Emperor cult and coins

[Numerianus]

I watched recently  TV -documentaries on Jesus' family and the origins of Christianity.
I am thinking on them now. There are at least two ideas that  I want to discuss, in separate threads.
 
The first one: the cult of the emperor was popular in the 1st century, REALLY.

What does this mean? We know that certain   emperors, starting from Jules Caesar were deified,  after the death.
I believed (erroneously!) that it was just a bureaucratic act, without essential consequences. 
In the context of the information from these documentaries, it was not the case.

At this period the state started to play the  role more important in people's life than Jupiter,  Neptune, Venus etc.
It was quite natural to worship the state-providence  or its personification - the emperor. Augustus was very 
clever guy to invent this and his successors followed the  pattern.
DIVVS AVGVSTVS PATER.  This formula was repeated on hundreds of millons  of  coins (which served at this time as mass-media). 
Automatically, the ruling emperor was identified with the son of the God and his name was also Augustus. 
 And this did work! It was a new cult,  natural and having a strong
support in population throughout  the empire. In the 1st and 2nd century this cult was flourishing and the Christian
project  had no chances to compete until the 3rd century, until the decline.  It was quite significative that on early coins the most important title of the emperor was PONT MAX.  So, the passage from the republic to the empire was not just a administrative
revolution (or evolution) but also a spiritual one.

[AncientCoins]

Yes, I remember in part of a research paper I had a section describing Emperor worship.  They were celebrated as Gods, especially after their death, with annual holidays and festivals to commemorate them.

Andrew

[Matthew Raica]

I'll comment on this more later, but my library is packed right now for my upcoming move this week, so I don't have a bunch of info right now.

When one wishes to discuss religion in the Roman empire, there as so many differing theories that a true discussion and interpretation can never be truly attained.  It is true that many of the emperors were deified upon death, baut many were not.  And the old gods were not truly forgotten  When you look at the Roman empire, you have to look at it in two parts: the empire, and Rome.  The empire never gave up its gods to worship the empire.  The Romans were probably the most excepting of foreign religions until the U.S.  Conquering Romans rarely forced a conquered people to give up its religion; most of the time the foreign gods were accepted by the empire are added to the roman religion, as with the destruction of Carthage, or the conquest of Egypt.  The Carthaginian god Baal was worshipped by the Romans and an interpretation of Jupiter, and many Egyptian deities ware added to the Roman Pantheon.

The city of Rome, on the other hand, did seem to forget the gods in the later centuries and focused on cult worship of the emperor.  But this worship was for the current emperor. Whether he was deified or not after death, his worship ceased upon the rise of a new emperor.  One could compare this to the worship of the Egyptian pharoah.  It was the current pharoah that was worshipped, not the deceased.
 
The Christian and Judean cults were not competition to the Roman religion.  The Roman were actually tolerant of the religions in the beginning.  It was the stubborness of these religions and there refusal to accept the Roman polytheistic religion as a true faith that led to their persecution.  After the Christian faith gained power in the empire during the reign of Constantine, they forced their faith upon conquered peoples.  This practice of forced conversion carried on  as far as the forced conversion of American Indians in the 19th century.

[slokind]

In many respects, the religious world of the Late Hellenistic and Imperial lands was experienced and practiced differently from ours; it had different parameters.  The partly Hellenised NW-Semitic near east, also, was not perfectly comparable with the religious realms of other regions.  We alll know that there were clashes between the early Christian church at Jerusalem and the gentile communities, too.  Besides, in time, the meaning, as experienced, of terms of divinity (as for the emperors) shifted.  A pinch of incense at an altar before an imperial image was closer to pledging allegiance to a national flag than to anything that most folks do in churches, synagogues, temples (lumping together Hindu and Buddhist), or mosques.  The glorification of emperors goes back to that of Hellenistic kings and, according to what we are told, Alexander got it from Achaemenid Persia.  It is no wonder that Paul of Tarsus had his work cut out for him.  I often have wondered, too, just what the inward beliefs of early Christians may have been, what their range of understanding may have been.  As for the TV channels, to me it looks like they're just cashing in. 
Such being the case, we'd do well to read up on all the assorted common assumptions of those people and on all the varied preaching they were exposed to and on all the philosophical ideas that, in varied degrees of dilution and adulteration, were floating around, before we start using words like cult and god as if in all times and all places they meant what we (varied ourselves) mean by them.  Pat L.

