 50; Ditt. Syll* 624. The inscription definitely prescribes r t / z a t iaoOeot. Dittenberger's heading, Philopoemenis honores heroici is misleading. 93
94
CHAPTER
II
T H E DIVINITY OF M A N AND K I N G IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
When Roman power extended to the East, divine honors for the ruler had become a fundamental characteristic of the rule that prevailed in Greek lands. Divinity established the binding authority of the king's command and as such was more a matter of practical politics than of religion. Hence it was readily offered by Greek peoples to the representatives of Roman power. The first place where the Romans en countered the eastern Greek conception of the ruler as divine was in Sicily where Marcellus in 212 succeeded in the capture of Syracuse and the overthrow of the Carthaginian govern ment there. The Syracusans welcomed him as a saviour and established a great festival in his honor, presumably on his birthday. The honors pointed the way to further develop ments. They were, for instance, in Sicily itself the direct antecedents of the flattering distinctions offered a far less worthy Roman, the infamous Gaius Verres, who, in order to make his own position more distinguished, abolished the games to Marcellus. 1
2
In Greece the victories of Titus Flamininus over Philip of Macedon and the consequent liberation of Greece which he proclaimed in the name of himself and the senate at the Isthmian games were the signal for extensive homage all through Greece for the man now popularly and truthfully called saviour. The Chalcidians dedicated a gymnasium to him with Heracles and a Delphinium with Apollo. They also created a priesthood of Flamininus which was still in existence 1
See Ferguson's important article, "Legalized Absolutism en route from Greece to Rome," Am. Hist. Rev. XVIII (1912), 29 ff. See Cic. Verr. n, 2, 51: Marcellia tolluntur maximo gemitu et luctu civitatis quern illi diem festum cum recentibus beneficiis C. Marcelli debitum reddebant. turn generi nomini familiae Marcellorum maxima voluntate tribuebant. 2
35
36
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
in the days of Plutarch and they composed a paean which celebrated him along with Zeus and Roma and the Roman Faith. "Hail Paean Apollo, hail Titus our saviour," it ended. Titus himself soon became accustomed to the termi nology that was used for him and adopted the Greek custom when he set up a votive offering at Delphi in which he de scribed himself as godlike. He suggested his divine descent when he called himself a son of Aeneas. He was moreover 3
4
FIG. 1.
Portrait of Flamininus.
Aureus.
the first Roman to enjoy a special prerogative of the Oriental monarch. His portrait was placed on a series of gold coins (Fig. 1) issued by a city of Greece. In the paean at Chalcis w e note that Flamininus was called upon with Roma. She was a goddess who was unknown in Roman cult, but she was created by the Greeks and was worshipped in much the same way as was the Fortune of the cities of the Hellenistic East. She had a particularly im portant place in the cult offered to the new power of the Romans, for she had a permanence which did not belong to the consuls who changed every year. Soon she had her temples in cities even beyond the eastern boundaries of Greece. The cities of Asia Minor were chafing under the authority of King Antiochus of Syria, and as early as the year 195—stante adhuc Punica urbe et validis per Asiam regibus—the city of 5
T
3 Plut. Flam. 16. See the inscription from Delphi quoted by Plutarch, Flam. 12. At Gythium in the Peloponnesus Flamininus was hailed as saviour and had a festival which was still celebrated in the time of Tiberius. See Dittenberger, Syll. 592 (Dessau 8766) and the inscription of the time of Tiberius recently published by Kugeas, ^EWTJVLKCL I, 17 ff. See Bahrfeldt, Romische Goldmunzenpragung, pp. 22 ff. 4
z
5
D I V I N I T Y OF M A N AND KING IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
37
6
Smyrna erected a temple of Roma. After the war with Antiochus other cities were ready to follow the example, and temples of Roma and games called Romaia were established in numerous Ionian cities which had been restored from tribu taries of the Syrian kings to positions of real or relative liberty. Just as at Chalcis Flamininus had had his cult with Roma, so in these cities Roman generals—consuls, or according to Sulla's later arrangements, proconsuls—shared with Roma in cult. They were thus worshipped, as the kings had been, with the Fortunes of the cities they represented. In Ephesus there was a shrine of Roma and Publius Servilius Isauricus, proconsul from 46 to 44. 7
8
Naturally the generals, like the kings before them, received in person more enthusiastic worship than the abstraction which represented the city. The fragmentary records available have given us knowledge of only a small number of the temples, priests, and festivals which must have been voted to them. The province w as particularly ready to build temples for the generals who could be regarded as special benefactors. Thus when Manius Aquillius, the consul of 129 B.C., under took the organization of the province of Asia, he was given the honor of a priest in Pergamum, and he was the object of special prayers in the Prytaneum. Thus too Lucullus, after "filling all Asia with order and peace" and giving the cities 9
r
10
6
See Tac. Ann. iv, 56, 1.
A temple of Roma was erected at Alabanda in
170 B.C. (Cf. Livy XLIII, 6). 7
See Pfister in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. ^Poifxaia. For games at Magnesia in the 2nd Century see Ditt. Syll* 1079; at Stratonicea, I.G.R. iv, 247. For priests of this shrine see Jahreshe/te des oester. Inst, XVIII (1915), 282; Forsch. in Ephesos in, p. 149. These are the only inscriptional records pre served from the Republic that show the union of Roma and the proconsul in cult. For Servilius as Soter and Euergetes of Pergamum see I.G.R. iv, 433. For a full collection of the honors of Servilius see Munzer, Romische Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien, p. 356, n. 2. See the valuable list of divine honors for Roman magistrates published by Seyrig, Rev. Arch, x x i x (1929), 95, n 4. The only republican magistrate cited who is not discussed in these pages is Caesar's legate Cn. Domitius Calvinus, who was addressed as 0e6s in a private dedication from Cappadocia. Cf. Cagnat, I.G.R. in, 108. See Cagnat, I.G.R. iv, 292, 1. 39; 293, n, 1. 24. 8
9
1 0
38
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
processions and contests, was honored with games called the Lucullea. The whole system was simply a continuation of the type of cult that had been offered to the Hellenistic rulers, and the Romans permitted it, and sometimes even fostered it, merely as a practical political expedient. In time the Roman governors became used to the honors, and it was almost a matter of course that the representatives of Rome should have monuments and festivals associated with their names. The senate even provided definitely that permission be given to collect money for a temple and a monument for the pro consul, and to gather another sum for the performance of regular festivals for the men thus proclaimed as saviours and benefactors of the cities of the Greek world. The custom belongs particularly to the Greek cities of Asia where worship of the kings had been far more effectively organized than had the more or less incidental ruler worship of the cities of Greece proper. Some of the festivals established continued for a long time to be celebrated. That was particularly true of the Mucia which honored the governorship of the great Roman pontiff Mucius Scaevola. Similarly the priesthood of Servilius persisted. T o be sure every Roman was not ready to accept the homage. Thus Cicero refused the temple which the people of Asia desired to erect to him and his brother while the latter was proconsul of Asia; he wrote his brother that though he knew that the honor was not less for him than for the Roman people (probably Roma was to share it with them), still he thought it wise to refuse for fear of arousing the envy of men to whom such honors were not due. Later, when 11
12
13
14
11
Plut. Lucull. 23. Cic. Flac. 55 ff.; cf. ad Q. Fr. i, 1, 26. On the custom of erecting temples to Roman proconsuls see Suet. Aug. 52: templa quamvis sciret etiam proconsulibus decerni solere. Cic. Verr. n, 2, 51; Dittenberger, O.G.I.S. 438, 439. For a full considera tion of the evidence see Foucart, Rev. Phil, x x v (1901), 85-91. The priesthood of Roma and P. Servilius Isauricus still existed under the Empire. Cic. ad Q. Fr. i, 1, 26: cum ad templum monumentumque nostrum civitates pecunias decrevissent, cumque id et pro meis magnis meritis et pro tuis maximis 12
13
14
DIVINITY OF M A N AND K I N G IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
39
governor of the neighboring province of Cilicia, Cicero claimed that he had accepted no statues, shrines, or quadrigae. His predecessor Appius Claudius was less modest. After he left Cilicia he was intent on the completion of the temple the people were building in his honor and he felt that Cicero failed to show proper zeal in securing its completion. This Appius gave his name to a city which was founded or probably refounded in his honor; its citizens in ancient times were called Appiani, and it probably survives in the modern Abia. Sulla after his victories was honored in the East by an issue of gold coins with his portrait on their reverse (Fig. 2). 15
16
17
1 8
FIG. 2.
Equestrian Statue of Sulla on reverse of Aureus.
Pompey, as a true saviour of the Orient, had many a temple built to him in the cities which he had freed from the ravages of the pirates and the power of Mithradates. Mytilene hailed him as a god and saviour and named a month in his honor. A city of Cilicia which was restored by him took the name Pompeiopolis and began to count a new era from the 19
beneficiis summa sua voluntate fecissent, nominatimque lex exciperet, ut ad ternplum et monumentum capere liceret, cumque id quod dabatur, non esset interiturum sed in ornamentis templi futurum, ut non mihi potius quam populo Romano ac dis immortalibus datum videretur, tamen id in quo erat dignitas, erat lex, erat eorum qui faciebant voluntas, accipendum non putavi cum aliis de causis, turn etiam ut animo aequiore ferrent ii, quibus nec deberetur nec liceret. Cic. Att. v, 21: nullos honores mihi nisi verborum decerni sino, statuas, fana, T€0pi7T7ra prohibeo. Cic. Fam. in, 7. 1 Cf. Head, Hist. Num.*, p. 667. Bahrfeldt, op. cit. pp. 24 ff. There were games called Sullaia in Athens Cf. C.I.A. 11, 481, 58. Cf. Hadrian's lines on Pompey, Anth. Pal. ix, 402: rw paoTs PpidovTi iroarj airdvis e-rrXero TVJX&OV. 15
16
7
1 8
1 9
40
T H E DIVINITY OF THE R O M A N EMPEROR 20
day when he liberated it. Its coins and those of other cities (Fig. 3) show the head of Pompey. Here is a Roman with all the glory of a Greek city founder.
FIG. 3.
Portrait of Pompey.
Bronze coin.
The Roman contact with the oriental ruler cult was further increased by the sojourn of various Romans at the courts of eastern kings. From the days of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who sought a treaty with Rome, there were relations between Rome and Egypt, and more than one Roman had a long sojourn in the unwarlike land whose divine rulers were more and more coming to depend on Rome for the recognition that established them on their thrones. There they came to know the elaborate court ceremonial of the people who more than any other treated the king as a god. They were only less familiar with the court of the Asiatic seaboard—the Syrians with their highly developed ruler cult and the less extreme dynasts of Pergamum. The latter were long the allies and friends of Rome in Asia Minor, and the last representative of the house willed his kingdom to Rome when he died in 133. The goddess Roma—and w ith her the Roman magistrates— probably inherited the forms of worship in vogue in the kingdom. The Roman generals in the East knew well the court ceremonial of the effeminate king Prusias of Bithynia at whose court Hannibal was finally captured and put to death. If we may believe Polybius, who seems to have been much prejudiced against Prusias, the king even came to Rome and employed the forms of his own court in the Roman senate. T
2 0
z
Ditt. Syll. 752-754; I.G.R. iv, 49-55; Head, op. cit. p . 728; for gold coins of Pompey see Bahrfeldt, op. cit. p. 28. For Pompeiastoi in Delos see Bull. Corr. Hell, v m (1884), 148; x x x i v (1910), 401.
D I V I N I T Y OF M A N AND K I N G IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
41
The historian records that he bowed down to earth in the senate house and saluted the senators with the words: "Hail, Saviour Gods." Livy, whose feelings as a Roman were apparently outraged by the story, notes that he finds no account of anything of the sort in the Roman historians of the period. At a later time the Romans were familiar with the general enthusiasm of Asia for their new liberator Mithradates who saved them from the Romans. He was usually known in the East as the New Dionysus, and he had a widespread worship throughout the region which was only exceeded by the adulation given to his conqueror, Pompey. Pompey and Caesar and Antony all had contacts with Antiochus of Commagene, and Romans probably saw the great monument which he erected "for eternal time" high in the Taurus mountains. In the long sculptured galleries showing Antiochus' ancestors, the Syrian and the Persian kings, and the galaxy of gods that he selected as his guiding divinities, the Roman could have beheld a complete union of Greek and oriental elements and could have read the elaborate provisions for sacrifices to him and the Fortune of Commagene and for the monthly celebration of his birthday. Even in the West, especially in regions under Punic in fluence, kings employed worship to maintain their power. Masinissa, the Libyan ruler, and other African kings had a cult that the Christian fathers knew centuries later. The obeisance that belonged to the court of kings was known to a Spanish tribe overcome by the elder Scipio; they bowed down and did reverence before him, and called him king. 21
22
23
24
25
21
Polyb. x x x , 16; Livy XLV, 44. Cf. the address of the Laodiceans to the Roman people as their Soter and Euergetes, C.I.L. vi, 374. Cic. Flac. 60: Mithradatem deum, ilium patrem, ilium conservatorem Asiae, ilium Euhium, Nysium, Bacchum, Liberum nominabant. Humann and Puchstein, Reisen in Kleinasien, pp. 339 ff. For the inscrip tion see Ditt. O.G.I.S. 383. A bilingual inscription, part Berber, part Punic, records the erection at Thugga of a temple to Masinissa by his son Micipsa. Cf. Sitzb. d. Preuss, Akad. 1913, 1, 300. Cf. Cyprian, De idolorum vanitatc 2; Tert. Apol. 24. See C.I.L. VIII, 8834. Polyb. x, 38 and 40. 2 2
23
24
25
42
T H E D I V I N I T Y OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
At Rome the officers and soldiers who came back from the East could tell of the cult of Roma and of the proconsuls, and the slaves from the East who through manumission were steadily passing into the citizen body of the state knew the forms of the oriental kingdoms. Romans could even read in Latin Euhemerus' romance in which he gave support to the divinity of the ruler by showing that all the gods had once been men. The Roman national poet Ennius had translated it. But there must nevertheless have been a considerable element in the population who did not understand the idea of the eastern divine monarchy. Such a group at any rate Cicero imagines he is addressing when in one of the pamphlets against Verres he comments on the distinctions of Verres in Sicily: " I have seen him designated at Syracuse not merely as patron but also as soter of the island. How much does that amount to? So much that it can hardly be expressed in a single word of Latin. ,,
2 6
Let us see how far the Rome of Caesar's day was prepared by political and religious traditions and by the tendencies of the times for the institution of a divine ruler. Though Rome had been for four and a half centuries under a form of re publican government, the idea of monarchy was familiar to the Romans. They looked back to a time when they had been under the rule of kings, but the monarchy of the early city had been elective and not dynastic and had left little record of itself in cult. Only one of the kings was represented in cult and that was the mythical first ruler, Romulus, who supplied Rome with the founder that every Greek city had. There was a legend of Romulus as son of a god that was similar to the legends of many Greek city founders, and there was a grave and a temple with which his name was associated. A spot in the ancient burial place, which later became the Forum, was rather uncertainly pointed out as his tomb and he was in cult identified with the Sabine god Quirinus and worshipped under his name in a temple on the Quirinal Hill. 2 6
Cic. Verr. n, 2, 154. The passage continues: Is est nimirum soter qui salutem dedit. Huius nomine etiam dies festi agitantur, pulchra ilia Verria.
