A web of power, and why splitting politics from religion is said to distort the cult

Rulers, the notes say, have long dressed the ideology they need in a religious form, in Egypt, in Greece, and in East and West alike. The usual explanation of Rome’s emperor cult is that a political-ideological system was needed to govern a vast territory and many peoples. Scholars differ on whether the cult is political or religious. Splitting the two, the writer thinks, risks distorting how the cult is read.

The British ancient historian Price (S.R.F.) also treats emperor worship as part of a web of power, to be understood only by examining both religion and politics. In ancient states, including Rome, religion was taken as the foundation of socio-political order, and political ideology was expressed through rites and ceremonies, so the attempt to choose politics or religion may itself be empty. The rites of the imperial cult, they write, derive from Greek cult culture in the Hellenistic period.

Before the cult was introduced, the city of Rome had no official deification of a living person, though deification of the dead — ancestor cult — was already appearing and spreading from the private into the public sphere. The practice was not the same everywhere in the empire. It varied by region, by period, and by the worshippers themselves; some places were more eager, some refused, and over time the custom settled. Jews and Christians, they add, were in constant conflict with it.

From Hellenistic ruler cult to Augustus, B.C. 30–A.D. 14

In Greece before Roman rule, the notes say, the domains of gods and of human beings were not sharply divided. Heroes stood between the two. As the polis developed, a political form of hero cult appeared, with rites different from those offered to the Olympian gods. Strict religious tradition still did not allow a living human being to be deified, but the heroization of historical figures is said to have given a direct background for worship of a ruler as a god.

During the Peloponnesian War a belief arose that a human being could acquire divinity. After the Spartan general Lysander won a great victory over Athens, city-states then under Athenian rule are said to have granted him divine honors. In the fourth century B.C., Alexander, once in Egypt, was received as a king by Egyptian priests and deified like a pharaoh; he later presented himself as the son of a god and asked the Greek city-states to recognize his divinity officially. After him, his successors in Greece were also deified in their lifetimes. Those years stay as the notes give them.

The origin of the Roman emperor cult is dated to the rule of Augustus (B.C. 30–A.D. 14). Rome, having taken Egypt, is said to have had to follow the Egyptian custom of deifying the ruler. In the Egyptian system the pharaoh was a living god and a son of a god, a mediator between gods and human beings; that idea became a model, and Augustus who ruled Egypt was regarded as a sun god. The first emperor settled the chaos of the late republic and began the Pax Romana, an empire centered on the Mediterranean and reaching Europe, Asia Minor, and Africa. Besides military means, emperors needed an ideological system, and the rites of emperor worship are said to have played that part. Augustus deified his adoptive father Julius Caesar, so as to present himself as the son of a god; he linked himself to Hercules, Apollo, and other gods or heroes; and he had his birthday, the victory at Actium, and other imperial commemorations entered on the Roman calendar.

Genius worship in Rome, and Augustus among the gods in the East

The cult was not received in the same way everywhere Rome ruled. Egypt and the Greek East, which already had a tradition of ruler worship, accepted it willingly. In the western provinces and in Rome itself the idea was somewhat unfamiliar. Because the city had no tradition of worshipping a living person as a god, and because republican ideas remained, the cult was introduced in a subtle form. Inside Rome, worship of the emperor’s genius — the guardian spirit of each male — met less resistance and was tied to cult of the living emperor; ancestor cult was tied to deification after death.

In the East, centered on Greece and Asia Minor, imperial rites spread rapidly from the start of Augustus’s principate. People, the notes say, found the Olympian gods hard to approach, while the ruler was a real person among them; a ruler’s outstanding human ability was thought to bring blessing. Around the fourth century B.C., political and social disorder is said to have gathered two things: hope in the transcendent power of a human being with absolute authority, and doubt about the old gods. As the gods’ authority fell and the status of human beings rose, historical heroes or rulers were set in the middle of the old vertical ranking, as practical objects of honor. People also thought the king had a special relation with particular gods who protected him, and wanted to give thanks for favors received. For Greeks, the line between ruler or hero and god was not sharp.

On that basis, Augustus’s rites in the eastern Greek world were combined with, or identified with, the rites of traditional Greek or Roman gods. Coins of the time, the notes record, show Augustus after Neptune (Poseidon). Eastern Greeks treated him as a god, or as the son of a god. An inscription carved in 3 B.C. swears loyalty “before Zeus and the sun, all the gods and goddesses, and Augustus.” The unique body does not carry the character and function of the rites, or the Judeo-Christian conflict, much beyond that standing conflict already noted, and nothing later is invented here. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Notes on the Roman emperor cult, set against a usual political-ideological explanation and against S.R.F. Price’s view of a web of power that is both religion and politics.
2. Hellenistic background as the unique body gives it: hero cult, Lysander, Alexander in the fourth century B.C., and the absence of official living deification in the city of Rome before the cult.
3. Augustus (B.C. 30–A.D. 14), Egyptian divine kingship as a model, the genius cult in Rome, identification with traditional gods in the East, coins after Neptune, and an oath of 3 B.C., with years left in the notes’ own frame.

Last updated: 14 November 2026