One singular development of Paganism requires, at least, a brief study. Again and again, when in Rome or in the provinces a persecution of the Christians in "the 250 years" was formally decreed, or was suddenly excited by popular clamor, the accused Christian was frequently, perhaps in the majority of cases, publicly brought in front of the statue of the deified Emperor and challenged, if he valued his life.
The genesis of this curious cult, which became eventually so prominent a feature in the government of Imperial Rome, was as follows. Among the nations of antiquity it was a common practice for the various cities to pay divine honors to their supposed founders. This local hero was ever a favorite object of adoration among the people, and even the more cultured citizens joined in the popular worship for various obvious reasons. In the East, the people went a step further, and paid divine honors to all their sovereigns without distinction, without reference to their deserts as founders, legislators, benefactors, or conquerors. So in Egypt Pharaoh was ever regarded as divine, and later in the same country the Ptolemies were careful to maintain their title to their divine rank among men. Greece in its later period, when its ancient liberty was gone, servilely imitated the East, and was content to adore its various masters, unworthy tyrants though they too often were. In Italy it was different; it is true that in some way the Italians chose to regard as deities the old mythic kings of Latium, such as Picus, Faunus, Latinus; but of the ancient kings of Rome, only Romulus appears to have received divine honors. We never hear even of the revered Numa or of any of his royal successors being regarded as gods in Rome. Yet even in Rome and Italy the way for the later Emperor-worship was prepared by the general custom in family life which chose to regard "the departed" in the light of powerful spirits (Dii Manes), spirits who were accessible to the prayers of dear ones they had left on earth, and to whom they were enabled under certain conditions still to afford assistance and protection. Thus the father, or head of the household, after death, often received worship from the members of his family. The "Lares," according to popular opinion, were the souls of ancestors, and these "Lares" were very commonly the object of family worship in Rome.
The Stoic philosophy which often accommodated itself to popular views, endeavored to modify this belief by teaching that it was only the souls of the good and great who were thus privileged from their home in the other world to protect and assist their kinfolk.
But the first formally deified Prince in Rome was Julius Caesar. No great hero perhaps ever captured popular opinion as did the mighty conqueror who had won for his native city and country such world-wide fame and power; and who, through his marvelous series of campaigns, had made Rome the capital of an Empire hitherto undreamed of. Julius Caesar was something more than the greatest of conquerors. As a ruler he was passionately loved as well as greatly admired in Rome and Italy. We have already noticed the real and intense devotion he had acquired among the Jews, that strangest of foreign colonies in the capital city. The pathetic circumstances of his tragic death served to fan the flame of love and devotion with which that great master of the Roman world was regarded at Rome; and the deification of Julius Caesar was the result of an uncontrollable popular movement. It was not long before the worship of the new god was legally established, and with strange rapidity the cult of the murdered sovereign spread throughout the Roman world, conquerors and conquered alike agreeing to regard Julius Caesar as a god.
We pass by the efforts of smaller men such as Sextus Pompeius and Antony, who obtained temporary power when Caesar had passed away, to win for themselves among their contemporaries divine honors similar to those accorded by the popular love to the great Julius; and we pause at the story of the great ruler best known as the Emperor Augustus.
In the servile eastern provinces, after the successful campaigns which witnessed the ruin of the hopes of his competitors for the Empire, Augustus was quickly selected as a deity.; but he only permitted this form of adulation on condition of being associated in the temples dedicated to him with the goddess Roma. A number of such temples soon arose in the principal provinces in honor of "Augustus and Roma," and this example was followed, but more sparingly, in the west. In Italy this Imperial cult was long discouraged; and though before he passed away there were temples in his honor in many of the more important Italian cities, Rome, while Augustus lived, was dishonored by no example of this strange, impious flattery. After his death the Senate at once, by a formal decree, pronounced that the late Emperor was henceforth to be reckoned among the gods. At his State funeral, a ceremony of imposing splendor in the Campus Martins, care was taken that an eagle should be seen by the crowd soaring from the burning pile, as though bearing the soul of the departed monarch to Olympus—a theatrical confirmation of the Senate's decree which seems, however, to have been usually omitted in the case of the deified successors of the first Augustus.
Some scholars who seek to explain this strange and yet generally popular form of idolatry, which continued to hold its own well-nigh all through the period of the Empire before the barbarian flood had become something more than a menace—roughly speaking, a period extending over nearly four centuries—tell us how, while Rome hesitated to pay divine honor to the living Emperor, as a rule contenting itself with acknowledging the departed sovereign as God, the provinces had no such scruple, but worshipped the reigning sovereign as well as the deified dead Emperors; and they further explain the provincial cult as an act of grateful loyalty to the Roman Empire under whose mighty shadow they lived in peace and comparative security. The worship of the Emperors in the provinces was in other words the worship of the Roman power in the person of the Emperor, who was the appointed representative of that power.
This worship of the Emperor, then, may be taken as the Symbol of the unity of the vast Empire made up of so many nationalities. Every province, every important provincial city, usually possessed its own special deity, as, for instance, Ephesus adored Diana (Artemis); Pergamos worshipped Esculapius; Cyziqua especially honored Proserpine. But the priest or flamen of "Augustus and Rome" represented the whole Empire; and thus there was a solidarity of worship extending over Rome and all the outlying provinces. "Flamen Romse, Divorum et Augusti," was the general title of the priest of the Imperial cult.
The Christian, who naturally refused with indignation to offer incense at this national altar, in a way separated himself from the religion of the Empire; and his refusal was construed by the Imperial magistrate as an act of disloyalty to the supreme Government and to Rome.