DIVINITY OF M A N AND K I N G IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
43
There was a story to explain that he had been translated to heaven, and, perhaps partly because of that story, the socalled tomb, obviously a spot of great antiquity, was also identified as the grave of his foster-father Faustulus. There was the same sort of uncertainty as to whether he was a god in heaven or a hero consigned to earth that we find in the case of many of the founders and heroes of Greek cult and legend. It has been pointed out that all the evidence that we have for his legend and his identification with Quirinus is late, and the inference has been drawn that the legend did not originate until the third century and that the identification with Quirinus was not made until the first century. But it is obviously unsound with our fragmentary tradition to assume that an institution begins with our evidence for it. Until we come to the first century B.C. there is no literary production preserved to us in its entirety in which we could expect to find an indication of the divinity of Romulus. The fragments of the Annals of Ennius from the early second century show a belief in his apotheosis and one passage seems to refer to the association with Quirinus. Ennius, though he had been brought up in Greek traditions, probably expressed in his epic the conceptions that were familiar in the Rome of his time; he would hardly have carried conviction if he had set forth ideas that were completely foreign to the Roman thought that he knew. The archaic bronze wolf which once stood on the Capitoline Hill indicates the existence of the legend of Romulus perhaps as early as the end of the regal period and the cult may have gone with the legend. 27
28
2 9
2 7
2
Wissowa, Rel. u. Kult. d. Romer , pp. 155 ff.; and in Roscher, s.v. Quirinus; Carter, ib. s.v. Romulus. For the apotheosis of Romulus see Ennius, Ann. 110-117 V. Wissowa does not admit a reference to Romulus in 1. 117: 2 8
Quirine pater veneror Horamque Quirini. But in support of the identification with Romulus is the fact that Ovid explains Hora Quirini as Romulus' deified wife, Hersilia. The story that Ovid tells was probably late in origin, but there is no reason for assuming, as Wissowa does, that Ovid invented it (see Gesam. Abhand. p . 142). 2 9
See Rosenberg in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Romulus (1082). Carcopino, La Louve du Capitole, Paris, 1925.
Cf. however
44
T H E D I V I N I T Y OF THE R O M A N EMPEROR
If, as is often asserted, the cult of a deified man was foreign to the very nature of early Roman religion—the evidence of the nature of that religion is too fragmentary to justify the dogmatic statements about it that are often made —it is possible that the Etruscan kings who were the last rulers of Rome were responsible for the legend and cult of Romulus. Their connections with Greek religious traditions, especially shown by the institution of the Sibylline books and of the priesthood in charge of them, might explain their desire to provide Rome with the type of cult that belonged to the Greek city state. Moreover, they were probably through their own traditions ready for the identification of king and god that would tend to strengthen the dynasty which they attempted to set up in place of the elective monarchy of early Rome. They themselves assumed certain emblems of divinity. In their lifetime they apparently wore the robe and had the emblems of Jupiter—the gold-spangled purple cloak, the laurel branch, and the sceptre topped with Jupiter's eagle. The god in the temple on the Capitoline which the Tarquins built to be the centre of the state religion was probably known at first as Jupiter R e x and his consort was Juno Regina. The king seems to have been identified with Jupiter in much the same way that the legendary Greek kings were associated with Zeus. 30
31
3 2
3 0
It is hardly of significance for the beginnings of the imperial cult that the Roman numina of the pre-Etruscan period were vague powers devoid of per sonality and sex. The Romans of Caesar's day had themselves forgotten that time. There seems to me to be too much emphasis on the early conception in W arde Fowler's suggestive chapter, " T h e Idea of the Man God," in Roman Ideas of Deity (pp. 81 ff.). For a more balanced discussion see Boissier, La religion romaine i, pp. 109 ff. Even in the early period the numina seem to have been kept vague by regulations, after the Romans themselves were ready to give their gods human personality. (See my paper, Aniconic Worship among the Early Romans in the volume soon to be published in honor of Professor John C. Rolfe.) r
31
3
On the insignia of the kings see Mommsen, Staatsrecht n , pp. 5 ff.; on the Etruscan origin of the toga praetexta cf. Livy I, 8, who however carries them back in time to Romulus. See W . Warde Fowler, Roman Ideas of Deity, p. 92. It is to Jupiter Rex that Romulus takes the auspices in Dion. H. u, 5. Cf. Mommsen, op. cit. p. 15 and n. 2. 32
DIVINITY OF M A N AND K I N G IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
45
The expulsion of the Tarquins prevented the survival of any record of the dynasty in cult. Even the god on the Capitol was apparently deprived of his name Rex—a curious indication of the identity between king and god; henceforth, though his consort retained the title Regina, he was called Jupiter Optimus Maximus. But the appurtenances of Ju piter, which the kings were said to have taken from Etruria, were not abandoned. They were kept in the temple of the god and from there they were secured and worn by the magis trate in charge of the circus games and by the general in triumph. The latter was borne into the city in the god's four horse chariot. In the ceremony, which was in a sense a temporary deification, the Roman magistrate, like the king before him, impersonated the god; his face was even painted like the face of Jupiter's statue. It was related that Camillus upon his victory at Veii was drawn to the Capitol by white horses, emblems of Jupiter and Sol, that roused the ire of many who thought that he had gone too far in his assumption of the panoply of the gods. 33
34
The Rome of Caesar had then an accepted tradition which, whatever its origin, held that the city had been founded by a god-born king who had later himself been elevated to the gods, and Romulus at this time was worshipped under the name Quirinus with rites that placed him not with the dead but with the gods. It had moreover inherited from the kings —perhaps only those of the Etruscan dynasty—the custom of presenting to the people the triumphing general in the guise of the great god of the Roman state. But it had never added another mortal man, alive or dead, to the realm of the gods. It maintained the same distinction that the Greek cities had between the cult of the dead and the cult of the god. It had given to its preeminent men distinctions that corresponded in some details with the Greek hero cult—the tomb inside the 33
Against this interpretation of the triumph (favored by W . Warde Fowler, op. cit.) see J. s. Reid, J.R.S. vi (1916), 177 ff. Livy v, 23; Plut. Cam. 7. 34
46
T H E D I V I N I T Y OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR 35
city boundary, sometimes even in the Forum, the celebration of annual games in their honor. But in spite of homage offered to the illustrious dead which made a deep impression on the Greek Polybius, Romans avoided the identification of hero with god. Roman emissaries refused to exempt from taxes the shrine of a Boeotian deified hero, declaring that their grants of immunity were made not to mortals but to gods. Cicero stood firmly on Roman tradition when, in opposing the grant of a thanksgiving to the dead Caesar, he declared: " I could not be induced to unite any man who has died with the religion of the immortal gods, < I cannot consent > that there should be a public thanksgiving to one for whom we have in existence a tomb where funeral offerings are m a d e / ' Romulus in Cicero's view did not form an exception to the Roman custom, for Romulus, according to the story accepted in Cicero's de Re Publico,, had not died but had been translated to heaven. Officially at least, he had no tomb. Moreover, even in the honors given to the illustrious dead, the Romans apparently avoided one distinction which some Greek cities gave to their heroes and which tended to aid in the development of the hero into the god. In no case that we know in the historical period did the state take the cult of a preeminent man out of the hands of the family and have it administered by public priests. But from certain sacrifices which persisted from an early period it would seem that this had not always been true. Thus the flamen Quirinalis made an annual sacrifice, a parentatio, which followed the rites of the cult of the dead, to Acca Larentia in the Velabrum, and the chief Vestal made a similar offering, apparently to Tarpeia; there was also a public libation to Titus Tatius 36
37
3 8
39
40
3 5
For burial within the city see the evidence cited by Marquardt, Privatleben der Romer\ p. 360, n. 12. Polyb. vi, 53-55. Cic. N.D. in, 49. Cic. Phil. 1, 13. Gell. VII, 7, 7; Yarro, L.L. vi, 23. The entry Virgo Vesta{lis) parental on February 13 in the Fasti Philocali has been explained by Mommsen as an indication of the libation to Tarpeia referred to in Dion. Hal. n, 40. See C.I.L. i, l , p. 309. 36
3 7
3 8
3 9
4 0
2
DIVINITY OF M A N AND K I N G IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
47
which seems to have been in the hands of a brotherhood known as the sodales Titii. Hence official offerings to the dead were not unknown in Roman religious organization, though there is no record in the historical period of additions to the number of the dead so honored. Perhaps the college of pontifices who had control over the cult of the dead was opposed to the extension of such ceremonies. Furthermore, nothing is known at Rome which exactly corresponds to heroic honors to the living man such as we have seen existed in various Greek cities. If we are right in explaining those honors as a cult of the man's daimon, it would be in accord with the importance of the Genius in Roman private cult to find a public cult of the Genius of the preeminent man. But there is no record of such a cult until it became a feature of the imperial worship. Still a trace of something of the sort may be found in the fact that the title of honor that the Romans conferred on their preservers was pater or parens, a term that designated them as head of the state family. Cicero was hailed as pater patriae after his execution of the Catilinarians, and the Greek Plutarch, in 41
42
43
41
Dion. Hal. n, 52. On the sodales Titii see Tac. Hist, n, 95: Caesae publice victimae cremataeque; facem Augustales subdidere, quod sacerdotium, ut Romulus Tatio regi, ita Caesar Tiberius Iuliae genti sacravit. The nature of the Genius to whom public sacrifices were made in 218 (Livy x x i , 62, 9) is not clear. The fact that the sacrifices were ordered by the Sibylline books indicates that the cult was thought of as non-Roman, and a parallel has been drawn between it and the public worship of agathos daimon at Alexandria. See W eber, Der Prophet und sein Gott, p. 54, n. 3. It is possible that the Genius of Sulla is represented by Genius Publicus to whom with Fausta Felix and Venus Victrix (both Sulla's gods) sacrifices are recorded for October 9 in the calendar. For the evidence see Mommsen, C.I.L. I, l , Comm. diurn. for October 9. A figure that appears on the coins of the Cornelii has been identified as the Genius populi Romani. See Grueber, op. cit. i, pp. 233, 406. The identification may be associated with the fact that the Cornelii seem to have been especially conscious of their destiny at Rome. See Sail. Cat. 47; Cic. Cat. 3, 9: Lentulum autem sibi confirmasse ex fatis Sibyllinis haruspicumque responsis se esse tertium ilium Cornelium ad quem regnum huius urbis atque imperium pervenire esset necesse: Cinnam ante se et Sullam fuisse. 42
r
2
43
Cicero uses pater as a synonym for deus as an appellation for a man, Rep. i, 64; Sest. 144. The association of pater with the names of Roman gods is too familiar to require illustration.
48
T H E D I V I N I T Y OF THE R O M A N EMPEROR
recording the titles of honor given to Roman heroes, calls them saviours and fathers, a grouping of two words by which he seems to be rendering the pater or parens of his Latin sources. For cities, Quintilian tells us, the founder is in the place of a father. It is possible that the Roman cities observed the cult of the Genius of their founders by some form of public offering. The founders would then be honored in the Genii of colonies and municipalities frequently addressed in inscriptions. Perhaps a popular worship of the Genius is also to be recognized in the unofficial distinctions granted Marius after his victories over the Cimbri and the Teutones. He was hailed as the third founder of Rome and in the private houses he received offerings of food and drink along with the gods. These informal offerings seem to be an anticipation of the libations later poured at public and private banquets to the Genius of Augustus. Another anticipation of the cult of Augustus' Genius is perhaps to be found in the distinctions offered, again unofficially, to Marius Gratidianus, praetor of the year 86 B.C. The people, in gratitude for currency reforms attributed unjustly to him, set up his statue in all the vici and 44
45
46
47
44
Sulla 34; Cam. 10. Lucan, with a long tradition of the imperial cult, calls Cato a true father of his country, worthy to have his name inscribed in oaths (ix, 601 f . ) : Ecce parens verus patriae, dignissimus aris, Roma, tuis, per quern numquam iurare pudebit. 45
in, 7, 26. Cf. Tac. Hist, i, 84. Augustus was called parens of one of his colonies, Bononia. See C.I.L. x i , 720. Horace's words in C. in, 24, 27 are significant: Si quaeret pater urbium subscribi statuis. See the Kiessling-Heinze note on the passage. It is noteworthy that the descendants of the commissioners who laid out a colony were regularly patroni of the colony. The word of course indicates a relationship similar to that between father and son. On patroni see Momm sen, Ephem. Epig. n, 146 f. Plut. Mar. 27, 5: p.a\iol re / / e r a waidoyv /cat yvvain&v €/ca
4 7
K
DIVINITY OF M A N AND K I N G IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
49
48
offered incense and wine. The incident suggests the possi bility that his Genius, like Augustus', was worshipped in formally with the Lares Compitales by the lower stratum of the population. But although there may have been a worship of the founder's Genius in Roman colonies and an informal cult of the Genius of popular heroes in the city, it is clear that the formal religious organization of the Roman state gave little preparation for the inclusion of a mortal man in the roll of the gods. There was some preparation for it in the conception of the divine in man which we find in Roman private cult both at the grave and at the house. In Roman worship all the dead were called gods—a distinction that was not accorded them in Greek cult—and were worshipped collectively as di manes or di parentes in the festival of the dead in February. It is often stated that the dead were not individualized in the cult, and for the early period that may be true, though the special libations to 'heroic' personages which we have already said were taken over by the state provide evidence against the view. But by the second century B.C., when the Romans were in constant contact with the ideas of the Greek world, they undoubtedly did individualize their dead, and Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, could write to her son of the time when he would venerate her as deus parens}* In the house the Romans worshipped the divine in man under two aspects, the Genius of the master of the house to which we have just referred and the Lar or later two Lares which the Romans interpreted as the spirits of deified ancestors. The Genius 50
4 8
Sen. de Ira in, 18: M . Mario cui vicatim populus statuas posuerat, cui ture ac vino supplicabat. See Cicero, Off. m , 80: omnibus vicis statuae, ad eas tus, cerei. See Peter, Hist. Rom. Rel. n, p. 39: ubi mortua ero parentabis mihi et invocabis Deum parent em. For the understanding of Roman thought in the late Republic it is more significant to record the Roman attitude toward the Lares than to enter the controversy on the origin of the Lares. (For a sane view on their origin see Laing, Class. Philol. x v (1921), 124 ff.). The Roman of the late Republic thought of his household Lar as the spirit of the departed ancestor. 4 9
6 0
50
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
was a spirit accompanying man through life, a being like the Persian fravashi, the Egyptian ka, and the Greek daimon or agathos daimon as we know him in the fourth century and later. The Genius represented the power that secured the continuity of the house, typifying by its very name, connected in origin with gignere, the idea of fertility that was denoted by its most common form of representation, the serpent, which the Genius shared with the daimon. Like the daimon, which was often identified with Dionysus, the Genius was identified with Dionysus' Italic counterpart Liber Pater. As for the Lar, whether or not the Romans were right in explaining him as in origin the spirit of the deified ancestor, he represented in the view of the ordinary man another indication of the divine in man. These Roman conceptions were no doubt influenced by the contemporary ideas of the divinity of man which we have seen in Greek beliefs, and Roman thought was close enough to Greek to make it possible for Plautus to render the daimon and the heros which he found in his Greek originals by Lar and Genius. The Romans were constantly strengthening their bonds with Greek culture which had been the most potent influence in their development from the third century on, and they were also coming steadily into closer contact with the Hellenized East. The Roman was now a citizen of the world, and the men who had studied in Athens and Rhodes, as well as the soldiers who had served in provinces and kingdoms of the East, continually brought back to Rome the ideas that pre vailed in the great centres of culture of the Greek world. Greek philosophers and rhetoricians and poets were teaching at Rome and were living in the houses of the nobles and meeting the society of the day. In the lower stratum of the population the eastern slave who had won his freedom was rising to prominence through his ability as craftsman and merchant, and his children as Roman citizens were inter marrying with the depleted Roman stock. The Orontes was 51
61
On race mixture at Rome in the Republic, see M . E. Park, The Plebs in Cicero's Day (1921); Frank, Economic History of Rome, pp. 202 ff.
