the solidarity and unity of the empire. Its political convenience, however, lent it increasing momentum. Gradually, on the worship of the Lares Augusti in Italy and the capital (Rushforth, pp. 59 f.) and on the association of the imperial cultus with that of dea Rome (to whom a temple had been erected at Smyrna as far back as 195 B.C.), the new canonisation rose to its height, never jealous of local cults, but thriving by means of its adaptability to the religious syn- cretism of the age. It was the religious sanction of the new im- perialism.! It had temples, sacrifices, choirs (as at Smyrna), and even a priesthood (the sodales Augustales) of its own.
For obvious reasons the cult flourished luxuriantly in the pro vinces, particularly in Asia Minor,? where the emperor was often regarded as an incarnation of the local god or named before him. Distance lent enchantment to the provincial view of the emperor. Any sordid traits or idiosyncrasies retired into the background before the adoration felt for the divinity which hedged this unseen, powerful figure, who was hailed with a mixture of servility and real gratitude as ‘“‘the Saviour,” “the Peace,” “the αὐτοκράτωρ ” of the world, or as. the lord of men (κύριος, dominus; cf. Kattenbusch, ii. pp. 612 f.). Asia Minor became a hotbed of the cultus. The mere recognition of an abstract empire with its authority providentially vested in the emperor passed often into a religious adulation of the latter, as θεός (cf. Thieme’s Inschriften von Magnesia am Maander u. das N.T., pp. 28 f.). The annual festival or diet of the nine Asiatic townships, which served as an organ of government throughout the province, readily coalesced with an annual festival in honour of the reigning
1 Full investigations by Boissier (La Religion Romaine, i. 184 f.), Friedlander (iii. 455 f.), and Mr. B. W. Henderson (Nero, pp. 347 f., 434 f.), to be supplemented by Otto Hirschfeld’s essay in Sitzungsberichte d. Akademie d. Wissensch. zu Berlin (1888), 833 f, the articles in Roscher’s Griech. u. Rim. Mythologie (ii. pp. 902-910) and in Prot. Real-Encykl. (1901), x. 539 f., Wendland’s Hellen.-Rémische Kultur in ihren Bezich. zu γι. u. Christ. (1907), §§ 5 and 7, and especially by J. Toutain’s. pages on the cult of Roma (37 f.) and the spread of the imperial cultus generally (pp. 43 f.) in his notable work on Les cultes paiens dans l’Empire Romain (premiére partie, tome i. Paris, 1907). Popular sketches in English in L. Dyer’s Studies of the Gods in Greece (1891, pp- 37,45); Lecky’s History of European Morals (1. 257 f.), Westcott’s Epistles of St. fohn (235-269), Iverach H.¥. (1906, 262 f.), Work- man’s Persecution in the Early Church (1906, pp. 94 f.), and Harnack’s Mission and Expansion of Christianity (1908), i. book ii. chap. ix.
2 With the title of Jesus (ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κτίσεως τοῦ θεοῦ), in Apoc. iii. 14, con- trast the servile language of the decree issued (ο. 9,B.c.) by the Asiatic κοινόν, fixing New Year’s Day as the emperor’s birthday: ἣν τῇ τῶν πάντων ἀρχῇ tony δικαίως av εἶναι ὑπολάβοιμεν (τοῦτο αὐτῷ ἀρχὴν τοῦ βίου καὶ τῆς ζωῆς Ὑενονέναι). Cf Dittenberger’s Ozientis Graeci Inscript. Selectae, 458.