A Political Tool as Much as a Religious Claim

Historians of Roman religion generally read imperial apotheosis as serving political functions inseparable from whatever religious belief accompanied it: formal deification by the Senate legitimated a new emperor's succession by tying him to a divine predecessor, and the honor could be withheld or, in rare cases, later revoked as a form of posthumous political judgment on a reign, making the practice as much an instrument of Roman politics as a straightforward religious conviction that the deified emperor now genuinely governed some portion of the cosmos. Roman elite opinion itself held mixed and sometimes openly skeptical views about how literally to take the deification of emperors, a skepticism the satirist Seneca's Apocolocyntosis, a mocking account of the emperor Claudius's posthumous divinization, illustrates directly from within the Roman literary tradition.

Apotheosis in this atlas is treated as a comparative category naming a recurring practice of formally elevating exceptional humans, chiefly rulers, to divine or quasi divine status, distinct from the broader and less formal phenomenon of a ruler simply being honored as unusually favored by the gods. Egyptian, Mesopotamian and other ancient Near Eastern kingship traditions developed their own related but distinct claims of royal divinity, generally treating the living king as divine or semi divine by nature rather than elevating him through a later, separate ceremony of deification.