DIVINITY OF M A N AND K I N G IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
51
already draining into the Tiber and the whole character of the Roman people was undergoing a radical change. All these contacts tended to strengthen the idea of the divine in man, and so to prepare the way for the deification of the pre eminent man. As a matter of fact the true Roman had become too in different and sceptical toward the gods of the state religion to be very much shocked by the inclusion of men with the gods. Moreover, for a large element in the population, the eastern freedmen and their children, the growth of the mystery religions, which gave a sense of union between man and god in this life and the next, was giving encouragement to the idea that all men were at least potentially divine. The Dionysiac mysteries with their orgiastic rites spread through Italy in the early second century, and especially among slaves and freed men, became so powerful that the senate found it necessary to put an effective check on the worship. The similar cult of the Egyptian gods Isis and Sarapis became prominent a century later, and it is perhaps indicative of a change in the population that the senate did not attempt to check the worship, though it kept the shrines outside the pomerium and refrained from enrolling the gods in state cult. These cults were the forerunners of the mysteries of Magna Mater and of other Oriental gods which became popular under the Empire. For the emotional elements that had now become strong in the Roman population, these religions gave what the formal ized cults of the Roman state could not give—a mystic identification of man with god in this life and a hope of the continuance of the union in the next. These worships had long existed in their eastern homes in harmony with a state ruler cult, and they were capable of a similar adaptation at Rome. 52
For the educated man the philosophies contributed to the idea of the divine in man. There was in their teaching a strong current of scepticism that led to a lack of faith in the gods of the state. At the same time there was a tendency to 52
See Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, Introduction.
52
T H E D I V I N I T Y OF THE R O M A N EMPEROR
exalt man and consequently to lower the position of the gods and so to make narrower the gulf that separated man and god. The materialistic Epicureans taught that the man who secured absolute calm by the banishment of all fear of death was a being like the utterly peaceful gods in whom the sect believed. Such a man was Epicurus, the founder of the sect, who, in the words of the great Epicurean poet of Caesar's time, deserved to be called a god also for the good which he had conferred upon men: deus ille fuit, deus, inclute Memmi qui princeps vitae rationem invenit earn quae nunc appellatur sapientia quique per artem fluctibus e tantis vitam tantisque tenebris in tarn tranquillo et tarn clara luce locavit. 53
The Stoics believed that the good man by his life of virtue on earth achieved a state that was in a very real sense divine. Moreover, beside the general scepticism there developed both in popular belief and in the philosophic teaching of the Neo-Stoics and the Neo-Pythagoreans a mystic belief in the future life that promised the best men an immortality in which they would retain something of the distinction that they had won on earth. The teaching was permeated with astro logical ideas of the East where the conception of the elevation of man to heaven and to the stars had long been current. The Syrian Posidonius, one of Cicero's teachers, was a potent influence in spreading these beliefs, and the Roman senator Nigidius Figulus, a leader of the Neo-Pythagoreans, a semireligious philosophical sect, was the chief exponent of the ideas in Rome. Cicero himself, in the months of his grief for the death of his daughter, was much under the influence of the teachings, and he planned to erect for her a monument which should be not a tomb but a shrine to testify to her apotheosis. The effect of the ideas is seen in Roman Stoic 54
63
Lucr. v, 8-12. Cic. ad Att. x n , 35, 2; 36; 37, 2; 38, 4; 41, 2; 43, 1; 44, 2. See also the fragments of his Consolatio. Cf. Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism, pp. 31 ff. 64
D I V I N I T Y OF M A N AND K I N G IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
53
doctrine which substituted for the theory of absorption in the divine mind the conception of a glorious individual im mortality for the man of true virtue. The idea that the man of true virtue, like Hercules, the favorite example of the Stoics, might win a place in heaven by his merits is readily transferred to the great men of Rome. "What are we to think," Cicero says, after speaking of Hercules' deification, "that the many great men in this state who were slain for the public weal had in mind? . . . Without great hope of immortality no man would ever offer up his life for his country." In Scipio's dream at the end of the de Re Publico, the great Africanus is represented as appearing to his namesake, the conqueror of Carthage, describing his own life in the heavens, and declaring that an immortality like his is in store for the great of the earth. "All those who have founded, aided, or amplified their cities have assigned to them a fixed abode in heaven where in bliss they may enjoy eternal life." When Cicero in another place asks whether almost the whole of heaven is not filled with the human race, he doubtless has in mind the great Romans who have been added to the abode of heaven. The doctrine that immortality could be won by virtue was attractive to the Romans: it gave them a means of glorifying the republican heroes in whom they felt a just pride and it had enough association with the popular idea of the raising of man to the stars that came in with eastern astrological ideas to make an appeal to the people. It has been called by Cumont "the republican transformation of the doctrine of divinity of kings," and in fact we shall see how important it became in the later development of the 5 5
5 6
57
5 8
6&
Cic. Tusc. I, 32. Cic. Somn. Scip. 13. See also Sest. 143. Romulus is described, like the Greek heroes Hercules and Castor, as a man who received a place in heaven because of his good deeds. Cf. Cic. Par. 1, 11: Quibus tandem gradibus Romu lus escendit in caelum? iisne quae isti bona appellant an rebus gestis atque virtutibus? Cic. Tusc. i, 28: Totum prope caelum . . . nonne humano genere completum est? Cumont, op. cit. p. 114. 66
5 7
6 8
54
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
imperial cult at Rome. It may have its share in explaining the fact that on coins of the late Republic portraits of the moneyers' distinguished ancestors begin to appear. Let us summarize briefly the foregoing discussion of the preparation that can be found at Rome for the eastern idea of the divine king. With a tradition of a time when kings had ruled at Rome, a cult of the first of those kings as founder, and a persistence in the triumph and the pompa circensis of the early king as impersonation of Jupiter, the Romans com bined a state religion which apparently did not permit the enrollment of men with the gods or even, in the historical period, the assumption by the state of the cult at the tomb of the great man. At the same time the Romans in their native beliefs as seen in private cult had some sense of the divine in man, for they called their dead men gods and wor shipped in the Genius and the Lar the spirit of the living man and of the dead ancestor. Moreover, the gods of their state religion had become meaningless and formal, and the inclusion of a mortal among 'the gods would not bring to the men of the day the same shock that it would have caused in a time when the native religion was strong. At the same time, through change in population and the widened contacts of her citizens, the religious beliefs and philosophical teachings of the identity of man and god that had been current in the Hellenistic world had found their way to Rome. With them went a widespread belief in immortality, and particularly in the glorious immortality of the preeminent man, that might prepare the way for the deification of the glorious dead which the state religion did not countenance. With the breakdown of the old religious forms and the development of the new tendencies w ent the decay of the old political system which for centuries had functioned with remarkable success, but now was no longer adequate for the rule of a great empire. In attempting to cure the ills of Rome, the Roman general who had seen the absolutism of the divine monarch in the East and had applied its system to the governT
DIVINITY OF M A N AND K I N G IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
55
ment of the eastern provinces, would naturally think in terms of such a system. In the Roman citizen body, changed by the intermixture of eastern slave stock with the native Roman, there was a large element ready for the forms of absolutism that had prevailed in their eastern homes. Moreover, in Rome itself the chaos of the end of the republic had led to the same longing for peace and the same desire for a saviour to secure it that characterized the Greek city state when its political system collapsed in the fourth century. With the change in the character of the population, it is not surprising to find the longing expressing itself in attribution of divine qualities and sometimes of divine homage to the men from whom the people hoped for salvation. Even in the early second century Scipio Africanus the elder is perhaps a case in point, though it has been shown that many of the details of his 'legend' sound like inventions of the panegyrists who contributed to the idea of the divine connections which he and his family tried to foster. The stories that we have indicate that he was especially under the care of Jupiter. He went every day to the temple of the god on the Capitol and communed long hours with him. The temple attendants are reported to have said that when he came by night the dogs on the Capitol never barked. A story even became current that he was the son of Jupiter, who had come to his mother, as Zeus Ammon had to Olympias, in the form of a serpent. After his death his family continued to insist on his special association with Jupiter. They placed his mask in the cella of the Capitoline temple instead of in the atrium of his own house and from there they secured it whenever it was needed for family funerals. Ennius in the epitaph which he wrote for him gave him the place in heaven which we find assigned to him in the dream at the end of the de Re Publico: 59
Si fas endo plagas caelestum ascendere cuiquam est, mi soli caeli maxima porta patet. 5 9
See Eduard Meyer, Kleine Schriften n, pp. 423 ff.
56
THE
DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
Here are all the elements of a legend that might have led the way to a genuine cult; the only difficulty is in determining how far it was a legend created by propaganda and how far it took hold upon popular, fancy. But there are instances of cult acts on the part of the people that undoubtedly show a spontaneous readiness to give divine honors. After the death of the Gracchi devoted bands of citizens gathered about the statues erected where they were slain and made offerings to the men who had died in the attempt to serve them. There are distinctions too for living men. When Metellus Pius, Sulla's colleague in the consulship, went to put down an uprising in Lusitania, the Roman citizens in Spain, looking to him to save them from danger, met him with offerings of incense as if he were a god. We have already seen that Gaius Marius was hailed as third founder of Rome and was worshipped with offerings of food and drink in the private houses and that his namesake Marius Gratidianus was honored by the erection of his statue in every vicus and re ceived sacrifices of incense and wine. Cicero quotes the latter incident simply as an example of great popular favor obtained unjustly; he does not suggest that Gratidianus' honors are unparalleled, and there were probably many similar in stances that are not recorded. At the same time there were no doubt many who were ready to protest against such practices. The protests would naturally become especially vigorous if the suggestion had been made that any popular hero be enrolled in state cult. Such a suggestion had in fact never been made, and, until Caesar debased the senate by adding numerous parvenus to its numbers, it was unthinkable that it should have been made in a body that was a bulwark of the mos maiorum. 60
61
62
6 0
Plut C. Gracch. 18:
eUovas
OevrOf Kal TOOS TOTTOVS b> ols kpov(n irdvTwVy
Wvov
re
yap
tyovevdrjaav
8e Kal KaO' rjfiepav
avrcov
ava8ti£avT€s
kv av€p$
dL€p6}aaures dirijpxovTO iroWol
Kal irpoakmirrov,
irpovrl'
p.kv &v wpcu &airep
Oe&v
iepols kirupoiTcovTes. For the young blades who paid homage to the tomb of Catiline see Cic. Flacc. 95. « Macrob. Sat. m , 13, 6. Cic. Off. in, 80. See Sen. de Ira in, 18. l
62
DIVINITY OF M A N AND K I N G IN REPUBLICAN R O M E
57
With the longing of the people for a saviour went at the same time the growth of the power of individuals, chiefly the great generals, to whom was accorded the triumph that was the closest thing in Roman state ceremony to deification. The triumphs became steadily more magnificent and the attendant festivals more splendid. Sulla instituted annual games in honor of his patron Venus Felix, but by a new departure the victor's name was permanently associated with them. Marius and Sulla were the first Romans to give their names to colonies, which had hitherto been founded by a board of three men. Pompey, after his great triumph over the pirates and Mithradates, was granted the privilege of appearing in triumphal attire at all circus games. But actually, in spite of the unconstitutional powers held by men like Sulla and Pompey, there was no real encroachment upon the rights of the gods in any of the distinctions conferred upon them by the Roman state. The danger that the further development of the individual's power might bring divine honors in its train lay in the possibility that his power might turn into declared monarchy. The monarchies known to the Roman world of Caesar's day were ruled by divine kings. 63
63
Cic. ad Alt. i, 18, 6; Veil, n, 40, 4.
CHAPTER
III
JULIUS CAESAR'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A D I V I N E MONARCHY r
It was in a w orld that thought of the absolute monarch as a god that Caesar developed his own supreme power after his victory at Pharsalus; and when he determined to have his power recognized by the establishment of a monarchy, it was as an essential feature of the monarchy that he sought his own divinity. T o him the absolute ruler was something different from the kings who had been expelled four and a half centuries before his day and who had left to the Roman people as their chief heritage an ineradicable hatred of the name rex. We shall see that the form of the early kingship had its effect on Caesar's divinity. But he was influenced chiefly by the traditions of the Hellenistic monarch handed down from the empire of Alexander. Let us see how far Caesar's personal background fitted him for the position which the preeminence he gained at Pharsalus enabled him for the first time to assume. He belonged to a family that was second to none at Rome in the claim that it could make to ancient and divine ancestry. The Julii could show a pedigree which went back through a problematical lulus straight to Aeneas of Troy. And so they were by special right divine in origin, for Aeneas, as all the world knew, was the son of Venus. The image of the goddess appeared on the coins of the Julian house. Some of the coins also showed the image of Mars, from whom through the Alban kings the family also seems to have traced descent, but that claim was far less well attested. IuluS, the founder of the family, was 1
2
1
Reference should be made to the most recent comprehensive study of the imperial cult, Herzog-Hauser's article Kaiserkultus in Pa-uly-Wissowa, Suppl. iv. Except for bibliography, in which it rivals Drexler's article in Roscher's Lexikon on the same subject, I have found it of little value. On the family of the Julii see Miinzer in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Iulius. 2
58
CAESAR'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A D I V I N E MONARCHY
59
an elusive person whom the stories made either the son or the grandson of Aeneas. We think of him ordinarily as Vergil has shown him to us—that is, as the son of Aeneas and Creusa. His family's Trojan ancestry and his descent from Venus were a matter of great pride with Caesar. The connection with Venus was always emphasized more than the less well authenticated descent from Mars. He asserted it as early as the year 68 B.C., when he delivered the funeral oration for his aunt Julia, Marius' wife. But in addition to an accepted pedigree claiming divine descent, Caesar had a further qualification for divine rulership the importance of which has perhaps not been sufficiently appreciated. In the year 63 he succeeded in capturing the office of pontifex maximus, the chief priesthood of Rome. That gave him for lifelong tenure the essence of the sacred power that had once been in the hands of the Roman king. The person of the king at Rome, as in many other monarchies, had united the supreme magisterial and priestly power. When the king was expelled, his name was retained for the rex sacrorum, a priest who was forbidden to hold magisterial 3
4
3
Cf. Aen. vi, 756 f. See Norden, Neue Jahrb. vn (1901), 277 ff. On lulus see also Eduard Meyer, Caesars Monarchie und das Principal des Pompeius, p. 511. One story of lulus that was perhaps invented in the days of Caesar shows him to have been deprived of the kingdom by his brother Silvius, but to have received instead the office of pontifex maximus. Cf. Eusebius' summary of Diodorus (Latin translation of the Armenian version) vn, 5, 8: Iulius autem imperio privatus pontifex maximus constitutus est et q' a:-i secundusrex erat; a quo ortam huiusce Iuliam familiam Romae perdurare aiunt. Cf. also Dion Hal. I. 70, 4: 'lovXa) 6' dvrl rrjs 0aai\elas Upa TLS ki-ovala irpoaeredTj Kal Ttp.r} TW T aKivbvvcp irpovxovaa rrjs /xovapxi-a-s ^al rfj paarcovy rod (3iov r)v e n Kal els e/xe TO e£ avrov ykvos kKapirovro, 'IOVXLOI KXrjOkvTes aw' kKcipov. Thus DioDysius sees Augustus' office of pontifex maximus, acquired only five years before the his torian published his history, as a direct inheritance from lulus. Suet. Jul. 6. The claim was sufficiently a matter of common knowledge for Caelius to refer to Caesar familiarly in 49 B.C. as Venere prognatus. Cf. Cic. ad Fam. VIII, 15, 2; see Veil, n, 41, 1: hie nobilissima Iuliorum genitus familia et, quod inter omnis antiquitatis studiosos constabat, ab Anchise ac Venere deducens genus. Cf. the speech put into Caesar's mouth at Placentia, Dio XLI, ,34, 2. t
4
60
T H E D I V I N I T Y OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
office or to leave Italy. Upon him devolved some of the king's religious functions, but they were nothing but empty cere monies. The real power of the king in sacred matters was passed on to the pontifex maximus. He dwelt in the king's house, the domus publica beside the Regia, and presided, as the king once had, over the comitia calata. As chief of a college that had little more than an advisory capacity, he chose by lot the rex, the three flamines, and the Vestal Virgins, supervised the calendar, was the chief interpreter of the sacred law, and the high priest of all the gods. Most especially he was the priest of the gods of the Roman hearth, Vesta and the Penates, and so he stood in something of the same relation to the Roman state that the father did to the family. At one time, like the rex, he had been prohibited from holding office and leaving Italy, but he had been relieved from those restrictions long before the time of Caesar. Caesar, when he acquired the office, was a candidate for the praetorship and was looking forward to absence on a provincial governorship. During the years that followed, as the priest who had general charge of the relations of the Romans with their state gods, he had a prestige which for his future can hardly be overestimated. 5
Caesar was familiar with the provinces and kingdoms of the East, for he had passed his early years of military service in Asia and Cilicia, and from Asia he had been sent to the court of Nicomedes, a successor of Prusias on the throne of Bithynia. There he lingered for some time on terms of intimacy with the king, and he must have come to know the court ceremonial and the processes of government of what was probably a fairly typical divine monarchy of the East. Although in his provincial governorships in Spain and Gaul Caesar did not have the experience of divinity that came to his rival, Pompey, a real saviour of the East, he nevertheless knew the forms of the absolute divine monarchy, and when his undisturbed 8
3
On the office of pontifex maximus see Mommsen, Staatsrecht n, pp. 17 ff. The importance Caesar gave to the office is shown by the prominence of the insignia of the supreme pontificate on Caesar's coins. See Grueber, Coins of the Roman Republic in the British Museum I, pp. 542 ff.
