David Hulme- Men As Gods: Part I

                                                                                         

When toward the end of his rule the debauched Roman emperor Nero (54 through 68 C.E.) opposed the building of a temple to himself as a divine being, he seemed to contradict the prevailing social order. Emperor worship had become part of everyday Roman life, and his own progress toward such exaltation seemed to be accelerating. Was Nero’s refusal a sign that humility had at last come to the pompous and cruel ruler?

It seems not, on several counts. Nero’s stated reason for declining the honor was the belief that only dead emperors could achieve divinity. But already 10 years earlier, he had allowed the Senate to erect his statue, alongside and equal in size to that of the god of war, in the temple of the Avenging Mars. Further, coins from his reign depict him with the radiate crown of a deified emperor and as Apollo, the sun god.

If that were not enough to demonstrate the emperor’s fascination with divinity (whether he really thought he was divine or just pretended at it), events surrounding the visit to Rome of Tiridates, king of Armenia, should convince the skeptic. Tiridates was also a Parthian magus, a priest of Mithra. His surrender to Roman forces had allowed him to retain his throne as a vassal king, but it was as a magus, or magician, that Tiridates intrigued Nero. To add to the fascination, Mithra was the god of light and was often identified with the sun. When the Armenian king visited Nero in the year 66, he knelt and addressed the emperor as “master” and “god.” At that point, apparently, Nero indeed viewed himself in terms approaching divinity. According to third-century Roman senator and historian Dio Cassius, Nero told the king, “You have done well to come here in person, so that by meeting me face-to-face you might enjoy my grace. . . . I have the power to take away kingdoms and to bestow them” (Roman History 63.5.3). Soon after, in a lavish and carefully orchestrated public ceremony, the priest of the god of light repeated his words of homage as the rising sun shone on Nero’s face and made him appear as a new manifestation of the sun.

Despite the fact that he was probably more interested in the gods ideologically than religiously, there is no question that Nero was obsessed with the sun. From his identification with Apollo the Lyre Player, god of music, to the invincible Sol, god of racing, to Phoebus Apollo, the charioteer of the sun, Nero became a multitype of the sun god in his lifetime. By the year 60 he had become a divine lyre player, a singer and a chariot racer with golden hair. He initiated a Golden Age. He was the New Apollo and Sol, wearing a diadem with rays rising from it. And yet he was also a man of the people, shunning divinity, performing in plays, singing in public.

In these sometimes ambivalent opinions about divinity, Nero was not so unusual, for his Roman predecessors and his imperial successors did similar things: they both shunned and claimed divinity. The thread of adulation runs throughout, as both a need of the ruled and a temptation for the ruler.

About the author:
David Hulme holds a doctorate in International Relations from the University of Southern California with an emphasis on the Middle East. He's the author of "Identity, Ideology and the Jerusalem Question" and the blog, Causes of Conflict. He is president of Vision Media Productions and chairman of Vision.org Foundation. Please email at dhulme@vision.org.

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