According to his later biographer, the Greek scholar Plutarch, whose book on famous Greek and Roman men provides us with biographies of many of the greatest figures of the time, many people believed that Alexander was one of Zeus’s offspring. Alexander’s actual father was the famous and powerful Philip, king of Macedonia, who had fallen in love with a woman named Olympias. According to Plutarch, the night before the two were to consummate their marriage, Olympias dreamed that a thunderbolt came down from heaven and entered her. Presumably, this was Zeus doing his magic. Philip, in the meantime, apparently looked in on his wife that night and saw a serpent engaged in conjugal embrace with her. As Plutarch indicates, and as one might understand, this sight very much cooled Philip’s passion for his bride. In ancient times Zeus was often represented in the form of a snake, and so, for those who believed this tale, the child—Alexander—was no mere mortal. He was the son of a god.
In mythology we have even more striking accounts of Zeus, or his Roman counterpart, Jupiter, engaging in such nocturnal activities. No story is more intriguing than the tale of the birth of Hercules. The tale takes many forms in antiquity, but perhaps the most memorable is the hilarious recounting found among the plays of the Roman comic playwright Plautus, in his work Amphytrion. The play is named after one of the main characters, a military general of Thebes who is married to an extraordinarily beautiful woman named Alcmena. Amphytrion has gone away to war, leaving his pregnant wife at home. Jupiter casts his lustful gaze upon her from heaven and decides that he has to have her. And he knows just how to do it.
Jupiter disguises himself as Amphytrion and tells Alcmena that he has come home from battle. She welcomes him with open arms and takes him to bed. So much does Jupiter enjoy the ensuing activities that he orders the constellations to stop in their circuit. In other words, he makes time stand still until he—even he, the mighty god with divine capacity for enjoyment—has his fill. The constellations resume their motion, Jupiter returns to his heavenly home, and Alcmena is obviously worn out from the very long frolic.
As it turns out, the real Amphytrion returns home that morning. And he is more than a little surprised and dismayed to find that his wife does not welcome him with all the enthusiasm that one might expect after such an extended absence. From her perspective, of course, this is completely understandable: she thinks that she has just spent a very long night in her husband’s arms. Be that as it may, there is an interesting gestational result of this episode. Alcmena had already been made pregnant by Amphytrion. But she becomes pregnant yet again by Jupiter (some of these mythological tales were not strong on anatomy or biology).5 The result is that she bears twins. One is the divine Hercules, the son of Jupiter; the other is his twin brother, a mortal, Iphicles.
The tale of Amphytrion and Alcmena, of course, is a myth, and it is not clear that anyone actually “believed” it. It was instead a great story. Still, the idea behind it—that a mortal woman could give birth to a child spawned by a god—was plausible to many people of the ancient world. It would not be unusual for them to think that some of the great beings who stride the earth—great conquerors like Alexander, for example, or even great philosophers with superhuman wisdom such as Plato6—may well have been conceived in ways different from us mere mortals. They may have had a divine parent so that they themselves were, in some sense, divine.
I should stress that when Alcmena gave birth to Hercules, the son of Jupiter, it was not an instance of a virgin birth. Quite the contrary. She had already had sex with her husband, and she had what you might call divine sex with Jupiter. In none of the stories of the divine humans born from the union of a god and a mortal is the mortal a virgin. This is one of the ways that the Christian stories of Jesus differ from those of other divine humans in the ancient world. It is true that (the Jewish) God is the one who makes Jesus’s mother Mary pregnant through the Holy Spirit (see Luke 1:35). But the monotheistic Christians had far too an exalted view of God to think that he could have temporarily become human to play out his sexual fantasies. The gods of the Greeks and Romans may have done such things, but the God of Israel was above it all.
A Human Who Becomes Divine
The third model of understanding divine humans in Greek and Roman circles provided the most important conceptual framework that the earliest Christians had for conceiving how Jesus could be both human and divine. It is not a view about how a divine being could become human—through a temporary incarnation or a sexual act—but about how a human being could become divine. As it turns out, this allegedly happened numerous times in Greek and Roman antiquity.
Romulus
One of the most striking examples involves the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus. We have several accounts of the life of Romulus, including one produced by a great early historian of Rome, Livy (59 CE–17 CE), who in one place states the opinion that Romulus was a “god born of a god” (History of Rome 1.16). The event that most interests us involves the end of Romulus’s life.
There were, to be sure, rumors of divine involvement in Romulus’s conception. His mother was a Vestal Virgin, a sacred office that required—as the name indicates—a woman to abstain from sexual relations. But she became pregnant. Obviously, something went wrong with her vows. She claimed that the god Mars was responsible, and possibly some people believed her. If so, it simply shows again how a divine-human union could be taken to explain the appearance of remarkable humans on earth.
But it was Romulus’s disappearance from life that was even more astonishing. According to Livy, by the end of Romulus’s life Rome had been established, the Roman government had been formed with the Senate in place and Romulus as king, the army was fully functioning, and everything was well positioned for the beginnings of the greatest city in history. During the final episode of his life, Romulus had gathered with members of the Senate to review the military troops at the Campus Martius. Suddenly a huge thunderstorm arose. After major claps of thunder, Romulus was enveloped by fog. When the fog lifted, he was nowhere to be seen.
As it turns out, two reports circulated about his death. One of them—the one that apparently Livy and presumably most other skeptical observers believed—indicated that the senators had taken the opportunity of the moment to get rid of a despot: they had torn Romulus to shreds and hidden his remains. The other report, which the masses believed, was one that the senators themselves propagated—that Romulus “had been caught up on high in the blast.” In other words, he had been taken up to heaven to live with the gods. The result was a sudden acclamation of Romulus’s divine status: “Then, when a few men had taken the initiative, they all with one accord hailed Romulus as a god and a god’s son, the king and Father of the Roman City, and with prayers besought his favor that he would graciously be pleased forever to protect his children” (History of Rome 1.16).7