CAESAR'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A D I V I N E MONARCHY
61
supremacy was established at Pharsalus, he began at once to receive from the East the acknowledgment of divinity that came as the natural recognition of his power. In the very year of the great battle, the Greeks of Asia—who knew all the claims of his family to divine ancestry—honored him as "a revealed god, offspring of Mars and Venus, and universal saviour of the human race." Other cities were quick to accord similar distinctions, and chance has preserved what is no doubt only a very small proportion of the divine honors conferred on him. 6
7
The value of such a cult as a piece of statecraft Caesar must have known from the experience of the Roman conquerors and governors in the East; its practical application to the whole governmental system he had an immediate opportunity of observing during the nine months he spent in Egypt in company with the fascinating Cleopatra. For there the cult that had once been given to the Pharaohs was by the un changing customs of the most conservative land on earth still being given to the Ptolemies. The new king was still hailed on his accession as the son of all the gods and goddesses, and was still going to Heliopolis to secure his legitimate position by being declared the son of R e ; he was still receiving a Re name and a Horus name and the other three divine titles that made up the Egyptian king's name. In the new reliefs and monuments that kept the unvarying traditions of Egyptian art the king was, like the Pharaohs, being portrayed as the ideal representative of his people in every secular and religious act. And Caesar, after coming to know something of Egyptian custom in the elaborate court ceremonial of the Greek Alex andria, was taken by the queen in splendid magnificence up the Nile to see the monuments of Egypt's former glory. We can imagine him among the stupendous temples of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, beholding the great 8
6
3
Cf. Dittenberger, Syll. , 760: see Appendix in. See Appendix in. s See App. B.C. n, 90. Cf. Suet. Jul 52.
7
62
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
reliefs of Ramses II at Thebes and Karnak, the scenes where alone and single handed the king smites the nation's foes and dedicates their spoils to the gods of the land. He must have looked upon the reliefs depicting the divine birth of the queen Hatshepsut at Deir el Bahri, and have visited the shrine of Seti I, which lay beside the sanctuaries of the great gods, Isis, Osiris, and Ammon at Abydos. With these monuments of the Pharaohs of old he must have beheld the reliefs that showed the Ptolemies as the heir of all their power and divinity—the great pylons of Ptolemy Euergetes at Karnak for instance, or the gateways but lately erected by Ptolemy the Flute Player at Edfu and Philae. And Caesar saw not merely the hollow shell which makes an unforgetable im pression on the modern visitor to Egypt. He probably witnessed the ceremonies with which the Egyptian people were erecting statues in all their temples to their new queen, wor shipping as a revealed divinity among them the last of the house of the Ptolemies, the divine Cleopatra. At every stage of the journey he must have stood by and beheld his companion adored in actual divinity and he doubtless noted how her orders were accepted not merely as the words of a ruler but as the commands of a god. Caesar cannot have failed, any more than the modern visitor does, to bring away from Egypt a new conception of the ruler as a being legitimatized by the gods whose son he was, a sharer with them in the honors of their temples, and at the same time the ideal representative of his people in every secular and religious act. In religious acts, it may be noted, Caesar was as pontifex maximus already the representative of the Roman state with the gods. It is not surprising to find him on returning to Rome setting at once about the further legitimization of the position of preeminence that he had assumed. At Pharsalus two years before, he had given Venus Victrix as his watchword and had vowed in case of victory to build a temple to the goddess. The fulfillment of his vow 9
9
App. B.C. II, 68; Dio XLIII, 43, 2-3. of Venus as his seal.
Dio notes that Caesar used an image
CAESAR'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A D I V I N E MONARCHY
63
on his return to Rome gave him his real opportunity to complete the legitimization of his position. With the new confidence which his victories and his Egyptian experience had given him, Caesar dedicated the temple not to Venus Victrix but to Venus Genetrix, Venus, the mother of the Julian house, and at the same time the mother of the people of Rome, Aeneadum genetrix, as the opening lines of Lucretius' great poem had called her a few years before. The significance of the new cult was brought home by the splendor of the temple and the magnificence of the ceremonies with which it was dedicated. The temple, rising in the beautiful Forum, was of solid marble, rich in gifts from the spoils of war and adorned with paintings of the greatest artists. Its cult statue was made by Arcesilaus, the greatest sculptor of his time. In the Forum stood a statue of Caesar in the full panoply of war and an image of his war horse, perhaps a rival in fame for the renowned Bucephalus of Alexander. The dedication came close upon the four days devoted to the Gallic, Pontic, African, and Egyptian triumphs with long processions of war captives and the spoils of gold, silver, and other riches such as even the sophisticated populace of Rome had never seen. It came, too when the people were rejoicing in the generous gifts from the spoils which the victor had bestowed. On the day of the last triumph Caesar began the inauguration ceremonies of the temple, descending to it as a garlanded victor, his path lighted by the torch-bearing elephants which had been a notable feature of the celebrations on the Capitol. On the succeeding days there followed games of unheard-of splendor with theatrical spectacles in which Roman knights participated, combats of armies of gladiators and wild beasts, and finally a mighty naval contest, a novelty even for the sated Romans. The games were placed in the hands of a college of men of distinguished birth—the young Octavius was one of them— whose task it was to have charge of them in the future as a permanent state festival. 10
1 0
On the temple see Dio XLIII, 22; App. B.C. n, 102; in, 28; Suet. Jul. 26,
64
T H E DIVINITY OF THE R O M A N EMPEROR
The new state cult, celebrated with a magnificence that no one could forget, was far more than a simple claim to divine ancestry such as many a noble Roman of the day might have set forth with equal justice. It was a formal declaration of Caesar's position as the representative of the state, the favored son of the goddess who was the mother of all the Romans. Caesar planned later to build a temple to Mars which should emphasize the less well authenticated side of his ancestry and secure for him something of the many-sided divine fatherhood that the Egyptian kings possessed and that belonged in a less degree to Hellenistic rulers. But that was a plan that his successor Augustus brought to execution. 1 1
Just before Caesar's return, the senate, already disposed to begin the abject flattery that was to characterize the next two years, had decreed to Caesar certain honors that at least prepared the way for divinity. The make-up of Caesar's senate was an important element in determining the character of the honors that were fundamentally at variance with Roman traditions. The optimates, the group that most strongly supported the mos maiorum, had withdrawn with Pompey, and the adherents of Caesar who were left were augmented by wholesale nominations of new senators, many of them of freedman stock. As a group they cared little for Roman tradition. The first vote that should be recorded as a divine honor provided that his war chariot should be dedicated in the Capitolium in front of the cult statue of Jupiter and that a statue of him mounted on a representation of the inhabited world should be erected there. This decree made him in a 12
61, 84; Cic. ad Alt. iv, 16, 8. On the incomplete state of the temple at the time of the dedication see Pliny, N.H. x x x v , 156. For other evidence see Heinen, p. 130, n. 2. The name ludi Victoriae Caesaris for the festival is attested by Cicero's contemporary reference, ad Fam. xi, 28, 6. The games are called ludi Veneris Genetricis by Pliny, N.H. n, 93, and Seneca, N.Q. vn, 17, 2. " Suet. Jul. 44. Dio XLIII, 14, 6 : appa re TL avrov ev r w KairtTuXiip avriirpowirov r<£ A i t 12
I8pv9rjvai
t
Zxwra
Kal
kirl
eiKova
OTL i)p.lde6s eari,
avrov TO re
rrjs ovopta
OLKovpevrjs avrov
ewl
a
K
x ^ °uv
6Tnl3il3aadfjvai
TO Ka7rirco\ioj> dvrl
t
rod
ypa^v KarovXov.
A parallel for this representation is provided by the painting of Demetrius Poliorcetes made in 290. It is described as eirl rrjs olKovp.evr}s 6xovp.evos. See Duris in Ath. x u , 536 a.
CAESAR'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A D I V I N E MONARCHY
65
sense, like the Egyptian kings, the sharer of the temple of the god. But he was not by any means a sharer on equal terms. The inscription under his statue called him a demigod, Dio tells us. The title was perhaps written in Greek, rinWeos. The designation was given as a voluntary honor by the senate, and Caesar when he saw it—we are told that he failed to notice it at first—had it removed. It is usually assumed that the claim was more than he cared to make, but in the light of the honors that followed it is more probable that it fell short of what he desired. The flattering senators had not yet realized the full extent of Caesar's designs. It was after the victory of Munda in April of 45 that the distinctions of Caesar became more closely related to the honors of the gods. On the news of the victory which reached Rome on the eve of the Parilia, the festival of the founding of Rome, it was voted that the circus games on the next day be held in Caesar's honor as if Caesar were the founder of the city. That was followed by a vote that he be called Liberator and that a public shrine be erected to his Libertas. After his return, in May of 45 came a distinction that put him unquestionably above the demigods. In the temple of Quirinus a statue of Caesar was set up with the inscription, " T o the unconquered god." From the incidental comments 13
14
15
16
1 7
13
The Latin equivalent of Dio's rjp.ideos has puzzled scholars. M y reason for conjecturing that the Greek word was used is based on a confused comment of Servius Dan. on Eel. 9,47: Baebius Macer circa horam octavam stellam amplissimam, quasi lemniscis, radiis coronatam, ortam dicit. quam quidam ad inlustrandam gloriam Caesaris iuvenis pertinere existimabant, ipse animam patris sui esse voluit eique in Capitolio statuam, super caput auream stellam habentem, posuit: inscriptum in basi fuit "Caesari emitheo." I believe that the scholiast has in mind here the inscription on the earlier statue existing on the Capitol But the whole subject is confusing. In general by Dio's time the distinction between fjpus and Oeos was no longer clear. " Dio XLIII, 21, 2. 1 6
Dio XLIII, 42, 3.
16
lb. 44, 1. This temple and apparently the temple of Concordia voted in Caesar's honor in the following year (Dio XLIV, 4, 5) seem never to have been erected. Id. XLIII, 45, 3: aWrjp rk TLVOL e'ucopa es TOP TOV Kvpivov vabv deCo aPLKrjrq) 17
eTTtypaxf/aPTes.
6
66
THE
DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
in Cicero's letters, an unfriendly source, we have some indica tion of the stir "Quirinus' tentmate" caused. In one letter Cicero says, " I should prefer to have him with Quirinus than with Salus," a god who also had a temple on the Quirinal. Quirinus, as we have seen, was identified with Rome's founder, Romulus, who in one story was torn to pieces by a group of angry senators, the very fate that awaited Caesar. This statue did not remain an isolated expression of godhead. About the same time Caesar was decreed a house at public expense; it was built like the houses of the gods with a pediment roof. At the circus games Caesar's gold and ivory image was borne with the images of the gods in the solemn procession to the Circus Maximus and was placed on a pillowed couch with all his attributes about it. When the ceremony was repeated at the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris in July, the people, according to the unfriendly Cicero, were so enraged that they refrained from applauding their favorite Victory whose image was presumably beside that of Caesar. In this same year Caesar's portrait appears for the first time on coins from the Roman mint (Fig. 4) which had usually had on them images 1 8
19
20
21
FIG. 4.
Poitrait of Caesar.
Denarius.
of the gods, and had never before shown a representation of a living man. 22
18
Ad Att. X I I , 45, 3. On the public house see Dio XLIII, 44, 6. On the pediment see the refer ences to fastigium in Cic. Phil. 2, 110: Flor. n, 13, 91. 19
2 0
appa 21
Dio 6\ov
XLIII, 45,
2 : Kal Tore
kv r a t s lirirobpoplats
\ikv dvbpiavTa pera
T&V delcov
avrov
eXeKpavTivov,
ayakparuv
varepov
irepireadaL
8e
Kal
tyvwaav.
Ad Att. XIII, 44, 1: populum vero praeclarum quod propter malum vicihum Victoriae quidem ploditur! Dio XLIV, 4, 4. For the coins of Caesar see L. L. Ganter, Zeit. f. Numism. xix (1895), 183 ff.; for symbols of a new era on Caesar's coins see A. Alfoldi, Hermes LXV (1930), 369 ff. ne
22
CAESAR'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A D I V I N E MONARCHY
67
The culminating honors came in the early months of 4 4 when the senate, a body now changed beyond all recognition through the nomination of new senators, passed a number of new decrees, and the people, under the influence of the consul Antony, passed laws to a similar effect. They gave Caesar the title parens patriae and authorized him to stamp it on his coins. This was a title which emphasized the paternal relation to the state which the king had once had and which Caesar's office of pontifex maximus had already given him. In line with this relation also was the provision that men should swear by his Genius, just as the household swore by the Genius of the master. This was a distinction that was destined to become prominent for Caesar's heir Augustus. In the other honors we find Caesar not so much the father of the Roman state as the heir of the Hellenistic kings. His birthday was made a festival on which public sacrifices should be made; it was provided that annual sacrifices for his safety should be undertaken and that each year the magistrates should swear to uphold his acts. Games to be celebrated in his honor every four years were decreed and a day in his name was added to each of the great festivals of Rome. It was ordered that statues of Caesar should be erected in all the temples of Rome and the Italian cities. His chair of gold and his crown of gold and precious stones were to be carried into the theatre at the games in the same way as the chairs of the gods. It was voted to build a temple to Concordia Nova because it was through him that men enjoyed peace and concord. The name of the month Quinctilis was changed to Iulius and it was decreed that a tribe to be chosen by lot should take his name. T o the ancient colleges of priests of Pan, the Luperci Fabiani and Quinctiales, a third known as the Luperci Iuliani was added. But the final step came when the 23
24
25
2 3
Dio, loc. cit. Dio XLIV, 6, 1: rrju re Tvxn CLVTOV d/xvvvai. In the Hellenistic East it was customary to swear by the TVXV of the king, and the Latin Genius is frequently rendered by the word. For the fullest account of these honors see Dio XLIV, 4-6; App. B.C. n, 106. 24
2 6
v
68
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
senate decreed him to be a god and commanded the erection of a temple to him and his dementia, thus formally providing for his enshrinement in state cult. At the same time they instituted a priesthood in his honor, appointing Antony to it, "like a flamen Dialis" says Dio. The last honor is the most significant of all. Except for certain gods of the early pantheon whose cult had declined in importance, the only Roman divinities who had their special priests were Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, the organization of whose cult was attributed to Numa. All other gods worshipped by Roman ritual had as their priests the pontifices. The appointment of a special priest therefore put Caesar in a peculiar position of preeminence in the Roman state religion. The account which Dio gives of the new priesthood is undoubtedly reliable, for it is confirmed by Cicero in the Philippics, where it is clear that the priest, though already provided for by decrees before Caesar's death, had never been consecrated and therefore had not begun to function in his sacred office. Cicero says nothing of the temple to Clementia. It is however represented on Caesar's coins (Fig. 5) and if Appian is right, its cult statue group of Caesar and Clementia clasping hands was made or at least begun. But the temple seems never to have had any place in subsequent cults and was probably never com pleted. 26
The priesthood shows Caesar as a god and the question now arises as to what his title was in his newly acquired divinity. Dio, giving the form in the accusative, says that they called him A t a 'IOVXLOV which one would naturally translate Jupiter Julius. But Cicero in the second Philippic (110) referring to Appian is especially reliable because he probably depends in large measure on Asinius Pollio. For the Luperci Iuliani see also Cic. Phil. 2, 85, and 110; 13, 31. The passages indicate that Caesar gave the priests lands which were later taken away. For the temple to Caesar and his Clementia, Dio XLIV, 6, 4; App. B.C. II, 106; Plut. Caes. 57. A tetrastyle temple with a globe in the tympanum is represented on the obverse oi coins of 44. Cf. Grueber, op. cit. I, p. 549. On the justice of the emphasis upon Caesar's Clementia see C. C. Coulter, Class. Jour, x x v i (1931), 513 ff. 2 6
CAESAR'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A D I V I N E MONARCHY
69
honors that were decreed before Caesar's death, calls Antony flamen Divi lull. Modern scholars have generally agreed that the name of Divus lulim was not conferred on Caesar until after his death; they have tended to associate the first use 27
FIG. 5. Temple of Clementia Caesaris.
