Imperial Cult, Roman

Introduction

Although there was a strong and ancient tradition in Roman culture of honoring the spirits of the dead (Manes), prior to the third century BCE, the Romans did not deify mortals. They did honor the Genius of a living man (just so, the Junoof a woman); these terms, however, denoted a divine force present in every human but at the same time distinct from him, and their worship should therefore not be considered equivalent to the worship of deified humans. The actual deification of individuals only came into practice following contact with Hellenistic cultures as the empire expanded; the concept of worshiping the emperor as a deity seems generally to have been an outgrowth of the Greek practice of deifying heroes and Hellenistic kings. The development of those earlier cults of heroes and kings, as well as later divine honors offered to prominent Romans, has been seen by modern scholars as adaptation by the Greeks of the cults of their traditional Olympian gods in order to...