The Augustan Empire 43 BC

The public cult of the ruler bulks large in the ideology of the Roman empire. Augustus began it - though Iulius Caesar and Antony would have done the same. Cult means, strictly, performing acts of worship to the ruler as a god, but, broadly conceived, it is about people's percep­tions and descriptions of the ruler and his role, and also about the practical business of securing and rewarding adherents in positions of importance in the cities and regions. The cult of the ruler as founder, saviour and benefactor was well established in the Greek-speaking world, and such honours had been bestowed, from time to time, on Roman commanders in the late Republic; even 'Roma', as a divinity, had come to be an object of cult in the East.[269] But it was the rival claims of the triumvirs to influence in the cities that raised the stakes in the game,⁹² and hence the cult and symbolism of the ruler were promoted and financed in the East by Augustus and by his wealthier supporters.[270] In Rome, the plebs had offered worship to Scipio, Marius and Iulius Caesar, but its betters had been too strongly principes inter pares for that, and Augustus behaved carefully. A gesture used by his successors, but no doubt deriving from him,⁹⁴ was the refusal of public divine honours for his person in his lifetime: we have seen how he declined to allow Agrippa's temple in the Campus to be called' Augusteum'. On the other hand, there were by now many Roman citizens about the world: the colonizations of Iulius Caesar had made a big difference. For them, the answer was an official cult of 'Rome and Augustus'. The West and North (except for Provence, southern Spain and Africa, long the home of cives Romani) were still under conquest and first-stage reorganization, and had no traditions offering precedent: Augustus promoted there major centres of cult and ceremony, the 'Altar of the Three Gauls' at Lugdunum and the 'Altar of the Ubii' at Cologne. For the Roman plebs there was yet another expedient in this rich fund of devices, the setting of a new cult of th& genius, or 'abiding spirit', of the ruler amongst the little tutelary gods of the 'blocks' of urban Rome, the lares compitales: their cult was in the charge of the 'block leaders', magistri vicorum.^9b Those magistri were freedmen; Augustus took account more globally of the fact that large numbers of Roman citizens were actually of that status, promoting another novelty: collegia of freedmen devoted to the cult of the ruler came into being in the cities under the title of 'Augustales', forming a freedman elite parallel to the municipal elites of the freeborn.[271]

No account on the scale here available can do justice to this vast subject. The antiquarian revival of cults, temples and ceremonies in Rome, and the harnessing of the major priesthoods to the new order, are part of the story;[272] so, too, the inclusion of Augustus' genius in oaths sworn by the divinities; so, too, the additions to the religious calendar celebrating his important dates. We have been bidden, rightly, to develop an imagination for the enormous visual impact of it all, with images of the ruler everywhere, in endless profusion, both actual and portrayed on the coinage. In summary, the whole complex was meant to serve as an ecumenical unifying force: citizens and non-citizens, classes and statuses, language- and culture-groups enmeshed in a common, though varied, symbolic network, and the cult acts of Gallic magnates, leading bourgeois of Asia, successful freedmen in the municipia, the plebs of Rome, and the legions,[273] all focussed on the ruler, legitimizing his rule on the charismatic plane, while ministering at the same time to their own desire for social prominence.