Denarius.
of the title with the games which Octavian gave for Caesar in July of 44, the time when the comet appeared. But aside from the fact that there is no evidence for such a view, it is unlikely that Cicero is using a term brought into popular knowledge by that circumstance. It is far more probable that he is employing the language of the decrees which he is charging Antony with failure to carry out. The word divus at that time, as we know from its use in earlier writers and from the comments of ancient scholars, had nothing of the meaning of man made into god which it eventually acquired after it had been applied for generations to deified emperors. It was used by the poets almost interchangeably with the more common deus; its chief connotation was rather the con nection with heaven—the sky. There is no reason why the 28
29
30
2 7
A notable exception is Dessau. See his illuminating note, Gesch. d. rom. Kaiserzeit i, p. 354, n. 2. Caesar is also called deus in two inscriptions, C.I.L. x, 1271 (Dessau 6343), and in the verse inscription, vi, 14211. See Appendix in. A study of the use of divus in Ennius (7 cases), Plautus, Catullus, Lucretius, and Cicero (see Thesaurus, s.v.) bears out the statement of Servius on Aen. v, 45: divum et deorum indifferenter plerumque ponit poeta, quamquam sit discretio ut deos perpetuos dicamus, divos ex hominibus factos, quasi qui diem obierint; unde divos etiam imperatores vocamus; sed Vario et Ateius contra sentiunt, dicentes divos perpetuos, deos qui propter sui consecrationem timentur ut sunt dii Manes. On the special association of divus with the sky see Varro, L.L. v, 66: Hoc idem magis ostendit antiquius Iovis nomen. Nam olim Diovis et Diespiter 2 8
2 9
3 0
70
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
senate, if bent on deifying Caesar, should not have called him divus, and Cicero, as a contemporar}' and a writer in Latin, is more reliable than Dio for the form of the title. But if the senate decreed Caesar to be Divus Julius, how are we to account for Dio's reference to him as Jupiter Julius? There is a possibility that Dio attempted a direct trans literation of divum hdium, which became corrupted in trans mission. But if Dio really wrote A i a , the form is probably due to something more than a desire on the part of the historian to render divus in this case by a word different from Belos by which the divus of the dead emperors was usually translated. Perhaps the word divus in the title conferred on Caesar suggested some relationship to Jupiter and Zeus, with w hich it is connected etymologically. Such a meaning seems to exist in the word as Horace applied it to Augustus (Carm. I l l , 5, I f f . ) : 31
T
Caelo tonantem credidimus Iovem regnare; praesens divus habebitur Augustus And there is much to show that there was a genuine identifica tion between Caesar and Jupiter. At Rome the Sacred History of Euhemerus was known both in the original and in the version of Ennius. In his theory that all the gods were kings of former times, Euhemerus showed Zeus as the king who first set about his own deification as a means of increasing and stabilizing his own power. He was naturally a model for other would-be divine monarchs. It is clear that Caesar felt a close relation between his power and that of the guardian of the Roman state. It was with that god that he was associated as demigod in the decrees of 46. With the same god he was apparently connected in a series of copper coins of the year 45 on which the thunderbolt (Fig. 6) dictus, id est dies pater, a quo dei dicti qui inde et dius et divum unde sub divo, Dius Fidius. Itaque inde eius perforatum tectum, ut ea videatur divum, id est caelum. On the possibility of dating dedications to Divus Julius at this period see Appendix in 31
CAESAR'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A D I V I N E MONARCHY
71
32
appears as a regular emblem. There was even a statue of Caesar with aegis and thunderbolt, the two chief emblems of Jupiter, which later found its way to Constantinople. When 33
FIG. 6.
Thunderbolt behind head ot Caesar.
Bronze coin.
Caesar was slain the mob tried to inter him in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. We can hardly doubt that some of his supporters urged the identification of Caesar and Jupiter, and viewed in that light the deification which the senate offered him. When Caesar sent to Jupiter Optimus Maximus the crown offered to him at the Lupercalia and said at the time, " Jupiter alone is king of the Romans," it would have been like Mark Antony and his kind to reply by proposing a decree calling Caesar by a name like divus that suggested the name of Jupiter. It was probably soon after the Lupercalia that the senate voted to call him Divus Julius. 34
35
It is impossible to appreciate the significance of the divine honors heaped upon Caesar without considering at the same time the royal prerogatives that were bestowed with them— the throne of gold and ivory on which he sat to transact state 32
Cf. Willers, Romische Kupferpragung, p. 99, no. 77. See PI. ix, 6. See Christodorus' description of the bronze statues in the Gymnasium (called Zeuxippos) in Constantinople, Anth. Pal. n, 92-96: 33
Kaiaap
d'kyyvs
dvTL^'uav
eare\f/€v
eXauirev
aiylda
pkv ^Xoavpuiinv
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aperprfTOiaL
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Zevs vkos aXXos kv Avaouioiaiv CLKOVCOV.
3 4
Dio
XLIV, 50,
3 6
Dio
XLIV, 11.
2.
72
T H E D I V I N I T Y OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
affairs, the laurel crown, the permanent use of the triumphal garb, which was at the same time the costume of the Roman kings. Honors like these—the list is so long that even Dio wearies of giving it—and, like the erection of his statue on the Capitol beside the statues of the seven kings of Rome, could only point one way, toward the declared legitimization of his power by monarchy. And Caesar, who had no sham about him, was undoubtedly ready for that. When about a month before his death a group of senators came to him bearing the decrees that conferred upon him the title dictator perpetuus with a mass of fresh honors, Caesar, sitting on his golden throne in front of the temple of Venus Genetrix, did not rise to greet the fathers but remained seated as a monarch might. None of his divine honors aroused so much hostility. When the title of king was offered to him, the last time by Mark Antony at the Lupercalia in 44, he was warned by the attitude of the people to refuse it. " M y name is not king but Caesar," he is reputed to have said when on one occasion he was saluted as Rex. If he had realized that with the name of Caesar and the title of imperator he was creating a designa tion for world rulership that would even surpass the dignity of kings, he might have been glad to dispense with the older name. But as it was, he continued to wish for the royalty that went with the divinity which had been comparatively easy to acquire. At the time of his death there was a persistent report that at the next meeting of the senate a Sibylline oracle would be brought forward with the declaration that the Parthians, against whom Caesar was about to lead an expedi tion, could be conquered only by a king; the proposal was to be that Caesar should be made king, not of the Romans and 36
37
36
The appurtenances of the king and Caesar's own designs for the kingship are the chief subject of discussion in Plutarch's life of Caesar. Plutarch gives very few details on Caesar's divine honors. Among the many references to this event (cf. for instance Plut. Caes. 60) the most striking is found in the Epitome of Livy c x v i : et cum plurimi maximique honores ei a senatu decreti essent . . . invidiae adversus eum causam praestiterunt quod senatui deferenti hos honores cum ante aedem Veneris Genetricis sederet, non adsurrexit. 3 7
CAESAR'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A D I V I N E MONARCHY
73
38
Italians, but of the subject races. Caesar had become a god, and, though his divine honors aroused men's anger and their mirth, they probably would have been endured. It was his assumption of the kingly pomp and splendor which went with his divinity that aroused a group of Liberators to assassi nate him. They were led by the heir of the name of the Junius Brutus who four and a half centuries before had expelled a hated race of kings from Rome. In assassinating Caesar the Roman patriots were destroying a king and attempting to end a kingdom. It is clear from the contemporary comments in Cicero that the attack was directed against the monarchy itself. The significance of Caesar's divinity lies chiefly in the fact that it was a part of royalty that had already been achieved. 39
As a matter of fact divinity in some form was an essential feature of the monarchy that Caesar was trying to establish. As we have seen, it had belonged in a sense to the Roman kings. As pontifex maximus Caesar already possessed the king's sacred functions and it was provided by special decree that he was to pass them on to his heir. When he was given the king's attire, associated for the Romans with the triumph where the general impersonated Jupiter, he was brought still more closely into line with the sacredness of the early king. But though Caesar was willing t o see his statue beside the early kings, he did not desire to establish the elective kingship which he knew from the shadowy traditions of early Rome. What Caesar desired to set up was the hereditary divine monarchy as it had survived in the East and as he had him self seen it function in Egypt. The oath by his Genius, the 40
38 Suet. Jul. 79; Dio XLIV, 15, 3; Appian, B.C. n, 110; Plut. Caes. 64. Cf. Cic. Div. (written in the summer of 44) n, 110. See Meyer's note, Caesars Monarchic, p. 529, 1. Appian and Plutarch are the only authorities that men tion the intention of excepting Italy and Rome from the kingship. Perhaps they were quoting from soma of the later pamphlets, notably those in which Antony was trying to justify his position in Egypt. Plut. Caes. 6 0 : TO 8e kp.aves pakiara fjuaos Kal Bavar^bpov kw' abrbv 6 3 9
rrjs jScuriXetas epcos 4 0
k%eipyd
D i o XLIV, 5, 3: TOP 5C 5I) vlbv,
dTrodeixByvcu
k\f/r)iaavTO.
dv Ttva
yevvifcr^ 77 Kal eo-TTOLTjarjTai, dp
pea
74
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
public birthday celebrations, the festivals added in his honor to the calendar, the games every four years, the placing of his portrait on coins, the naming of a month and a tribe for him, the erection of his statue in all temples, and the procession with his gold and ivory image all have parallels there. His task, however, was more like that of Alexander than that of the later Hellenistic kings. It was to create rather than to maintain the conception of such a kingdom. His initial act, as we have seen, was the dedication of the temple of Venus Genetrix. That served as a legitimization of his rule much as the Libyan oracle's declaration of Alexander as the son of Zeus served to establish Alexander's position. For both men the legitimization came after a sojourn in the oldest divine monarchy on earth. In Alexander's case it eventually served as a guarantee to the Greek world of the divine fatherhood which the Egyptians had bestowed on him when they recog nized him as their king. In Caesar's case it expressed in state cult his divine origin and his position as representative of the people which claimed Venus as its mother. This was a conception of the power of the sovereign which Caesar had come to appreciate in Egypt—to which he was perhaps bearing witness when he placed Cleopatra's statue beside that of the goddess in the new temple. 41
The stage that followed the declaration of his divinity, separated as in Alexander's case by a reasonable interval of time, was the formal declaration of Caesar himself as a god. Caesar, to be sure, working through his trusted henchmen, was able to proceed more delicately than Alexander, who in his absence from Greece avoided all possible misunderstanding by the frank demand that he sent to the Greek cities to make him a god. Nevertheless some of the details of the process are curiously alike. The identification of Caesar with Jupiter, suggested by the name Divus Julius, may be compared with the recognition of Alexander as Dionysus. And the opposi tion, though more covert as we get it in Cicero than it was in 41
For an ancient comparison between Alexander and Caesar see App. B.C. II, 149-154.
CAESAR'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A D I V I N E MONARCHY
75
the frank debates at Athens and Sparta, was in many ways similar. In Greece, already under the rule of a king, it was directed more forcibly against the granting of divine honor to a living man than it was in Rome. In both places it was aroused still more by the type of oriental monarchy which the new declarations brought with them. The example of Alexander was constantly before Caesar. He saw himself as the successor of Alexander, carrying out his conquests and his process of civilizing the world. As Meyer has lately pointed out, it was not merely the fascination of Cleopatra that held Caesar in Egypt during the years after Pharsalus when Rome and the provinces were clamoring for his attention. Cleopatra was the last of Alexander's heirs, and Egypt the last kingdom of the civilized world. For Caesar the association with Cleopatra was something more than an incidental liaison. He apparently recognized as his the son that she bore soon after he left Egypt, the boy who was later associated with his mother as Ptolemy X I V but is usually known as Caesarion. There was later a report that at the time of Caesar's death a bill about to be presented to the senate provided that Caesar might for the purpose of succession marry as many wives as he liked and choose them from whom he pleased. Though the report as we have it perhaps ema nated from Antony, who tried to show that he had a precedent in Caesar for his own subsequent course, it is conceivable that Caesar was considering for the future the possibility of assuming the right of polygamy practiced by Alexander and some of his successors. That was a right which Antony assumed when he married Cleopatra without divorcing Oc tavia. Moreover, Caesar is also said to have considered seriously the possibility of moving his capital to the East; as 42
43
4 2
Meyer, Caesars Monarchie, pp. 521 ff., to which I am constantly indebted in this discussion. Suet. Jul. 52; Dio XLIV, 7, 3; Laberius ap. Gell. xvi, 7, 12. Suetonius, who gives the fullest details on the subject, quotes the tribune Helvius Cinna as the person who had the bill in his possession. Cinna was slain at Caesar's funeral. It was therefore safe to quote him. 43
70
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
his chief city he thought not only of Ilium, the home of his ancestors, but of Alexandria, the city of Cleopatra and the most enduring monument of the great Macedonian conqueror. But though he had Cleopatra come to Rome and showed his admiration for her by placing her statue beside that of Venus Genetrix, he did not in the will which he wrote in 45 make any special provision for her or for her son. By his plans he had simply indicated the way for the attempt at complete orientalization of the Empire which Antony was soon to make. There can be no doubt of Caesar's own interest in the recognition of his divinity. In his case as in Alexander's there has been a curious misreading of the evidence by modern writers who have felt in the worship of a living man a sense of degradation for the worshippers which they were not willing to believe that Caesar or Alexander could have countenanced. But such an interpretation of the worship is based on modern conceptions and does not consider the theory of absolute government current in ancient times. It is not a question whether Caesar and Alexander were men of too great intellect to be captivated by the adulation of decrees which put them on a plane with the Olympians. They probably were. But for them godhead was not adulation. It was a necessary part of a type of monarchy that had functioned in the past and might be expected to function again. Under the ideal of government which they had in mind they were themselves the authors of their own divinity. At the same time it is possible that there was spontaneous worship for both Caesar and Alexander. Certainly not all Caesar's divine honors were self-inspired. Many of them were invented by flatterers; some of them w ere even the invention of men who wished to 44
45
46
T
44
Suet. Jul. 79; Nicolaus Damascenus 20. Again one may suspect the activity of Antony in spreading the report. Appian, B.C. n, 102. Cf. Dio LI, 22, 3. See however Kornemann, op. cit. 95 ff.; Warde Fowler, Roman Ideas of Deity, pp. 107 ff.; Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, p . 494. 4 5
4 6
CAESAR'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A D I V I N E MONARCHY
77
increase the hostility to him. If the poetry of the period had been preserved, we might perhaps judge whether Caesar aroused anything like the profound admiration and reverence that Augustus later inspired. As a matter of fact, Caesar was probably too far past the romantic glamor of youth to inspire anything like the same spontaneous worship that Augustus did later. Unlike Augustus or perhaps Scipio Africanus at an earlier time, Caesar does not seem to have been the subject of a popular legend during his lifetime. There was apparently no story about his miraculous birth, or about omens that showed his divine destiny during his infancy. Such a legend is an im portant element in creating belief that a man is divine. In Caesar's case it was his death at the hands of assassins that brought him into the number of the gods " not simply on the lips of men passing decrees but in the conviction of the masses." 4 7
4 7
Suet. Jul. 88.