It is true that in some cities there were various temples dedicated to several Emperors, who more or less had won or deserved popular recognition; as, for instance, in wealthy commercial Ostia, the port of the capital of the world, which possessed several distinct "Imperial" shrines. But, as a rule, in an ordinary city the majesty of the Emperors collectively was venerated in one common "Imperial" temple.
But the question presses for a more direct answer: Was this worship at a temple of an Emperor of Rome—or at a shrine where, perhaps, many Emperors were adored in a group, some of whom were monsters of cruelty and vice, some of them poor creatures at best, and only a few really great and noble—a genuine expression of the hearts of the worshippers? Or was it merely a piece of hypocrisy, a courtly, flattering falsehood, repeated and repeated again throughout the vast Roman world for nearly four centuries? In the latter case the dragging of Christians before such shrines, the scenes of conscious hypocrisy and untruth, the requiring them under pain of death and agony to worship there, to share in these scenes of unreality and pretence, would increase enormously the crime of official Paganism.
A patient study, however, of this strange Imperial cult on the whole purges it of this dark stain of unreality and conscious hypocrisy. It was first of all, undoubtedly in the provinces, a most popular form of idolatry. Melito, Bishop of Sardis, in the last quarter of the second century, for instance, tells us in his "Apology" that the statues of the Caesars were more venerated than the images of the ancient deities. This is partly accounted for when we remember how "the majesty of Rome" was closely associated with the Emperor, and how in venerating the Caesar, the genius or the power of Rome was included in the act of adoration; and a feeling of deep gratitude to the power or genius of Rome for the peace and prosperity they enjoyed undoubtedly lived among the majority of the provincials. Their adoration, therefore, at these Imperial shrines does not appear to have been mere hypocrisy. These worshippers were, according to the light they possessed, in most instances probably sincere.
In the case of the army, too, among those legions stationed in so many quarters of the Roman world, the worship of the Caesar was no doubt a reality. These would not even need the association of "the Genius of Rome" to give the cult of the Emperor a reality. As a rule the soldiery, when faithful, were devotedly, passionately attached to their supreme chief, the wicked Nero, almost to the last, threw his glamor over the legions.
If anywhere, it is in Rome, where most of the thought-leaders of the Empire congregated, that we must seek for doubters and scorners when the question of the reality of the worship of the Emperors presented itself. It was in Rome that these deified ones principally lived. The littleness, the ignoble vices, the dark crimes of the magnificent Caesar, were too well known to the dwellers hard by the sumptuous and stately group of buildings on the Palatine. Could the Roman citizens living as they did beneath the shadow of the Caesar's house, acquiesce in the worship of these strange gods?
And yet, curiously enough, there is little outward sign even of Rome's repugnance to this worship. The apotheosis of Augustus appears to have been honestly welcomed as heartily in Rome as it was in the provinces. Even Seneca, philosopher and statesman, who certainly now and again had his doubts as to the righteousness of the Imperial cult, thus writes of the deification of Augustus: "For us to believe that he, Augustus, is a God, no compulsion is necessary." The younger Pliny again addressed Trajan in these words: "You have deified your (adoptive) father (Nerva), not from any feeling of vanity, or to insult heaven, but simply because you believe him a God." These are surely strong words confirmatory of the bona fide, the sincerity of Pliny the scholar-statesman, and of Trajan the great and good Emperor.
Occasionally, it is true, public opinion at Rome was revolted at some glaring and monstrous attempt made by some irresponsible Caesar to deify ridiculous and discreditable personages; as when Nero proclaimed Poppsea a goddess, or Hadrian insisted on the worship of Antinous. But even these insulting promotions of infamous mortals to the rank of the deified, although, no doubt in Rome at least, they weakened the theory of Imperial worship, had no permanent effect on this most popular cult. Indeed, as time went on it grew more general. It was at its height in the days of Marcus Aurelius in the second half of the second century.
It has been suggested, with great ingenuity, that probably while the masses, especially in the provinces, accepted the deified Emperors as genuine gods, and addressed their prayers to them as such, the more enlightened, especially at Rome, regarded them rather in the light of the demi-gods, or as the Heroes of Greek worship; differentiating between the divus (divine) prefixed to the name of the deified Caesar, and the sacred term Deus (God); but this difference in signification was certainly not primitive, nor do the above quoted words of such serious writers as Seneca and the younger Pliny at all support the ingenious hypothesis in question.
Following up this hypothesis, to quote a purely Christian usage and to pursue a train of purely Christian ideas, the official senatorial decree of deification was in effect a sort of "canonization," which in the eyes of the more instructed placed the deified Emperor among the saints in blessedness, neither more nor less. The loftier conception which ranked him as divine and on the same level as the immortal gods, was probably held by the uncultured masses.
But this ingenious suggestion, for it is nothing more, even if it be adopted, cannot be said to fully explain this worship of the deified Emperors; which is and must remain a grave difficulty in any intelligent conception of Paganism. The cult of the Emperors was a worship which was almost universal in the period which lies between the death of Julius Caesar and the Edict of Constantino.
For there is no shadow of doubt that the Emperor, living or dead, thus formally honored by a decree of the Senate, became at once in the eyes of the general Roman world a god in the loftiest sense of the word. That some persons were utterly incredulous, and mocked at the pretentious claim of the newly elevated Imperial colleague of the immortals, is more than probable; but as a rule these scornful doubts were veiled, and the whole Roman world may be said to have acquiesced in the worship of each newly deified member of the Imperial line of princes, as the equal of the great gods, the objects of the reverent worship of their forefathers.