{"id":69626,"date":"2023-06-20T01:00:46","date_gmt":"2023-06-20T05:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=69626"},"modified":"2025-08-19T19:13:35","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T23:13:35","slug":"qotd-when-kings-and-emperors-become-gods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/06\/20\/qotd-when-kings-and-emperors-become-gods\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: When kings and emperors become gods"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Nothing<\/em> in ancient religion strikes my students as so utterly strange and foreign as that idea [of divinized kings and emperors]. The usual first response of the modern student is to treat the thing like a sham \u2013 surely the king knows he is not divine or invested with some mystical power, so this most all be a con-job aimed at shoring up the legitimacy of the king. But as we’ve seen, the line between great humans and minor gods is blurry<\/strong>, and it is possible to cross that line. It is not necessary to assume that it was all an intentional sham.<\/p>\n

Divine rulership was not universal however \u2013 it was subject to cultural context. In Egypt, the Pharaoh was the Living Horus, a physical incarnation of the divine; when he died he became Osiris, the ruler over the underworld. The mystery of the duality whereby a Pharaoh was both a specific person (and might be a different person in the future) but also the same god each time seems to owe something to the multipart Egyptian conception of the soul. Naram-Sin, an Akkadian King (2254-2218 B.C.) represents himself as divine (shown by his having horns) on his victory stele<\/em>; future kings of Akkad followed suit in claiming a form of divinity, albeit a lesser one than the big-time great gods.<\/p>\n

But in Mesopotamia, the rulers of Akkad were the exception; other Mesopotamian kings (Sumerian, Babylonian, etc) did not claim to be gods \u2013 even very great kings (at least while alive \u2013 declaring a legendary ruler a god is rather more like a divine founder figure). Hammurabi (king of Babylon, c.1810-c.1750 B.C.) is shown in his royal artwork very much a man \u2013 albeit one who receives his mandate to rule from the gods Shamash and Marduk. Crucially, and I want to stress this, the Achaemenid kings of Persia were not considered gods<\/strong> (except inasmuch as some of them also occupied the position of Pharaoh of Egypt; it’s not clear how seriously they took this \u2013 less seriously than Alexander and Ptolemy, quite clearly). The assumption that the Persians practiced a divine kingship is mostly a product of Greek misunderstandings of Persian court ritual, magnified in the popular culture by centuries of using the Persian “other” as a mirror and (usually false) contrast for European cultures.<\/p>\n

But the practice that my students often find most confusing is that of the Roman emperors. To be clear, Roman emperors were not divinized while they were alive<\/em><\/strong>. Augustus had his adoptive father, Julius Caesar divinized (this practice would repeat for future emperors divinizing their predecessors), but not himself; the emperor Vespasian, on his deathbed, famously made fun of this by declaring as a joke, “Alas! I think I’m becoming a god” (Suet. Vesp<\/em>. 23.4). And yet, at the same time, outside of Rome, even Augustus \u2013 the first emperor \u2013 received cult and divine honors, either to his person or to his genius<\/em> (remember, that’s not how smart he is, but the divine spirit that protects him and his family).<\/p>\n

I think it is common for us, sitting outside of these systems, to view this sort of two-step dance, “I’m not a god, but you can give me divine honors in the provinces and call me a god, just don’t do it too loudly” as fundamentally cynical \u2013 and to some degree it might have been; Augustus was capable of immense cynicism. But I think it is possible to view this relationship outside of that cynicism through the lens of the ideas and rules we’ve laid out.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part IV: Little Gods and Big People”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2019-11-15.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nothing in ancient religion strikes my students as so utterly strange and foreign as that idea [of divinized kings and emperors]. The usual first response of the modern student is to treat the thing like a sham \u2013 surely the king knows he is not divine or invested with some mystical power, so this most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1526,7,370,41,11],"tags":[1527,1340,1457,588,1111,1337,396,1101,855,1343,1601],"class_list":["post-69626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greece","category-history","category-middle-east","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-ancientgreece","tag-augustus","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-egypt","tag-juliuscaesar","tag-mesopotamia","tag-monarchy","tag-persia","tag-polytheism","tag-romanempire","tag-romanhellenism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-i70","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69626"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82952,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69626\/revisions\/82952"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}