C H A P T E R IV Divus JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE CULT
It is doubtful whether many people in Rome were convinced of the divinity of Caesar at the time of his death. The most extravagant of the decrees according him godhead had just been passed, and many of them had not yet been put into execution. The body which passed the decrees was made up of men who were his creatures, with a liberal admixture of others who devised new honors to increase his unpopularity and participated in plots against him; the people who voted for the honors in the form of laws were simply a mob shouting acclamation. Except for a group of Caesar's veterans and his slaves and freedmen, they knew him rather little. Among them were many who at the moment were summoning Brutus to the defence of liberty. But when the senatorial plots resulted in the revolting murder of the undefended Caesar, the stage was set for one of those extraordinary revulsions of popular feeling which history often shows. The man who had been looked upon with suspicion or at best uncertainty was now in the position not of a tyrant but of a martyr. The events of the next few days were calculated to strengthen his claim to be considered not the destroyer but the saviour of his people. In the senate, which met two days after the Ides of March, questions of political expediency clouded the issue. The members of the conspiracy wished to have Caesar declared a tyrant, his acts annulled, and his body thrown out unburied. The consul, Mark Antony, was quick to point out that the annullment of Caesar's acts would mean the cancellation of his appointments for the next two years. Some of the most important senators and indeed of the conspirators were in cluded in these appointments and did not wish to lose the 78
D i v u s JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE C U L T
79
authority which had been conferred on them. Hence they found themselves in the anomalous position of assassins of a tyrant and defenders of his acts. There was moreover another factor in the situation of which Antony was ready to take advantage. Many of Caesar's veterans were waiting at Rome for the promised land grants which were to be the reward of their years of valiant service. They were undoubtedly to be reckoned with if Caesar's body was thrown out unburied, and there was no force ready to withstand them. In the end the senate passed Cicero's motion for a general amnesty. By its terms Caesar's acts were confirmed and it was provided that there was to be no prosecution of his murderers. A further decree confirmed the land grants to the veterans. Hardly had the meeting been adjourned when it was called together again and the Caesarians went beyond the bargain by a further demand that Caesar's will should be made public and that he should have a public funeral. The party of the conspirators was powerless against this motion, though many of them doubtless felt as Cicero's friend Atticus did, that all was lost if Caesar was given a public funeral. Caesar's will was made public before the funeral and its terms had an incalculable effect on the attitude of the people. To every man in Rome he left the sum of three hundred sesterces; to all the people he bequeathed his splendid gardens across the Tiber as a public park. But the people were no less moved by his generosity than touched by some of the other details of his will. A number of the conspirators were named in the document and Decimus Brutus, one of the leaders.in the plot, was made an heir in the second degree. Thus Caesar was shown to have been betrayed by those whom he had trusted. 1
2
1
For the meeting and the funeral the best accounts are Appian, B.C. n, 126 ff.; Dio XLIV, 23 ff.; Plut. Caes. 67 ff.; Ant. 14 ff.; Brut. 19 ff. For valuable incidental comments see Cicero's letters, passim. There is no adequate reason for accepting Plutarch's statement that the senate voted Caesar divine honors at this time (Caes. 67, 4: Kaiaapa pev o>$ deov ripav k\pr)<j>t
80
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
The publication of the will was a fitting prelude to the funeral. The most careful preparations were made for the event. In front of the Rostra a small gilded baldachin was erected on the model of the temple of Venus Genetrix. Within it on an ivory couch covered with gold and purple lay Caesar's body. At the head of it were his trophies and the blood stained mantle in which he met his death. At the games that preceded the ceremonies in the Forum some lines adapted from Atilius and Pacuvius were chanted. One of them from the Armorum Indicium of Pacuvius was: Men servasse ut essent qui me perderent. The funeral oration, delivered by immemorial custom from the Rostra, was assigned in this public funeral not to a member of the family but to the consul Mark Antony. Just what Antony said it is impossible in the mass of conflicting evidence to ascertain. First of all he apparently read with brief and biting comments the honorary decrees that had been passed in Caesar's honor. They proved, if decrees ever could, that the man who lay slain before the people was a god. Then he made a speech in which Appian says he "hymned Caesar as a god in heaven." But it is doubtful whether Antony insisted as much on Caesar's divinity as on the treachery that had betrayed him. Shakespeare's version of the oration as a masterly example of mob oratory may not be far from what it was. When Antony exhibited Caesar's bloodstained robe and raised aloft a wax image that showed the twenty-three wounds in the dictator's body, the people went wild. They rushed to the theatre of Pompey and burned the curia in which Caesar was slain. They seized upon and tore in pieces the tribune Cinna whom they mistook in their fury for the praetor Cinna, who had made a speech for the conspirators. They set 3
4
3
On public funerals see Vollmer, Jahrb. f. Phil. Suppl. x i x , 319-364; on the choice of Antony to deliver the oration, App. B.C. n, 143. lb. 146: cos Beov ovpaviov vpvei Kal « TT'HTTIV deov yeveaeais ras xetpas avkreivev. The speech which Dio (XLIV, 36 ff.) puts into Antony's mouth is probably less reliable than Appian's account. Cicero refers to Antony's speech, Att. xiv, 10: Phil. 2, 90; 3, 30. 4
D i v u s JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE C U L T
81
forth to seek the murderers and,findingthat they hadfledin terror from the city, then attempted to set fire to their houses. Finally the mob returned to the Forum, seized upon Caesar's body, and carried it to the Capitol to inter it in the temple of the god with whom he had been associated. But the priests deterred them from thus ' placing Caesar among the gods/ Then, disregarding the funeral pyre already constructed in the Campus Martius, they seized upon any available material, even the chairs and benches from the shops and tribunals, and hastily built a new pyre in the Forum beside the ancient home of the kings. There they burned Caesar's body and into the flames the veterans threw their armor and the matrons their jewels. After watching over the embers for several days, his freedmen gathered up the bones of the dictator and interred them in the tomb of his family. The people surrounding the ashes of the dead Caesar were ready to make his deification something more than a matter of unaccomplished decrees. But the consul Antony was the person who would most naturally have carried to execution the plans on foot for Caesar's godhead, and Caesar's will had 5
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• Dio XLIV, 5 1 , 1. The most probable sites for the tomb are Bovillae, the ancient home of the Julii where Tiberius later erected a shrine to the Gens Iulia (Tac. Ann. n, 4 1 ) , and the Campus Martius where. Caesar's body was to have been burned. According to Dio XLIV, 7 , 1, he had before his death been voted the right to be buried within the pomcrium, which may at the time have in cluded a part of the Campus. In favor of the Campus Martius as the site Lundstrdm (Undersfikningar i Roms Topografi, Goteborg, 1 9 2 9 ) has lately made an ingenious combination of two fragments of the marble plan that adorned the W5ills of the Templum Pacis. The chief difficulty about the combination lies in the fact that one of the fragments is known only from a drawing, and therefore there can be no certainty that the two pieces belong together. If Lundstrom's combination isright,the fragments we have would place an AEdes iuLlorum near the Pantheon and the complex of Agrippa's buildings. The word aedes is used for a tomb on some thirteen inscriptions, and is therefore not impossible in this sense. But Lundstrom's suggestion that the use of aedes for the monument dated from the time when Caesar became divus is most improb able. Caesar's aedes was dedicated in the Forum and we hear of no worship at a tomb for him. For a criticism of Lundstrom's conclusions see Boethius, Athenaeum rx ( 1 9 3 1 ) , 1 7 ff. 7
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T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
given Antony a reason for hesitating. Caesar had made his great-nephew, the young Octavius, heir to his name and the major portion of his wealth. Octavius was comparatively unknown and Antony may not have feared him seriously. And yet he must have realized that the youth might eventually be the heir to Caesar's power as well as to his name. From the first Antony seems to have seen that if he made Caesar a god, his testament as the will of a god would have superlegal standing, and his heir as the son of a god would have an un assailable position with the men who had deified the father. And so immediately after the funeral we find Antony setting himself firmly against Caesar's deification. At once he sponsored two measures that were calculated to curtail Octavian's inheritance. The first was the abolition for all time of the dictatorship, which Antony accomplished by senatorial decree. The second was the election of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus as pontifex maximus, an office which the senate had voted should be passed on from Caesar to his heir. 7
In his unwillingness to have Octavian honored Antony had one natural ally in Rome, and that was the queen Cleopatra, who had been disappointed in any hopes she might have had that her own position and that of her son would be made legitimate. She lingered at Rome after Caesar was killed, and, if one may conjecture from what is known of her after wards, she probably schemed. There is no record in ancient sources of any relations between Antony and Cleopatra at this time, though the story goes that Antony had fallen in love with Cleopatra eleven years before, when he had seen her, a girl of fourteen, at the court of her father in Alexandria. If that story is true, it is hardly credible 8
7
According to Dio XLIV, 53, Antony secured the election of Lepidus by trans ferring the choice from the people back to the pontifices, from whose hands it had been taken just before the election of Caesar in 63. On Lepidus' method of securing the office see Veil, n, 63: furto creatus; Livy, Epit. 117: pontificatum intercepit; Mon. Anc. 2, 26: Cepi id saoerdotium aliquod post annos eo mortuo qui civilis motus occasione occupaverat. On the whole question see Mommsen, Staatsrecht n , 31 A.3. » App. B.C. v, 8. 3
D i v u s JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE C U L T
83
that Antony should have neglected the opportunity to see Cleopatra in Rome. She was a well-known figure there. Cicero, who was anything but intimate with Caesar, knew her and was forced to pay court to her, and Caesar's closest associate must have known her well. When Caesar died, Antony could not have failed to realize that Cleopatra possessed in Caesarion, the only son the dictator is known to have had, the strongest of all possible weapons against his rival, who was Caesar's son only by adoption. In the daily letters which Cicero was writing to Atticus in the months after Caesar's death, Cleopatra is mentioned a number of times and in one case, Caesar ille, obviously the young Caesarion is also named. But the lack of Atticus' replies makes it impossible to reconstruct the situation, and the only fact of real significance which comes out is that Cleopatra apparently fled from Rome about the time when young Octavian seems to have arrived to claim his position as Caesar's heir. Evidently the arrival of the youth in Italy and the reception accorded him by Caesar's veterans made the capital an unsafe place for the queen. Again one is tempted to suspect some association with Antony, who just then was bending every energy to the undoing of Octavian. It should however be added that any alliance between Antony and Cleopatra at this time must have been a matter of profound secrecy. Cicero certainly knew nothing about it, for, if he had known, he would not have failed to make use of it in the torrents of abuse which he later poured upon Antony in the Philippics. 9
10
The decrees in Caesar's honor were neglected and Caesar remained in actuality undeified until there appeared on the scene a man who knew how to make use of the popular excite9
These letters are a very valuable source for the events of March to July of 44. They can be most conveniently consulted in Tyrrell and Purser, The Correspondence of Cicero, vol. v. See also-Tyrrell's essay, "Antony succeeds Caesar," in the introduction to that volume, pp. xlviii-xciii. Cic. Att. xiv, 8, 1: Reginae fuga mihi non molesta est. The letter was written on April 15. Reference to the expected arrival of Octavian is first made in a letter of the eleventh (ib. 5, 3 ) . 1 0
84
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
ment which Caesar's slaves and veterans were ready to keep alive after the funeral. The man was an impostor of whom we hear rather often in the last years of the Republic. His name is variously given in Greek and Latin form as Herophilus and Amatius, and he was presumably an eastern Greek who was by profession an oculist. Before Caesar's death he was heard of at Rome and in various other places. He claimed to be the grandson of the great Marius and a cousin of the dic tator. He was a good mob orator and he acquired considerable influence in the municipalities, and especially among the colonies of veterans, many of whom made him their patron. Caesar had him discredited and exiled but he came back again as soon as he heard of Caesar's death and made use of his old power as a demagogue. With the aid of a group of Caesar's freedmen and of others who had been present at the burning of Caesar's body, he erected an altar with a column on the site of the funeral pyre and made preparations to consecrate it and to establish sacrifices at it to Caesar, as to a god. The people responded with great enthusiasm and Antony, in fear of the consequences, seized upon the false Marius and put him to death without trial about the thirteenth of April. This act, though applauded by Cicero and, no doubt, by all " good men," aroused great indignation among the people. They demanded that the magistrates should dedicate the altar and offer the first sacrifices on it, thus making the worship 11
1 2
13
11
OD the false Marius see Val. Max. ix, 15, 1; Cic. Att. x n , 49; Nic. Dam. 14 (ed. C. M . Hall, Smith Coll. Stud, iv, 1924). On his activities after the death of Caesar see Cic. Att. xiv, 6-8; Phil. 1, 2; Livy, Epit. 116, App. B.C. in, 2-3. On the altar see Suet. Caes. 85: postea solidam columnam prope viginti pedum lapidis Numidici in foro statuit < plebs > scripsitque Parenti Patriae. Apud earn longo tempore sacrificare, vota suscipere, controversias quasdam interposito per Caesarem hire iurando distrahere perseveravit. The passage seems to be confused and there is a question whether the column of Numidian marble twenty feet high was the one erected by Marius and removed by Dolabella. Cf. Mommsen, Gesam. Schr. iv, p . 182. But Marius' monument cer tainly included a column (Cic. ad Att. xiv, 15; Phil. 1, 5; cf. Lact. I, 15, 30: columnam in foro id est tumulum). It is referred to as /3
1 3
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D i v u s JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE CULT
85
official. It was at the very moment of the agitation aroused by Marius that the young Octavius came to Rome. Caesar's great-nephew, the son of Atia, daughter of his niece Julia, was at the time not yet nineteen years old. Ever since the battle of Pharsalus, when Caesar had secured sole power, he had marked out Octavius with special favors with the apparent intention of designating him as heir. The youth had been elected at once to a vacancy in the college of pontifices, an honor that assured him of the dignity of a great priesthood for life. He had been given the distinction, reserved for the most eminent young men, of being made prefect of Rome while all the magistrates were absent at the Latin festival in 47. He took part in the celebration of Caesar's great triumph and games in 46. In the African triumph, though he had no part in the war, he was presented with military rewards. He was one of the curators of the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris and was made a member of the permanent college to keep them up as a regular festival. He had then a close association with Caesar's claims of divine origin. In the following year he was with Caesar during the last part of the Spanish expedition, and on his return must have witnessed the divine honors bestowed on the dictator—the gold and ivory image carried with the statues of the gods at the circus games, for instance. In December of 45 the young Octavius was sent to Apollonia in Illyricum where some of the troops which Caesar was preparing for his Parthian expedition were stationed. There the youth was receiving instruction in military tactics and at the same time continuing his training in rhetoric under the famous Apollodorus of Pergamum. Shortly before the time when Caesar himself was expected to arrive en route to his Parthian campaign, news came to the nephew of his uncle's assassination. Fortunately we are very well informed about Octavius' plans and actions when the news came. Nicolaus of Da mascus, who during his residence in Rome was on intimate terms with Augustus and had access to the emperor's memoirs, wrote a biography of Augustus of which some of
86
THE
DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
the chapters dealing with this early period are preserved. From the first Octavius seems to have been determined to avenge Caesar's death and to secure whatever personal and political advantage Caesar's testament conveyed. With that end in view, he set out at once for Italy. Landing early in April on the Calabrian coast, he went first to the neighboring town of Lupiae where he learned that he was Caesar's chief heir and that he had been adopted as son by Caesar's will. At once he took the name Caesar, and with his purpose of avenging the murder and securing the inheritance strengthened by the new events, he proceeded to Brundisium to present himself to the soldiers there. From Brundisium the young Caesar (we shall follow the convenient modern custom and call him Octavian) went to Rome. In a letter of the eleventh of April Cicero asks Atticus for news of his arrival and wishes to know whether there is any hint of a coup d'etat,, Shortly afterwards he refers to the disturbances raised by Marius and to Cleopatra's flight. Although the flight of Cleopatra was, as we have said, probably caused by Octavian's arrival, there is no reason to suppose that he had anything to do with Marius' activity. Still it is not unlikely that the astute youth saw at once how the agitation about the new altar could be turned to account for himself. At any rate he set immediately about having the decrees for his adoptive father's divinity put into force. The ludi Ceriales began on the twelfth of April and lasted until the nineteenth. At the time of the theatrical games early in the celebration Octavian prepared to exhibit in the u
14
Cic. Att. xiv, 5, 3: Sed velim scire quid adventus Octavi, num qui concursus ad eum, num quae vewTepianov suspicio. NOD puto equidem, sed tamen quidquid est scire cupio. There is no further reference in Cicero's letters to Octavian's arrival in Rome and it is generally assumed that he did not reach the city until later. But Plutarch is definite in his statement that Octavian went directly there (Brutus 22): a/m 8e T # irvdkadai TO irddos rj\6ev els V6)ixi)v, Cf. App. B.C. in, 12. The strongest evidence for believing that he went to Rome soon after April 11 is provided by the fact that only at the Cerialia (April 12 to 19) can the attempt to exhibit the chair at the games have occurred. See n. 15, p. 87, n. 15. K
t
87
D i v u s JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE CULT
theatre his father's gilded throne and garland which the senate had voted should be shown at every theatrical performance. The aedile Critonius, who was in charge of the games, declared that he could not permit the throne to be shown, and Octavian referred the question to Antony, who tried to escape answering it by saying that it must be brought to the senate. Octavian replied by declaring that as long as the decree was still in force he would exhibit the chair. But Antony prevented him from doing so. The incident is an important one because it shows that from the very first Octavian was determined to carry the decrees of Caesar's godhead through, and because it reveals that Antony 15
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Obviously, from this account, there were two attempts to exhibit the chair, the first at games which are undesignated, the second at the ludi Victoriae Caesaris in July. The latter attempt is referred to by Nicolaus of Damascus as a second one (cf. au0is, chap. 28). Nicolaus probably described the earlier attempt in a section which has been lost. Cicero's remark in a letter of May 22 (Att. xv, 3 ) : " D e sella Caesaris bene tribuni," probably refers to a declared intention of the tribunes to prevent the exhibition of the chair at the games in July for which Octavian was at the time preparing. It remains to determine when the earlier attempt was made. The only games appointed for the period were the Ceriales (April 12-19), the Florales (April 28-May 3), and the Apollinares (July 6-13). The Florales and the Apollinares are both impossible, the former because Antony was in Campania at the time and could not have taken the steps described by Appian, the latter because they were presided over by the praetors, and therefore the aedile Critonius could have had no part in the management of them. The Ceriales remain, and there is no reason to suppose, as some scholars have, that they were postponed or that there was an instauratio. It is much simpler to assume that Octavian went to Rome at the time when we know from Cicero that he was expected. He could have stayed only a few days before going to Naples. On the events of the period see Mommsen, Ges. Schr. iv, pp. 180 fT.
