Potentially Interesting Roman History
Episode XXXIII
In Roman and Greek polytheism, the gods were not all necessarily omnipotent, universe-creating mega-beings able to bend the forces of existence to their will at the snap of the fingers, which is why there were so many of them. In the Abrahamic model, you only need one God because He can do whatever He wants, but Romans made do with more specialist divine beings with explicit powers to match.
The major difference between humans and the gods was that they had what might be best described as superpowers not available to humans (although some gods had more powers than others) and the fact that they were immortal. Fans of the Marvel Universe will immediately recognize these superhumans in characters like Thor, whose fingers don’t crackle with the omnipotence of the Christian God, but he’ll live forever, and he can smash people through skyscrapers with a mallet.
It was not such a stretch of the imagination, therefore, to believe that a human could become a god, especially when such a person had either been given powers that most normal people don’t have - superpowers, one might say - or had displayed such in life, either by daring deed on the battlefield or by the performance of some kind of ‘miracle’.
Coins were minted in the same year of Caesar’s murder bearing the motto DIVVS IVLIVS or Divine Julius, and in 42BC, the senate and the people agreed and recognized him as a god. Accordingly, a temple to Divus Julius was constructed in the forum at Rome and was dedicated in 29.
Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son, recognized the opportunity and seized upon it, naming himself Divi Filius - Son of a God.
In life, Caesar had been a man of unique power, far beyond that afforded to any other Roman, both politically and in terms of his prowess in war. A ‘superman’ if you like. That’s halfway to being a god without even dying.
Worshipping living people had always been possible in the Roman world. More specifically, what was worshipped was specific elements of the individual’s genius or ‘guardian angel’. A person’s genius, which by its nature is divine or ‘holy’, watched over them from birth and imbued that person with their characteristics. It’s the origin of the word genie. If someone of note was engaged in an activity where they needed the support of the people or just a little extra luck, then sacrifices, normally in the form of libations, could be offered to their genius to urge them onwards to their goal.
Imagine England football fans all fervently beseeching the genius of Harry Kane to help slot home the winning penalty in the World Cup by offering up a can of terrible, cheap lager over a hastily cobbled-together voodoo doll around the back of a stadium somewhere in Europe.
If one could then imagine that after death, such a person became non-corporeally immortal - a ghost, if you will - then all the component parts of divinity were in place. Therefore, there was no reason why anyone would treat the idea of the Emperor becoming divine with anything but absolute conviction.
And there could be signs from the gods that helped that conviction stick. When Julius Caesar died in 44BC, a great comet appeared in the sky, the Caesaris Astrum, ‘Star of Caesar’, interpreted by Romans as the soul - genius - of the departed Caesar ascending to the heavens.
“When beggars die there are no comets seen.” As Calpurnia puts it in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. “The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
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