Ittai Gradel. Emperor Worship and Roman Religion. Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press, 2002.
On the subject of emperor worship in ancient Rome, Ittai Gradel seems
to present a similar picture to what I have read thus far in other
scholarly works: that worship of the Roman emperor while he was alive
was not part of the official Roman cult, but it was practiced in private
cults throughout the Roman empire. The Senate did, however, declare a
number of Roman emperors to be divine after their death. According to
Gradel, this practice declined as so many people were being divinized
after death that there was not enough capacity to support their cults,
and as the emperor became alienated from the Senate by no longer ruling
from Rome.
That is my understanding of the big picture of what Gradel is arguing in Emperor Worship and Roman Religion. Here are some other things that I got out of the book, things that are important to the author and that I found interesting:
1. Gradel is arguing against scholarly assumptions, many of which he
believes can be attributed to Christian influence. These assumptions
include the separation of politics and religion into separate spheres, a
focus on theology, and a tendency to conceptualize divinity in terms of
nature or a divine essence. I did not always understand how Gradel
believed that such assumptions influenced scholarly views of emperor
worship: for example, Gradel argues against the idea that Roman emperors
were not worshiped while they were alive, and he seems to believe that
such a view flows from scholarly bias (or so it appears to me, and I
could be mistaken). Personally, I do not see how a Christian bias would
lead scholars to believe that the emperor was not worshiped while he
was still alive, for what difference would it make to Christianity if
the Romans did that? But Gradel does argue rather effectively that
biases have influenced how scholars conceptualize the divine and, thus,
emperor worship. Whereas many scholars conceive of divinity in terms of
one’s nature and essence and thus wonder how exactly the Romans
believed that the emperor was divine, Gradel shifts the focus from
ontology to status. Essentially, Gradel contends that the emperor was
worshiped on account of his status and his power, not because he was
believed to be ontologically divine.
2. This moves us to the worship of the emperor’s genius, his divine
essence. My impression from reading Gradel (and also W. Warde Fowler’s
1914 book, Roman Ideas of Deity) is that a number of scholars
maintain that many Romans worshiped the emperor’s genius. Gradel does
not seem to dismiss that the emperor’s genius was worshiped, but he does
mention certain considerations. Gradel argues, for example, that a
number of freemen would consider the worship of a superior’s genius to
be degrading, since slaves worshiped the genius of their masters. My
understanding is that Gradel is contending that emperor worship was not
so much about the worship of the emperor’s genius, but of the emperor
himself. For some reason, that was not considered to be degrading.
3. Gradel talks about the divinization of emperors after their
death. This was a particularly rich discussion because of the vast
amount of ground that it covered: how some emperors were not divinized
after death on account of perceived evils, and thus they went to Hades
rather than heaven; how an emperor could be declared divine by the
Senate and yet rejected by the gods when he arrived at heaven; the
reception (or, often, lack thereof) of deceased divinized emperors by
the public; and the complexities of saying that an emperor was divine,
if he died through assassination (as did Julius Caesar). Of particular
interest to me was Gradel’s discussion of emperors ascending to heaven
in the flesh, how witnesses would voluntarily come forward to claim that
they beheld this, and how some implicitly criticized the view that an
emperor could ascend in the flesh. This could be relevant to
discussions about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and Gradel
actually mentions Jesus’ ascension at one point. Christian apologists
like to argue that there were eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus and that
the belief that Jesus rose physically went against the grain of
Greco-Roman culture, which deemed a physical resurrection to be
repugnant. But witnesses were claiming to see the emperor ascending in
the flesh to the heavens. Of course, I am not entirely clear what they
claimed to see: according to Gradel, an official ritual was devised
whereby the emperor was taken to heaven, and that essentially entailed a
bird flying off. Still, I wonder if Roman claims about the emperor’s
ascension could be relevant to Christian claims about Jesus.
I enjoyed Gradel’s book on account of its clarity, though I wish that Gradel summarized the conclusions of the book at the end.