88
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as early as this was already opposing Caesar's divine honors out of fear of the advantages that they could give to Caesar's heir. At the moment the consul by his attitude toward the disturbance about the altar was securing the favor of the con spirators and the "good men" like Cicero who failed to under stand his motives, and there was anticipation of a great contest between him and Octavian. Octavian apparently found it impossible with the opposition of Antony to make any headway in Rome, and so he went to Campania to try the temper of Caesar's veterans, many of whom were settled in colonies of the region. He reached Naples about the eighteenth of April and then went to the villa of his step father Philippus near by, where Cicero saw him a day or two later. After his departure he doubtless had his agents in Rome, and it was probably a group of them who put into effect another honor of Caesar. On the Parilia of 44 a group of young Roman aristocrats appeared in public wearing crowns out of homage to Caesar. In accordance with the distinctions voted after the victory of Munda they were thus honoring Caesar as a second founder of Rome. 16
The altar, though undedicated, remained in place for the time being. But after Antony too went to Campania to see if he could rival Octavian's success with the veterans, the other consul Dolabella, a creature of Antony, took decisive action in Rome. He seized the slaves and freedmen who were con tinuing the agitation about the altar. The slaves he crucified and the freedmen he had thrown down from the Tarpeian rock. He removed the altar and the column and let the con tract for a new pavement on the spot. His act was received with transports of joy from Cicero, who, utterly failing to realize that Dolabella was actuated only by fear of Octavian, hailed him as the vindicator of the Republic. 17
w
Cf. Dio XLIII, 42. Cicero's nephew Quintus was among those who took part in the celebration: Alt. xiv, 19, 3 (cf. xrv, 14): De coronatis, cum sororis tuae filius a patre accusatus esset, rescripsit se coronam habuisse honoris Caesaris causa, posuisse luctus gratia, postremo se libenter vituperationem subire quod amaret etiam mortuum Caesarem. Cic. Alt. xiv, 15 and 17 a: Fam. x n , 1. 1 7
D i v u s JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE CULT
89
Soon afterwards—about the middle of May—Octavian returned to Rome and presented himself for his inheritance. He made a speech to the people in which he pledged himself to pay the legacy which Caesar had left them. But again he found himself obstructed by Antony and his henchmen. Antony postponed on one pretext or another the passing of the lex curiata to confirm Octavian's adoption. He refused to give Octavian access to Caesar's treasure, declaring that the funds had all been spent. Octavian announced his intention of giving the ludi Victoriae Caesaris in July, combining with the regular celebration a type of funeral games for Caesar. The tribunes let it be known that they would oppose any attempt to carry Caesar's chair to the games. Brutus at the same time was making preparations in absentia for the celebration of his games as praetor, the ludi Apollinares, which came just before Caesar's games, that is, from the sixth to the thirteenth of July. Brutus was buying up all the wild beasts in Italy, and was sparing no expense to make the celebration of the games as splendid as they could be. Neither he nor the other con spirators ventured to appear in Rome for the celebration. Brutus waited near Naples for news of the success of the games and was much depressed at the reports which came to him. There seems to have been interference at Rome with his plans, perhaps from his colleague Gaius Antonius, the brother of Antony, who acted for Brutus, perhaps from the young Octavian and his adherents. Another play was substituted for the Roman tragedy Brutus, which might have reminded the people that the younger Brutus was a second liberator of Rome. Moreover there was tampering with the bill-posting for the games. The notices b y calling the month Julius instead of the old Roman name Quinctilis put into execution the decree which renamed the month in Caesar's honor. Brutus sent up hasty orders that the notice for the bunting games on the last and most important day of the celebration 18
1 8
Cic. Att. xvi, 5, 1.
90
T H E D I V I N I T Y OF THE R O M A N EMPEROR 19
should read A.D. Ill Idus Quinctilis. Apparently it has not been noticed that that day was Caesar's birthday, which had been declared a public festival. It seems that Octavian tried to interfere with the celebration by distributing to the people, perhaps on Caesar's birthday, the gifts that Caesar's will had left for them. T o obtain the money, since Antony had apparently made away with Caesar's treasure, the young man had to sell his own inheritance and bring together all that he could secure from his relatives. His generosity made more impression than Brutus' lavish celebration. It put the people in a proper frame of mind for the games for Caesar which lasted from the twentieth to the thirtieth of July. 20
The magnificence of that celebration reflected no more glory on the dead Caesar than on his adopted son. Antony might be as active as he liked in preventing the exhibition of Caesar's chair and garland at the theatre. A phenomenon of nature interposed which more than made up for the failure to grant Caesar that token of divinity. We can tell the story in the words of Augustus' own memoirs which Pliny the Elder has fortunately preserved for us. "During the very time of my games a comet was seen for seven days in the northern region of the sky. It would rise about the eleventh hour and was very bright and conspicuous in all lands. This comet, the people thought, indicated that Caesar's soul had been received 19
lb. xvi, 1,1: NONISIULIIS? Di hercule istis! Sed stomachari totum diem licet. Quidquamne turpius quam Bruto IULIIS? Nihil vidi.; ib. xvi, 4, 1: Quam ille doluit de NONIS IULIIS. Mirifice est conturbatus. Itaque sese scripturum aiebat ut venationem earn quae postridie ludos Apollinaris futura est proscriberent in III IDUS QUINCTILIS. We should expect Octavian to attempt a public celebration of Caesar's birthday. Appian's account (B.C. in, 23-24) of Octavian's efforts to collect money to pay Caesar's legacy is in close relation with the story of the disorders at the Ludi Apollinares. It seems a reasonable assumption that Octavian chose Caesar's birthday, the last day of the Apollinares, for the distribution of the money. When Caesar's deification was finally accomplished in 42, his birthday was changed from the thirteenth of July to the twelfth because of an oracle which prevented any one besides Apollo from being honored on Apollo's day (Dio XLVII, 18). The oracle may have been produced before the deification, and possibly at the Ludi Apollinares of 44 when efforts were being made to check Caesar's honors. 2 0
D i v u s JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE CULT
91
among the immortal gods. For that reason this symbol was placed above the head of the statue of Caesar which I con secrated in the Forum soon afterwards/' But the comet was also interpreted as a sign that a new age was at hand. On gold coins of the year 43 (Fig. 7) appear the head of Sol with crown and rays and the crescent moon with five stars. These are the symbols of the approach of the magnus annus, the time of renewal when sun, moon, and planets return to the same relative position from which they had set forth at the beginning of the cycle. In foretelling 21
22
23
FIG. 7 .
Sun, Moon, and five Planets.
Aureus.
the birth of the new age which Vergil celebrated a few years later, the comet was, like the star of Bethlehem, the sign of the coming of a child, and Octavian himself, though publicly 2 1
Pliny, N.H. n, 9 4 . See Verg. Eel. 9, 4 7 : Ecce Dionaei processit Caesaris astrum, and Servius Dan. ad loc.: Baebius Macer circa horam octavam stellam amplissimam, quasi lemniscis, radiis coronatam, ortam dicit. quam quidam ad inlustrandam gloriam Caesaris iuvenis pertinere existimabant, ipse animam patris sui esse voluit eique in Capitolio statuam, super caput auream stellam habentem, posuit: inscriptum in basi fuit "Caesari emitheo." sed Vulcanius aruspex in contione dixit cometen esse, qui significaret exitum noni saeculi et ingressum decimi; sed quod invitis diis secreta rerum pronuntiaret, statim se esse moriturum; et nondum finita oratione, in ipsa contione concidit. hoc etiam Augustus in libro secundo de memoria vitae suae complexus est. For the star on a coin of the latter part of 4 4 , see the sestertius of L. Aemilius Buca, Grueber, op. ext. I, p. 5 4 7 . 2 2
See the aurei of P. Clodius that seem to date in 4 3 before the formation of the triumvirate. Cf. Bahrfeldt, Romische Goldmunzenprdgung, PI. v, 8, 9, 1 0 . On the sun and moon as symbols of the age see Norden, Die Geburt des Kindes, p. 1 4 3 . For other symbols of a golden age on the coins of this period see Alfoldi, Hermes LXV ( 1 9 3 0 ) , 3 6 9 ff. Cic. N.D. II, 5 1 : Quarum (reference to the planets) ex disparibus motionibus magnum annum mathematici nominaverunt qui turn efficitur cum Solis et Lunae et quinque errantium ad eandem inter se comparationem confectis omnium spatiis est facta conversio. Cf. Censorinus 18, 1 1 . 2 3
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T H E D I V I N I T Y OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
he explained the comet as the apotheosis of his father, is said to have associated it privately with his own rebirth and so to have turned it as he did the other signs of Caesar's godhead to his own glory. The young Caesar's glory could in no way be more effectively served than by the belief that the man whose son and heir he was was a god in heaven. Truly the gods were good to him when they sent the comet, for Octavian could appeal to the popular belief that the illustrious dead were translated to the stars. Naturally the greatest men had the brightest stars. In the w ords of Horace, "The Julian star gleams amid all others like the moon amid lesser lights. Ovid's picture of how Venus came into the senate-house and seized the soul of Caesar from his pierced body and bore it aloft into the sky is perhaps indicative of the popular conception of the way the apotheosis took p l a c e : 2 4
25
r
,, 2 6
27
Dumque tulit lumen capere atque ignescere sensit, emisitque sinu. Luna volat altius ilia, flammiferumque trahens spatioso limite crinem stella micat. Octavian lost no time in taking advantage of the situation. He seems to have attached the star to every statue of Caesar that was set up, and the symbol henceforth became a regular sign of Caesar's godhead. 28
24
See the words of Pliny following the quotation from Augustus' memoirs (n, 94): Haec ille in publicum; interiore gaudio sibi ilium natum seque in eo nasci interpretatus est, et si verum fatemur, salutare id terris fuit. The signifi cance of the passage in connection with the fourth eclogue has lately been pointed out by Wagenvoort, "Vergils Vierte Ekloge und das Sidus Iulium," Mededeelingen der koninkl. Akad. van Wetenschappen, Afd. Letterkunde, Deel 67, Serie A (1927), 1 ff. Cf. the statement about the comet, Servius Dan. on Aen. x, 272: Dicitur apparuisse eo tempore quo est Augustus sortitus imperium; tunc denique gaudia omnibus gentibus futura sunt nuntiata. Carm. I, 12, 46 ff. Met. xv, 847 ff. See Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism, p. 104. Cf. Serv. Dan. on Aen. VIII, 681 (Nam ideo Augustus omnibus statuis, quas divinitati Caesaris statuit, hanc stellam adiecit), and on Eel. 9, 47, quoted in n. 21. See Dio XLV, 7, 1. For the star on statues of Caesar see Gsell, Rev. Arch, x x x i v (1899), 37-43, PI. n. Cf. Fig. 44, below. 2 6
26
27
2 8
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D i v u s JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE C U L T T
The new statues were left unmolested, and there w as such popular enthusiasm that it was possible now to put some of the other decrees in Caesar's honor into operation. From this time the name Julius for the month of July was firmly fixed. But Antony still opposed the execution of most of the decrees. In a temporary effort to conciliate Octavian and the veterans, the consul proposed the addition of a day in Caesar's honor to all the public thanksgivings. Cicero in the second Philippic slightly later pointed out the inconsistency of Antony's course, his readiness to give Caesar certain honors and his unwilling ness to carry out others—notably his failure to have himself consecrated as priest of Caesar. " Either do away with your religious scruples altogether or stick to them in every case." Antony again showed readiness to honor Caesar when he erected a statue of the dictator on the Rostra and inscribed it Parenti Optimo Maximo. He did it, Cicero writes to Cassius, " t o make us seem not merely assassins but parricides." 29
3 0
31
2 9
D i o XLV, 7, 1-2: rco 8k 8r} Kaiaapi
aorpuv
dpidpbv
81
kyKareiXeypkvcp
avrb
averiQeaav
y
virkp TT}S KeaXrjs txovra,
OJS KCLI am\BavaTiQpkvo^ daparj&as
earr^ev.
CI
X XKODJ' avrov
Kal ks TOV T&V ks TO 'A#po
kiTeiS-ft re oure TOVTO TLS 6/3O,
kKQjXvvev, OVTO3 di) Kal dXXo. Tiva T&V ks TYJV rou Kcucrapos rip.r\v
pkvcov kykvero
TOV re yap prjva TOV 'IOVXLOV bpolus
eKaXeaav,
Kal Upoprjviais
irpodedoyTialv
rco bvbpari avrov k(3ovdvT7]aav. For the decree of a thanksgiving to Caesar see Cicero, Phil. 1, 13: An me censetis, patres conscripti, quod vos inviti secuti estis, decreturum f uisse, ut parentalia cum supplicationibus miscerentur, ut inexpiabiles reiigiones in rem pablicam inducerentur, ut decernerentur supplicationes mortuo? Nihil dico cui. Fuerit ille Brutus, qui et ipse dominatu regio rem publicam liberavit et ad similem virtutem et simile factum stirpem iam prope in quingentesimum annum propagavit: adduci tamen non possem ut quemquam mortuum coniungerem cum deorum immortalium religione; ut, cuius sepulcrum usquam exstet ubi parentetur, ei publice supplicetur. kwiviKLOis Iblav
ripkpav
kirl
3 0
Cic. Phil. 2, 110: Nescis heri quartum in circo diem ludorum Romanorum fuisse? te autem ipsum ad populum tulisse ut quintus praeterea dies Caesari tribueretur? Cur non sumus praetextati? cur honorem Caesaris tua lege datum deseri patimur? an supplicationes addendo diem contaminari passus es, pulvinaria noluisti? Aut undique religionem tolle aut usquequaque con serva. Before Caesar's death two statues of him had been erected on the Rostra 31
according to Dio XLIV, 4, 5: kiri ye TOV firjpaTOS diio < avbpiavrt.s TroXlras
aeacoKOTOs rbv 8k cbs TT\V TTOXLV kK woXiopKias
TQV kirl TOLS TCIOVTOLS vevopiaukvw
ISpvaavro.
