civic religion by categorizing it as a sign not of continued vitality but of an
historical interest from a romantic and sentimental background charac-
teristic of an age “weary of its culture” (1964, 295).
The decline of civic structures also led to other important trends, includ-
ing the rise of individualism, which was “the dominant feature of the age”
(W.S. Ferguson 1928, 4; cf. Nilsson 1964, 282–83, 287; Farnell 1912, 137,
140–41, 147–50, who speaks of the rise of a spirit of individualism and a cor-
responding waning in the old religion; Guthrie 1950, 256, 334). Tarn and
Griffith state: “Man as a political animal, a fraction of the polisor self-gov-
erning city state, had ended with Aristotle; with Alexander begins man as
an individual” (1952, 79). Luther H. Martin seems to have had a change of
mind on the issue of individualism (contrast 1987 and 1994). Moreover, indi-
viduals in the Hellenistic era suffered from a general malaise character-
ized by feelings of detachment, isolation, and uncertainty: “loneliness and
helplessness in a vast disintegrating world” (W.S. Ferguson 1928, 35),
which led them to seek substitutes for the attachment they had previously
felt toward the polisand its social and religious structures. Scholars who hold
these views often explain and group together various religious phenomena
in the Hellenistic world, including the addiction to foreign cults or mystery
religions, the supposed preoccupation with Tyche, the popularity of both
magic and astrology, and the rise of ruler cults, as (often misguided)
responses to a social and spiritual vacuum, as relatively new compensatory
phenomena.^3
It is worth pointing out the place of ruler cults in this overall scenario,
since it reveals some of the underlying assumptions and value judgments
involved. For Nilsson and others, ruler cults were the epitome of faltering
religious life, and foreshadowed the fall that was yet to come: “The origin
of the cult of men in Greece is to be sought in the convulsions of the dying
religion” (Nilsson 1964, 288, italics mine; cf. W.S. Ferguson 1928, 13–22).
Nilsson’s opinion is the same in his very influential Geschichte der griechis-
chen Religion,where he states: “dass der Herrscherkult eine Verfallserschei-
nung der griechischen Religion ist, der es an wirklich religiösem Gehalt
mangelt” (1961, 182). Lily Ross Taylor gives a similar assessment of the
imperial cult when she states that “the inclusion of a mortal among the gods
would not bring to the men of the day the same shock that it would have
30 PART I •RIVALRIES?
3 For a recent restatement of the view, see P. Green 1990, 396–413, 586–601, esp. p. 396.
Green is clearly reiterating the perspectives of Dodds and Nilsson. Such questionable
conceptions of individualism and widespread deracination have also influenced the
study and interpretation of Greco-Roman novels (see Swain 1996, 104–109, for a cri-
tique of associated assumptions and theories).