Honours That Grew Into Worship

The Roman imperial cult was the extensive and genuinely widespread network of temples, priesthoods, festivals, statues, oaths and sacrifices through which the emperor and members of the imperial household were honoured across the Roman world, and it developed unevenly rather than as a single deliberate policy imposed uniformly from Rome outward, growing considerably faster and more openly divine in the Greek speaking eastern provinces, where it built directly on longstanding Hellenistic traditions of honouring powerful rulers as gods, than in Rome and Italy itself, where more cautious formulas, honouring the emperor's genius, guardian spirit, rather than the emperor's own person directly as a living god, generally prevailed during an emperor's lifetime, with full deification, apotheosis, formally granted by the Senate typically only after death. The historian S.R.F. Price's influential study of the cult in Roman Asia Minor argued that these ritual practices were not merely cynical political theatre performed without real belief, but functioned as a genuine and coherent way for provincial communities to understand and structure their relationship to an otherwise almost incomprehensibly distant and powerful central authority, translating imperial power into the familiar civic and religious vocabulary those communities already used to honour their own traditional gods.