Imperial cult: The Roman general Pompey
Worshipping rulers as gods
The Roman general Pompey conquered West Asia around 50 BC. He was embarrassed to find that people there were worshipping him as a god.
Who was Pompey?
Roman religion and gods
All our ancient Rome articles
Sacrifice and statues
They would come out of the cities to pray to him, and bow down to him. They made statues of him and put them in temples and even sometimes sacrificed animals or incense to these statues.
What is animal sacrifice?
Roman religion and sacrifice
Why did they do it?
If he asked about it, Pompey might have found out why people were worshipping him as a god. It’s because they had been used to worshipping their rulers since the time of Alexander of Macedon, nearly 300 years earlier.
Who was Alexander of Macedon?
The Roman emperor Augustus
Augustus and the Imperial Cult
After Pompey was killed, and Augustus came to power, Augustus found it useful to allow this emperor-worship to continue. (And I don’t know that he could have stopped it anyway.)
Who was Augustus?
Christianity and Constantine
So people in West Asia and Egypt kept on worshipping the Roman emperors as gods. They still did it right up until everybody converted to Christianity in the 300s AD.
In fact, emperor worship was one of the last parts of the pagan tradition to stop, well into the 400s AD.
Temple of Antoninus and Faustina
Polytheism and the imperial cult
You might say that it was ridiculous to worship a person as a god. But it wasn’t as ridiculous as it seems to you. The Romans worshipped a lot of gods, some more powerful than others.
What is polytheism?
But none of their gods were as powerful as the God that Christians, Jews, or Moslems think of today. And the Romans believed in many less powerful gods too. Why shouldn’t the emperor be one of them?
The emperor’s real power
The emperor was just as remote to most people as the gods. You never saw him. You never spoke to him (or he never spoke to you anyway). And he was just as powerful. He could send food when there was a famine. He could make there be a canal where you needed one. The Roman emperor could have a whole city full of people killed if he liked. In fact, he probably did all of these things more often than the gods did. So why not pray to him?
