The concept's flexibility became politically consequential under the Empire, when numen Augusti, "the numen of Augustus," gave Romans and, especially, provincial subjects a vocabulary for honoring the living emperor's power in explicitly religious terms without necessarily claiming he was a god outright in the manner of the fully deified emperors worshipped after death. Altars, inscriptions and provincial cult sites dedicated to the numen of a reigning emperor, rather than to the emperor as a named god, let this distinction operate as a kind of controlled ambiguity, satisfying subjects' desire to honor imperial power in religiously serious terms while allowing the emperor and Roman elite opinion, wary of the more contentious claim of a living god, to read the same dedication more conservatively as acknowledging influence and authority rather than full divinity.
Historians continue to debate how sincerely this distinction was maintained in practice across the different regions and social classes of the empire, since a provincial community's enthusiasm for imperial cult likely varied considerably from the more careful theological hedging visible in Roman senatorial sources, but the numen concept's underlying flexibility, power recognized wherever it act, is what made this entire graduated system of imperial honors possible in the first place.