> TOV pkv &s rois
kt-wprjpkvov, /zerd TCOV are^avcov
Possibly the statement is inaccu-
94
T H E D I V I N I T Y OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
But in general Antony continued his opposition to Caesar's divinity. We have not the evidence to follow the contest through the year of blood and strife that led to the coalition between the two men and Lepidus known as the second triumvirate. Octavian kept before Caesar's troops, who were his stanchest supporters, his purpose of avenging Caesar and of securing all his honors. In a speech in November Caesar's heir stretched his hand toward Caesar's statue with an oath which contained the words, " S o may it be granted to me to attain the honors of my father.'' At the same time Octavian played a dubious game with the senate which put him for a time into alliance with some of his father's murderers. His course is perhaps no more indefensible than that of the aristocratic group in the senate who, as we see clearly from Cicero, compromised by allying themselves with him. By the first of January the senate had conferred on him a series of extraordinary honors that brought him far on the road to the attainment of Caesar's position. They included the title pro praetore, which legalized his dangerous military command, the right to vote with the men of consular rank, and a prefer ential position in candidacy for office. 32
When one of the two consuls with whom Octavian was cooperating in the manoeuvres before Mutina was killed in battle and the other died of his wounds in the moment of victory, Octavian was their natural successor in the command of a large army which was already devoted to him as the heir of Caesar. He refused then to have anything to do with Decimus Brutus, whom he had helped to liberate from Mutina. There could, he declared, be no intercourse between him and one of his father's murderers. When the senate attempted to curtail his powers, Octavian marched on Rome and forced his rate, and the statues, like most of the other honors mentioned in the same chap ter, were simply voted. In that case Antony may have been carrying out the earlier decree. Cic. Alt. xvi, 15, 3: At quae contio. Nam est missa mihi. Iurat "Ita sibi parentis honores consequi liceat" et simul dextram intendit ad statuam. Cicero's comment just before allying himself with Octavian is significant: 32
"Mrjde GwdeLrjv VTTO ye TOLOVTOV.
95
D i v u s JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE CULT
enemies to confer the consulship upon him. In after years the date when he received the fasces, August 19, was recorded as one of the anniversaries of his power, and there is a story, which perhaps comes from his own memoirs, that six vultures were seen by him as he entered the Campus Martius with his army and that six more appeared as he ascended the Rostra to address the people the first time as consul. The omen, in after times at least, was compared to the famous birds that confirmed Romulus as the destined king. 33
34
But for the time being Caesar's memory and the determina tion to avenge Caesar's murder rather than his own position seemed to dominate all that Octavian did. The first act of his consulship was to secure from the comitia curiata the con firmation of his adoption by Caesar. Then as Caesar's acknowledged son he brought about the passage of a law which declared all his father's assassins to be outlaws. Later the historians who wrote under Octavian's influence liked to dwell upon the violent death that came as inescapable retribution to the conspirators one after another. Octavian was already in communication with Antony when he entered upon the consulship. Alliance with him furnished after all the most effective means of punishing Brutus and Cassius, who, with provincial commands to aid them, were raising a great force in the East. Late in October Octavian met Antony and Lepidus on an island near Bononia and entered upon the coalition known as the second triumvirate, a union to be sealed in the blood of their common enemies in the terrible proscriptions that marked the closing months of the year 43. 33
2
On the commemoration of the day at Cumae see C.I.L. i, l , Comm. diurn. p. 326, on August 19 (Feriale Cumanum): [Eo die Caesar pri)mum consulatum i n ^ i . August 19 was also the date of Augustus' death. Cf. Tac. Ann. i, 9: Multus hinc ipso de Augusto sermo, plerisque vana mirantibus quod idem dies accepti quondam imperii princeps et vitae supremus. Iul. Obs. 129: Caesar cum in campum Martium exercitum deduceret, sex vultures apparuerunt. Conscendenti deinde rostra creato consuli iterum sex vultures conspecti veluti Romuli auspiciis novam urbem condituro signum dederunt. Cf. App. B.C. in, 94. 34
96
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
One of the first acts of the triumvirate was the deification of Julius Caesar. Just as the group which has succeeded Lenin in Bolshevist Russia fortified its position by what we may term the canonization of Lenin, the Roman triumvirate established its prestige by referring its authority to a god and by securing the worship of that god in formal state cult. The deification took place on the first of January, 42 B.C. It has been generally assumed that the apotheosis put into effect at this time had no relation to the divine honors granted Caesar before his death. It is indeed often asserted that the divinity which he assumed in his lifetime was based on Hellenistic models, while the cult accorded after his death represented a new Roman institution. But the opposition at Rome was rather to the worship of a mortal than to the cult of a living man. Cicero was not less shocked at a formal cult of a man whose tomb was in existence than he was at the image of the living Caesar in the circus procession or the statue of Caesar inscribed with the title "Unconquered G o d . " Dio is right in associating the apotheosis accorded by the triumvirs with the deification that came in Caesar's lifetime. He says the triumvirs "exalted him not only by honors which had been voted him but also by others which they now added." Caesar was in fact placed in the number of the gods by the decree of divinity, priest, and temple accorded him early in the year 44; the only difficulty had been that the decrees were not carried out. The same divine name, Divus Julius, was now given to him and the same priest, Mark Antony, was assigned him as his special flamen, though the priest himself succeeded for a while longer in delaying his inauguration. The temple was not erected as previously 35
3 6
35
See for instance Wissowa, Rel. u. Kult. d. Rom* p. 342, n. 6: " D i e fiiiher bei Lebzeiten oder sofort nach dem Tode Caesars dekretierten gottlichen Ehrungen . . . die ganz und gar an den hellenistischen Herrscherkult ankniipfen werden durch die spatere Regelung des Dienstes aufgehoben and kommen fur die Schaffung eines dauernden neuen Rechtszustandes nicht in Betracht." 3 6
Dio
XLVII,
18,
2:
nal
8ia
rovro
rots re
e\prit.
erepois a Tore irpoaedeaav. Dio's account in this and the following chapter is the best source for the deification of Caesar.
97
D i v u s JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE C U L T
voted to Caesar and his Clementia. That shrine, whose cult statue seems actually to have been made, was apparently never completed. Instead, a new temple was erected to him on the spot made sacred by the circumstances of his death— the place where his ardent adherents had burned his body, and where his veterans and freedmen had gathered about the altar that the false Marius had set up to him. The altar had been removed by Dolabella, but it had probably been restored not long afterwards. Indeed we know that the veterans were thinking of putting it back in the very month when it was
FIG. 8.
Altar of Divus Julius.
37
removed. The altar that stands on the site today (Fig. 8) antedates the temple structure which cuts into the pavement on which it rests. The honors of 42, known chiefly from Dio's list of them, can in several cases be identified with earlier provisions. Such is the case with the oath to consider his acts binding, the 38
3 7
Cf. Cic. Fam. xi, 2, 2 (a letter of Brutus and Cassius to Antony): Putesne nos tutos fore in tanta frequentia militum veteranorum, quos etiam de reponenda ara cogitare audimus? Cf. App. B.C. ii. 106. 3 8
98
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR 39
carrying of his image with that of Venus in the circus games, the exhibition of his chair and wreath (Fig. 9 ) at the theatrical
FIG. 9.
Caesar's Wreath and Chair.
Denarius.
40
games, and the public celebration of his birthday (transferred by Sibylline oracle from the thirteenth to the twelfth of July). The provision to honor him with a thanksgiving along with the victor whenever news of a victory came put into force the new honor which Antony had voted to Caesar in September after his death. The other honors listed, the making of the anniversary of Caesar's death into a day on which the senate could not meet, the walling up of the room in which he had been murdered, were new and hardly divine honors which were conditioned by the circumstances of his death. There was another measure that emphasized his divinity—the provision that no likeness of him might be carried in the funerals of his relatives, "just as if he were in very truth a god." This distinction could only come after Caesar's death; it indicated in strong terms that the dictator was not what Cicero called him—simply a dead man.
41
42
3 9
Cf.
Dio
XLVII, 18,
4:
/cat
TI Kal ayaX/za avrov
kv rats linrohpoplats
ped'
krkpov 'Apodi. That the image of Caesar was carried to the games with the image of Victory in 45 is clear from Cicero's account of the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris, Att. XIII, 44, 1. Victory was identical with Venus Victrix. The Ludi Victoriae Caesaris had as an alternate name Ludi Veneris Genetricis. See Wissowa, op. cit. pp. 291 f. This honor, which Octavian had tried twice to put into execution in the games of the four months following Caesar's death, is indicated on a series of coins struck in Gaul in the early years of the Iriumvirate. They have a head of Octavian on the obverse and a chair surmounted by a wreath on the reverse. The inscription reads CAESAR D I C . PER. See Grueber, op. cit. n, p. 405. See n. 15 above. For the date of the inscriptions to Divus Iulius usually placed in 42 see Appendix in. 40
41
42
D i v u s JULIUS ENSHRINED IN STATE CULT
99
Undoubtedly then the triumvirs in deifying Caesar were doing no more than putting into force the godhead that was Caesar's before he died. The special distinctions offered were of course modified by the fact that Caesar was dead and were materially affected by the circumstances under which he met his death. Nevertheless they represented the victory of Octavian in his long struggle to establish his adoptive father in the position that was Caesar's by legal right at the moment of his assassination. The new honors were far more effective than the earlier attempts at deification had been. Caesar was now removed from envy and hatred, and his fame had been enhanced by the fact that he had died a martyr's death. Moreover, faith in his apotheosis had been strengthened by the appearance of the comet, which could readily be associated with the popular idea that the souls of great men were trans lated to the stars. Octavian had made skillful use of the idea, and men were reminded of it by the star placed on all the myriads of statues of Caesar. Divus Julius was now a potent god. Nowhere is his potency more apparent than in its effect on the power of the adopted son who henceforth styled himself divi filius.
CHAPTER V T H E STRIFE TO SECURE CAESAR'S P O W E R
The thirteen years that followed the formation of the triumvirate decided the character of the divine monarchy at Rome. The alliance between Octavian and Antony—almost from the beginning Lepidus was unimportant in the trium virate—accepted the deification of Julius Caesar. In putting into execution the decree that established Caesar's godhead along the lines laid down before Caesar's death, the triumvirs were making a precedent at Rome of which they themselves might be expected to take advantage in establishing their own position. There was really only one serious obstacle to the immediate creation of a god-king, after the manner of the empires of the Orient, and that was that there were two claimants for the throne. One of them, Mark Antony, was the man who had been most active in Caesar's lifetime in his efforts to secure Caesar's position as god and king. He understood so well the significance of Caesar's divinity that in the year after Caesar's death he set himself firmly against Caesar's divine honors because he saw that they would magnify the position of Octavian. From the first he attempted to make himself Caesar's successor; he was probably in secret alliance with Cleopatra soon after the Ides of March and it is likely that she helped him to formulate plans of attaining the position of Hellenistic divine monarch which he had tried to help Caesar reach. His rival was a youth of twenty, frail and inexperienced except for the bitter struggle of the past year, but possessed of a tenacity of purpose and a grasp of the means of attaining his ends that are perhaps unparalleled in the history of youth. He was unswerving in his determination to enter on the 100
T H E STRIFE TO SECURE CAESAR'S P O W E R
101
inheritance that his adoptive father had willed him, and the inheritance as he viewed it meant the full extent of Caesar's power, and all the halo of divinity that went with it. From the beginning this alliance of two men determined to secure Caesar's position could hardly have been expected to last. It had been formed simply because of the necessity both men felt of making away with Caesar's murderers, and when that was done it had no real basis for enduring. The decade after Philippi is one long series of breaks and reconciliations between the two, until the final reckoning came at Actium. The character of the struggle between them and the allies they sought against each other resulted in the formation of widely different aims for the two and in the evolution of two very distinct conceptions of the god-king which were not clearly defined in the first years of their conflict. It is unfortunate that the ancient sources available make it particularly difficult to reconstruct this very crucial period in the development of the divine monarchy at Rome. The proscriptions that followed the formation of the triumvirate removed in Cicero the most enlightening source of knowledge for the events of the time. Without his speeches and his correspondence, political developments seem suddenly obscure, and the obscurity is deepened by the fact that there is very little contemporary comment on the events of the next decade. The official inscriptions, which give us so much information about the latter part of the reign of Augustus, are rare even for Octavian; and the inscriptions in honor of Antony seem to have been almost wholly destroyed. The poets who celebrate Augustus' achievements with such enthusiasm a few years later have hardly begun to write. Horace, as yet un convinced of the destiny of Caesar's adopted son, generally avoids the mention of public affairs in his verse, and Vergil's occasional poems on political or national subjects are so beset with problems that it is difficult to base conclusions upon them. Of contemporary historical works we have none except the bald narrative of the soldier Velleius Paterculus and the
102
T H E DIVINITY OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR
brief epitomes of the lost books of Livy. For the events of the period we must turn to later writers whose accounts of the triumvirate are inevitably very much affected by the masses of pamphlet literature which the partisans of Antony and Octavian issued against each other. Among these writers the only important one who wrote in Latin, Suetonius, does not give us much material for these years. The fullest authorities are Greeks. Plutarch in his lives of Antony and Brutus gives much that is priceless but one is forced to remember that he never really acquired a thorough understanding of Roman institutions any more than of the Latin language. Appian, though his best sources end with the death of Caesar, furnishes a great deal of valuable material for the early years of the triumvirate, but it is often vitiated by his own lack of discern ment and grasp. Cassius Dio, who wrote the only continuous history of the period which has come down to us, is the most important source for the course of events, but he was writing beyond a gulf of two and a half centuries from the time he was describing, and his point of view is colored by the servility of the age in which he lived. Finally it may be added that the years of the triumvirate are less clear because no great modern historian has reconstructed them for us. 1
It is the incompleteness of the entire picture rather than the lack of details about the divine pretensions of the leaders which makes it hard to gauge the significance of the develop ment in the conception of the absolute monarchy during these years. Claims to divine ancestry and to personal identification with godhead were apt to be exaggerated by the pamphleteers who wrote for the opposing forces, and the stories of Antony masquerading as Dionysus, of Octavian as Apollo, and Sextus Pompey as Neptune have lost nothing in the telling. But there can be no doubt of the fact that all sides used their divine associations as a means of propaganda with the people 1
A thorough collection of the evidence for Augustus' whole life is fortunately available in Gardthausen's valuable work, Augustus und seine Zeit (1891-1904); cf. the Bibliographische Nachtrdge, which lists supplementary bibliography up to 1918. See also Otto Seeck in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Iulius (Augustus).
T H E STRIFE TO SECURE CAESAR'S P O W E R
103
both in the East and among the easternized plebs of Rome. For the real use of such claims in making the divine associations of every side known, there is abundant direct testimony in the coins issued by both sides in the East and the West. In addition to Octavian and Antony there is a third person who plays a major role in the events of the years covered by the triumvirate. That is the queen Cleopatra. In view of her influence on the course of events it seems desirable to go back and see what is known of her for the period following the death of Caesar. She left Italy to return to Egypt, apparently in April of the year 44. Once arrived in her own country, she set about the legitimization of her son Caesarion's position as king of Egypt. The obstacle in the way was her young brother-husband whom Caesar had established as co-ruler with her. With the ruthlessness that had been characteristic of the Ptolemaic royal house for the past two centuries, the queen had her brother poisoned and put her son in his 