If all this sounds familiar to Christian readers, it should. This man—here, the emperor—is a god whose birthday is to be celebrated because it brought “good tidings” to the world; he is the greatest benefactor of humans, surpassing all others, and is to be considered a “savior.” Jesus was not the only “savior-God” known to the ancient world.
A Nonruler: The Passing of Peregrinus
To this point, in exploring humans who were thought to have become divine, I have focused principally on powerful rulers. But other great humans also had this capacity. Of course, lots of people among us are reasonably powerful, wise, or virtuous. Others are remarkably powerful, wise, or virtuous. And others are unbelievably powerful, wise, or virtuous. If someone’s power, wisdom, or virtue is almost beyond belief, it may be because the person is not a lower life-form—a mortal like the rest of us. That person may be a god in human form. Or so it was widely believed in the Greek and Roman worlds.
One of the clearest ways to evaluate the common beliefs of a society is to consider the satires that arise within it. Satire makes fun of standard assumptions, perspectives, views, and beliefs. For satire to work, it has to be directed against something that is widely accepted. This is one reason that satire is such a perfect tool for unpacking the beliefs of other cultures. As it turns out, we have some brilliant satires from the Roman world.
One of the most entertaining satirists of ancient times was the second-century CE Lucian of Samosata, a Greek-speaking wit who proved to be the gadfly of all pretension, especially philosophical and religious. Among Lucian’s many surviving works is a book called The Passing of Peregrinus. Peregrinus was a self-styled philosopher of the Cynic mode. In ancient philosophy being a Cynic did not mean simply being cynical; it was a style of philosophy. Cynic philosophers were adamant that you shouldn’t live for the “good things” in life. You shouldn’t care what you possess, what you wear, or what you eat. You shouldn’t care for anything, in fact, that is external to you, anything that is ultimately beyond your ability to control. If your house burns down, that’s outside your control, so you shouldn’t be personally invested in your house. If you get fired from your job, that’s outside your control, so you shouldn’t be personally invested in your job. If your spouse divorces you or your child unexpectedly dies, those things are outside your control, so you shouldn’t be personally invested in your family. What you can control are your attitudes about the things in your life. And so it is your inner self, your attitudes, that you should be concerned about.
People who hold such views are not going to be interested in having a nice, comfortable life (since it can be taken away), in how other people respond to them (no way to control that), or in social convention (why should anyone care?). Cynic philosophers who acted out their convictions had no possessions, no personal loves, and often no manners. They didn’t have permanent homes and performed bodily functions in public. That’s why they were called Cynics. The word cynic is from the Greek word for dog. These people lived like dogs.
Some people from outside the ranks of Cynics highly respected them. Some people thought they could be brilliant philosophers. And some people who wanted to be thought of as brilliant philosophers became Cynics. In a sense, it was easy enough to do. All you had to do was give up everything and declare such a choice to be a virtue.
Lucian thought the whole Cynic business was a sham, an attention-grabbing ploy with no serious substance behind it. And so he mocked Cynics and their ways. No one earned his opprobrium more than a Cynic named Peregrinus. In The Passing of Peregrinus (meaning, the death of Peregrinus) Lucian tells the real story behind this famous Cynic whom others in his time considered to be so deeply profound and philosophical that they suspected he was in fact a divine being—which is precisely what Peregrinus wanted, in Lucian’s view. Lucian gives a hilarious account of Peregrinus’s life, but here I’m interested in the events surrounding his death. In a sense, the entire book is looking forward to the death of this self-aggrandizing proponent of selfless debasement.
Peregrinus reportedly presented himself as being the god Proteus in the flesh. And he wanted to demonstrate his divine virtue by the way he died. As a Cynic he proclaimed—hypocritically, in Lucian’s view—the need to abstain from all the pleasure and joy of this life. He decided to prove his point by voluntarily undergoing a violent and painful death, so as to show how he thought that people should in fact live. He planned, and proclaimed, that he would immolate himself. According to Lucian, he did just that, before a large crowd that had gathered to observe the event.
After announcing his intentions and hyping the event at great length (itself a form of self-aggrandizement, as Lucian portrays it), at a set time, around midnight, and near the Olympic games (where crowds would be sure to gather), Peregrinus and his followers built an enormous pyre and lit it. According to Lucian, Peregrinus hoped to be stopped by those who could not bear to see him pass from human existence, but when it came to the moment, Peregrinus realized he had no choice but to go through with the deed. He cast himself into the raging fire and so ended his life.
Lucian claims to have witnessed the event and thought the entire episode was ridiculous and absurd. He says that on the way back from the scene he met people who were coming—too late—to see the great man display his godlike courage and resilience to pain. Lucian informed them that they had missed the festivities, but he told them what happened, and did so as if he himself were a believer:
For the benefit of the dullards, agog to listen, I would thicken the plot a bit on my own account, saying that when the pyre was kindled and Proteus flung himself bodily in, a great earthquake first took place, accompanied by a bellowing of the ground, and then a vulture, flying up out of the midst of the flames, went off to Heaven, saying, in human speech, with a loud voice, “I am through with the earth; to Olympus I fare.” (The Passing of Peregrinus 39)16
And so Peregrinus, in the shape of a bird (not the noble eagle but the scavenger vulture), allegedly ascended to Mount Olympus, home of the gods, to live there, divine man that he was. To Lucian’s unmitigated amusement, he then met another man who was also telling about the event. This man claimed that after it was all over, he had met the supposedly dead Peregrinus, who was wearing a white garment and a garland of wild olive. Moreover, this man indicated that before this meeting, when Peregrinus had met his fiery fate, a vulture had arisen from the fire and flown off to heaven. This was the vulture that Lucian himself had invented! And so stories go, as they are invented, told by word of mouth, and then come to be taken as gospel truth.
Lucian, of course, mocked the entire proceeding and concluded his account by speaking not of Peregrinus’s divinity, but of his utter, and rather lowly, humanity: “So ended that poor wretch Proteus, a man who (to put it briefly) never fixed his gaze on the truth but always did and said everything with a view to glory and the praise of the multitude, even to the extent of leaping into fire, when he was sure not to enjoy the praise because he could not hear it” (The Passing of Peregrinus 42).
Divine Humans in the Greek and Roman Worlds
FROM THESE EXAMPLES, WE can see a variety of ways in the ancient world that divine beings could be thought to be human and that humans could be thought to be divine. Again, this way of looking at things stands considerably at odds with how most people today understand the relationship of the human and the divine, at least people who stand in the western religious traditions (Jews, Christians, Muslims). As I have noted already, in our world it is widely thought that the divine realm is separated from the human by an unbridgeable chasm. God is one thing; humans are another—and never the twain shall meet. Well, almost never: in the Christian tradition they did meet once, in the person of Jesus. Our question is how that was thought to have happened. At the root of that idea is a different sensibility about the world, one in which divinity is not absolutely but only relatively remote from humanity.