like the deity of what Robert Bellah (1967) has called “the American civil religion,”
a concept that goes back to Jefferson, Washington, and others and bears no relation
to sectarian agendas. And, as for the United States, the Roman emperor’s task was
to finde pluribus unum, that is, to identify some issues, values, institutions, and emblems
that would give his vast and diverse constituency some sense of unity. We are back
to the theme of Roman religion serving as a means for cohesiveness, and the cult
of Augustus became its imperial variant. The empire now was the Roman, and
improved, version of Alexander’soikoumene; it is fitting that the term “ecumenical”
today is operative mostly in the area of religion.
In the east, the imperial cult was the natural successor to the cults of the
Hellenistic rulers. At the provincial level, permission was required from Rome,
and Augustus authorized a joint cult of the Divine Julius and the goddess Roma for
Roman citizens at Ephesus and Nicaea, and of himself and the goddess Roma for
non-citizens in Pergamum and Nicomedia. Far more numerous were the municipal
cults in his honor which did not need formal authorization. The reasons for them
ran the usual gamut: gratitude for tax relief, peace, and liberty; show of loyalty espe-
cially on the part of those cities that had sided with Antony; and demonstration of
local pride. This last element in particular again led to competition with other cities,
not just in the same province, but throughout the Augustan oikoumene; the city of
Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, for instance, in 27 bcsent ambassadors as far as
Spain to advertise the exceptional honors it had voted to Augustus. In the individual
cities, much of the impetus came from the Romanophile local aristocracies that
were the agent of “Romanization” throughout the empire. It implied anything but
standardization, but was a constant work in progress, and the cult of the emperor
was part of that. Besides the basic distinction, inherited from the previous ruler cult,
of making sacrifices not toAugustus, butforhim to the gods, there were nuances
like granting him honors “like a god” – in Greek there was no real equivalent to
divus, nor was Augustus called a god (theos) outright in the provincial cults. In most
of the municipal cults he was, but when he shared a temple with another deity or
more, care was taken not to represent him as the gods’ equal. These are only a few
examples of the many variations that kept the cult vital rather than routine.
As in so many other ways, things were different in the western provinces. There
was no indigenous tradition there and hence the two provincial cults, centered at
Lugdunum (Lyon) and Cologne, were established almost twenty years after their
eastern counterparts, and through the action of the Roman government at that. Loyalty
and security in these areas were the main issues. Municipal cults did not wait that
long and flourished especially in Spain. Even in many of these we find a strong mil-
itary ethos, which is yet more obvious in the establishment of altars to Augustus by
Roman commanders from the northwest corner of Spain to the Elbe. But there were
other variations, such as a cult for the numenof Augustus at Narbo, which was super-
vised by a body of three knights and three freedmen, and at Forum Clodii in northern
Italy where the inscription relating to the cult makes it plain that worship of the
emperor’s divinity (numen) was the same as worshiping him directly as a god.
It has often been noted that one of the legacies of Augustus was a much more
unified empire. Religion and his cult played a major part because they allowed for
Continuity and Change 81