Imperial divinity in the twilight of the gods: the transformation of Roman Imperial cults in the Latin West, AD 193-430

Thesis

The cultic of veneration of Roman Emperors, though expressed divergently by region and social setting, attained a ubiquity unparalleled by most other religious institutions of the Roman world. While the inception and early development of this phenomenon has attracted substantial scholarly interest, the history of ruler cults in the Roman world beyond the Nerva-Antonine dynasty (AD 96–192) has been chronically neglected. This thesis offers the first dedicated diachronic study of the evolution of ruler cults in the western Roman Empire between AD 193 and c. 430. Attending closely to the most widely replicated categories of divine honour that Roman emperors customarily received throughout the first and second centuries AD, it challenges the view that the Severan emperors inaugurated a crass cult of the living emperor that displaced the more restrained principle of deferred divinisation in the third century. Instead, it asserts that, under the Severans, a standard package of divine honours, customarily granted to deceased emperors upon their consecration in Rome, was reinterpreted along lines which accentuated Severan claims to dynastic continuity with the Antonines and forged a new model of dynastic cult that exerted a pronounced influence on ruler cults down to the mid-fourth century both within and outside of Rome. Only under Constantine, at first an active promoter of the cult of his own dynastic gens, did the framework of divine honours, which had long supplied a standard grammar of imperial divinity, begin to break apart. Under subsequent Christian emperors, the institutional foundation of ruler cult, traditionally a stable confluence of divine honours, was fundamentally transformed in a process that brought about the formal end of ruler worship in the Roman Empire, while allowing certain institutional vestiges to survive in secularised form long beyond the mid-fourth century.

Authors: Berg, K

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-z5xnej46q
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: christianity; late Roman Empire; Emperor worship; ruler cult
• Subjects: Religion; History, Ancient; Classics