[Numerianus]

You are jumping astonishingly easily from Ellinistic to Roman imperial period.  The time frame for this is half a millenium.
I would prefer to concentrate the discussion to a more narrow interval, namely to the 1st century AD. It was a time of radical changes. At this period worship to foreign deities was not welcome. I remember that Tacitus mentioned a woman  condemned for this crime (during Nero: sorry, but I could not find the precise reference).
As for a cult of personalities, we have  several recent examples, like cults of Stalin and Hitler. In the native house of Louis Pasteur in Dole one can read that  his father, a soldier of the 1st Empire,  considered Napoleon more than just a human...
We may guess  that the cult of an emperor was of a similar nature. Should we associate the religious fanatism only with modern monotheistic religions?  The message of the documentary is that the emperor cult was more attractive than the early Christian doctrine. It was supported by the powerful propaganda, in particular, by innumerable statues of the  emperor and his coinage. More, cities and months were called after emperors.   The devotion to the emperor could be stronger than to Jupiter or Mars...

[Robert_Brenchley]

Devotion to the emperor, sure, like devotion to the flag (something I quite fail to understand!) in some modern countries. I'm not sure worship was taken that seriously, at least by educated Romans. When Pliny put Christians to the test in Trajan's reign, says that he brought forward Trajan's image and those of the deities, and if they worshipped the images and cursed Christ, they were released. So Caesar worship was on a level with that of the gods, but that says nothing of the relative importance of the cult. I've never seen anything which suggested that anyone made Caesar-worship their main religion! I suppose the high point of it might be considered to be Daia's GENIO AVGVSTI issues, which obviously put the cult onto the coinage.

[C. Caesar Germ.]

I just finished reading a good bio of Caligula in which the point was made that prior to Gaius, it was not unusual for Romans to make a sacrifice to the genius of the Emperor-- this was what was divine in the Emperor.  In the case of Caligula, what was unusual was that the sacrifice was to be made to the Emperor himself and not just the genius.  This wasn't nearly as big a step as it seems in modern times and it was probably a reaction to the plot of Gaetulicus, Lepidus and Gaius' two sisters.  The later cult of the Emperor is thus a pretty logical development.

[basemetal]

Mmmm...my newbie two cents.
Life was simple.  Even in rome for the masses. Much more for the provinces. 
And even for the nobles and the elite which included the current emperor.
Things are going ok, you stop by the temple of .....fill in the blank and do a brief thanks to who ever you want to.  Polythesim in Rome.
You want something, you stop by the temple of.......fill in the blank and make an offering to who ever you think might intervene.
Someone pisses you off, you write down or get someone to write down a "curse" on that person and either have it burnt or toss it (as in Bath in England) into a pool.
Emperors were diefied by the state.  Unless they really screwed up and in some cases where they did,
they were deified by decree not by a popular  "yes he must be a god...he was so good"
To think that a senatorial or other decree made the masses automatically worship an individual...welllllll
...maybe.
There were those who thought Hadrian the cat's behind and others who thought him a snotty dillatante that always chose grecian practices over those of Rome and was never in Rome and when he finally returned for good chose not to live there (just outside-Hadrian's Villa-you may have heard of it).
The roman emperors were there to worship if one wished. 
Take the case of Titus.  He assumed power and immediately, Vesuvius ereupted, plague broke out, and a honkin big fire (sorry slokind, I know how you hate the vernacular) broke out.
Subsiquently, he issued coins with altars, coins invoking the traditional gods, and even a famous restoration series of past emperors, including some that history views with a jaundiced eye
(of which I am slowly amassing a collection).  All this to placate all the gods and good fortune he knew of.
"What was that?....who?...Galba?....ya mint some for him too"!
One of the pitfalls of polytheisim is that when there is a god for everyone the definition of a god is diluted.  Gods base themselves on an ultimate truth.  Have too many and.......which ultimate truth do you worship?

[Numerianus]

Basemetal, your considerations has  great importance. Indeed, why the cult of the emperor?
I think that the phenomenon was the same as with Hitler and Stalin. The total  majority of population
believed that the Fuehrer is really a father of the nation, working day and night, leading Germany to prosperity and
glory (this faith wase very persistent). If something is wrong, it is because the Fuehrer does not know this.
Note  that this was in the country which was at this time  n.1 in the world in science and technology, renowned for its cultural and religeus tradition. The same was with Stalin.

Why the same phenomenon could not happen with the emperor? It was a great evolution: the stae went global.
The head of the state, August, Pater, he is so wise, kind, always young...     

[basemetal]

I'm also betting that in the common arena of life in the marketplace or the army, or....wherever,
To denigrate the deified emperor ................ was to invoke as we say in the South here "Fight'in words"
I'm betting that like in modern times, most people kept their "religion" and "politics" to themselves except when among people they knew generally thought like they did.
Antinous Marcellus:
"Well just between you and me, you know that damn ....vegitable seller Publius just worships the ground that miserly Antoninus Pius walks on.  And it's all 'cause Antonius always  kissed Hadrian's butt.  I have it for a fact that Publius has greek in his background".