The Cult of the Emperor - Roman Emperor Worship in the Ancient World

THE early development and widespread prevalence of the great-man cult, to designate it by a term sufficiently broad to cover all the facts, are not without immediate bearing upon the question now before us--the beginning of this cult among the Romans.

It is not merely that we are able to trace a number of interlacing lines of historical transmission from age to age and from land to land, as indicated at the close of the last section--in this way connecting the Roman custom with the outside world and with earlier times. These inter-connections are important enough but not so important as a certain general fact or principle which we may discover even where no direct connection can be detected. That principle is this: Whatever may be the reason for it, a matter to be discussed later, polytheists exhibit everywhere a spontaneous tendency to include great and powerful human personalities among the objects of their worship. This conclusion is inevitable from the facts. It is impossible to suppose that this mode of worship started from a single centre and spread to the boundaries of the world. It has sprung up spontaneously everywhere on pagan soil, because it is universally indigenous to that soil...