Emperor Worship and Roman Religion

Couverture
Clarendon Press, 2002 - 398 pages
While Roman religion worshipped a number of gods, one kind of worship in particular aroused the fury of early Christians and the wonder of scholars: the cult of Roman emperors alive or dead. Was the divinity of emperors a glue that held the Empire together? Were rulers such as Julius Caesar and Caligula simply mad to expect such worhsip of themselves? Or was it rather a phenomenon which has only been rendered incomprehensible by modern and monotheistic ideas of what religion is - or should be - all about? This book presents the first study of emperor worship among the Romans themselves, both in Rome and in its heartland Italy. It argues that emperor worhsip was indeed perfectly in keeping with Roman religious tradition, which has been generally misunderstood by a posterity imbued in radically different notions of the relationship between man and the divine. -- from back cover.

À propos de l'auteur (2002)

Ittai Gradel is at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.

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