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had been in their midst rather than making someone divine. The recognition was based on the fact that the person was powerful and beneficent. And who could be more powerful and beneficent than the Roman emperor? So-called bad emperors (there were a number of them) did not receive divine honors at death, but the good ones did. As with Octavian, many were worshiped as divine even while alive. So we find an inscription (a text carved on stone) in the city of Pergamon that gives honor to “the God Augustus Caesar,” and another in the city of Miletus dedicated to Gaius, otherwise known to history as Caligula (later considered a very bad emperor—but this inscription was made during his lifetime), which read “Gaius Caesar Germanicus, Son of Germanicus, God Sebastos.” While he was alive, at least, Caligula was sometimes considered divine.
    Over the years scholars have wrestled with the problem of how to understand the development of the emperor cult throughout the Roman empire—in particular with the idea that a living person was revered as a god. Couldn’t everyone see that the man was human like everyone else? He had to eat and drink; he had other bodily functions; he had personal weaknesses as well as strengths—he was altogether mortal. In what sense could he seriously be considered a god?
    As a rule, older scholarship was skeptical on this point, arguing that in fact most people didn’t really think the emperor was a god and that the bestowal of divine honors was mostly a form of flattery. 12 This scholarly view was largely based on ancient writings that were produced by the literary elite, that is, the upper echelon of society. Moreover, from this perspective it looked as if the emperor cult was sponsored by the ruling authorities themselves as a kind of imperial propaganda, to make everyone in the Roman provinces understand and appreciate whom they were dealing with when they were dealing with the Roman authorities. Ultimately, they were dealing with a god. In this view, everyone knew that of course the emperor was just a mortal, as all his predecessors had been, but members of the empire participated in the imperial cult to remain on Rome’s good side.
    So cities built temples dedicated not simply to one of the great gods or goddesses of Rome—Jupiter, his wife Juno, Mars, Venus, or even “Roma”—but also to the “god” emperor. And sacrifices were made to the image of the emperor, just as to the gods. Still, in this former view of things the emperor was a lower-class divinity, and the worship of these human divinities was restricted to those who had already been deified at their deaths.
    This older scholarly view is no longer the consensus, however. More recent scholarship has been less interested in what the literary elite of the upper classes had to say about Roman religion and more interested in what we can learn about what most Romans—the vast majority of whom could not read, let alone write, great works of biography or history—may have thought and certainly did practice. In this newer scholarship, the category of “belief” has come to be recognized as rather complicated with regard to Roman religion. Unlike Christianity, Roman religions did not stress belief or the “intellectual content” of religion. Instead, religion was all about action —what one did in relation to the gods, rather than what one happened to think or believe about them. From this perspective, the emperors—both dead and living—were indeed treated in the ways gods were treated, sometimes in virtually identical ways. 13
    More recent scholarship does not consider worship of the emperor as a top-down act of propaganda, promoted by Roman officials among the poor dupes who couldn’t know any better. It was instead a series of local movements usually initiated by city officials of the provinces as a way of revering the power of the empire. Moreover, this worship happened within Rome itself, not simply out in the boonies.