Here we have a view of divine humans in a nutshelclass="underline" a human can be honored by the gods by being made one of them; this happens because of the person’s great merit; as a divinity, the person deserves worship; and in his role as a god, he can protect those who bring to him their supplications.
It is interesting that Livy reports that the ascension of Romulus was later verified by a man named Proculus Julius, who declared to the assembly of the Roman people that Romulus had appeared to him alive after his death. He is recorded as saying that “the Father of this City, Romulus, descended suddenly from the sky at dawn this morning and appeared to me. Covered with confusion I stood reverently before him. . . . ‘Go,’ he said, ‘and declare to the capital of the world; so let them cherish the art of war, and let them know and teach their children that no human strength can resist Roman arms.’ So saying . . . Romulus departed on high” (History of Rome 1.16).
Romans heartily and enthusiastically embraced the divinity of the man Romulus. A trio of gods—Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus—lived at the heart of ancient Rome, on the ancient hill, the Capitoline. Originally, Quirinus may have been a god worshiped among one of the groups of people, the Sabines, who were incorporated into the Roman state early in its history. But by the time of Livy’s writing, Quirinus was understood to be the divinized Romulus, worshiped right up there with the great father of the gods himself.
Julius Caesar
The traditional date for the founding of Rome is 753 BCE. If we move the calendar forward about seven centuries, we still find men who are proclaimed to have become gods. Few are better known than Julius Caesar, the self-declared dictator of Rome who was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BCE, by political enemies who preferred not having a dictator when all was said and done. The Roman biographer Suetonius provided a life of Julius Caesar in his Lives of the Caesars, published in 115 CE. According to Suetonius, already during his lifetime Caesar had declared that he had a divine heritage. In a funeral oration he delivered for his aunt he stated that one side of his family descended from the ancient Roman kings—through the legendary Marcus Ancius, the fourth king of Rome—and the other side descended from the gods. His family line, in fact, could be traced back to the goddess Venus.
At Caesar’s death a vicious power struggle ensued between his enemies and supporters, the latter including Mark Antony (of Antony and Cleopatra fame) in league with Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, who later became Caesar Augustus. At Caesar’s funeral, Antony decided not to deliver the customary funerary oration. Instead, he had a herald cry out the Senate’s decision “to render Caesar all honors, both human and divine.” In effect, Julius Caesar was voted into divinity by the ruling authorities. This is a process known as deification—the recognition that, in this instance, a person had been so great that he had been taken up at death into the ranks of the gods. The “common people” and even the heavens seemed to support Caesar’s deification, as Suetonius tells us: “[Caesar] died in the fifty-sixth year of his life and was included in the ranks of the gods, not only by formal decree but also by the conviction of the common people. Indeed at the first games which were given after his deification by his heir Augustus, a comet shone, appearing around the eleventh hour for seven days in succession, and it was believed to be the soul of Caesar who had been received into heaven” (The Deified Julius Caesar 88).8
Looking at the matter from a purely human and political point of view, there is little question about why the heir and adopted son Octavian wanted the Roman people to agree that Caesar was not only descended from a divine line, but had himself been made a divine being. If Julius Caesar was a god, what would that make his son? As New Testament scholar Michael Peppard has recently pointed out, to our knowledge only two people in the ancient world were actually called “Son of God.” Other people were, to be sure, named after their divine fathers: son of Zeus, son of Apollo, and so on. But only two people known by name were also called “Son of God.” One was the Roman emperor—starting with Octavian, or Caesar Augustus—and the other was Jesus. This is probably not an accident. When Jesus came on the scene as a divine man, he and the emperor were in competition.
Caesar Augustus
Julius Caesar may have been considered a god after he died, but his adopted son Octavian (emperor from 27 BCE to 14 CE) was sometimes considered a god while he was still alive. Considering a living ruler to be divine was not unheard of in the ancient world. The Egyptians had long revered their pharaohs as living representatives of deities, and the conqueror Alexander the Great, mentioned earlier, was offered and accepted the kind of obeisance reserved for the gods. But this was not done in the Roman world until the beginning of the worship of the emperor.
Legends indicated that Octavian did not have a normal human birth but, like others before him, was born of the union of a mortal and a god. According to Suetonius, Octavian’s mother, Atia, was said to have been made pregnant by the god Apollo in the form of a snake (reminiscent, of course, of the conception of Alexander the Great). Atia had been attending the sacred rites of Apollo in a temple, and in the middle of the night, while she was asleep on her litter in the temple, a snake slid up to her and then quickly departed. When she awoke, she purified herself as she would have done after having sex with her husband, and miraculously the image of a snake permanently appeared on her body. Suetonius tells us that “Augustus was born ten months later and for this reason is believed to be the son of Apollo” (The Deified Augustus 94).
Moreover, that very night, Atia’s husband, who was off at war in Thrace (northern Greece), had a dream in which he “saw his son of greater than mortal size with a thunderbolt and scepter and emblems of Jupiter Best and Greatest and a radiant crown drawn by twelve brilliantly white horses” (The Deified Augustus 94). Clearly, these were portents that this child was a divine figure, a great god on earth.
Unlike some of the later emperors, while in office Augustus was not enthusiastic about being worshiped as a god. Suetonius says that he would not allow temples in the Roman provinces to be dedicated to him unless they were jointly dedicated to the goddess Roma—the patron goddess of Rome. Sometimes cities got around this imperial reluctance by building a temple and dedicating it to the “genius” of Augustus. The word genius in this case does not mean his intellectual brilliance, but the guardian spirit that watched over his family and, especially, him as its leader, making him who he was. In a sense, by worshiping Augustus’s genius, these cities revered him in a depersonalized but highly divinized sense.
Moreover, despite his reluctance, Octavian was hailed as the “Son of God” as early as 40 BCE—years before he was emperor—and this title is found on coins as early as 38 BCE. A decree from the Greek city of Cos hails Augustus as the god Sebastos (a Greek term equivalent to the Latin “Augustus”) and indicates that he has “by his benefactions to all people outdone even the Olympian gods.” That’s pretty stiff competition for a mere mortal, but for his reverential followers, he was far more than that. After his death Augustus was deified and called “divine,” or “one who has been made divine,” or “one who has been accounted among the gods.” When his body was cremated, according to Suetonius, a high-ranking Roman official claimed that he “saw Augustus’s image ascending to the sky.” He continued to be worshiped as a god by later Romans, including later Roman emperors.9
The Emperor Cult
For an ancient historian, the word cult does not have the kind of negative connotations it may have today—referring to a wild sectarian religion with bizarre beliefs and practices. It is simply a shortened version of the term cultus deorum, which means “care of the gods,” a close equivalent to what today we would call “religion” (just as “agriculture” means “care of the fields”). The Roman cult of the emperor started with Augustus and continued through the emperors who followed him, many of whom lacked his reticence in being considered a manifestation of the divine on earth.10