Imperial Cult
Pompey
The Roman general Pompey, when he first conquered West Asia around 50 BC, was embarrassed to find that people there were worshipping him as a god, coming out of the cities to pray to him, bowing down to him, making statues of him and putting them in temples and even sometimes sacrificing to these statues.
If he asked about it, Pompey might have found out
that people were worshipping him as a god because they had been used
to doing that with their own rulers since the time of Alexander
the Great, nearly 300 years earlier.
After Pompey was killed, and
Augustus came to power,
Augustus found it useful to allow this emperor-worship to continue (and
I don't know that he could have stopped it anyway). So people in West
Asia and Egypt continued
to worship the Roman emperors as gods right up until everybody converted
to Christianity
in the 300s AD. In fact, emperor worship
was one of the last parts of the pagan tradition to stop, well into
the 400s AD.
You might say that it was ridiculous to worship a person as a god, but it wasn't as ridiculous as it seems to you. The Romans worshipped a lot of gods, some more powerful than others, but none of them as powerful as the God that Christians, Jews, or Moslems think of today. And there were many less powerful gods too. Why shouldn't the emperor be one of them? The emperor was just as remote to most people as the gods, you never saw him, you never spoke to him (or he never spoke to you anyway). And he was just as powerful: he could send food when there was a famine, he could make there be a canal where you needed one, he could have a whole city full of people killed if he liked. In fact, he probably did all of these things more often than the gods did. So why not pray to him?
Why did people want to punch Socrates?
Where did Egyptians bury your liver?
How old are the Rocky Mountains?
What does a half-timbered house look like?
How do you spin wool?
(a project)
A useful book on Roman religion is Ramsey MacMullen's Paganism in the Roman Empire. His writing is very lively, and he uses a lot of interesting stories from the Roman world to illustrate his points. No pictures though.
Main Roman page
Main religion page
