Augustus

In the account of his own deeds that Augustus left to be inscribed outside his tomb, he states that in one year, as consul for the sixth time, he restored eighty two temples of the gods in the city and neglected none that needed repair at that time. The claim is exact, checkable against surviving buildings, and entirely characteristic. His public position was never that he had made something new. It was that he had put back what a century of civil war had let fall down.

The priesthoods were treated the same way. He held membership of all four great colleges, revived the Arval Brethren, an archaic body of twelve whose annual hymn was so old that the priests themselves recited it from a written text they no longer fully understood, and refilled the office of flamen Dialis, which had stood empty for seventy five years because nobody would accept its taboos. He took the office of pontifex maximus only in 12 BCE, on the death of Lepidus who held it, and made a point of having waited rather than seizing it.

The Secular Games of 17 BCE show the method in miniature. They were an ancient rite marking the passing of an age, they had not been celebrated on schedule, and the priestly college produced an interpretation of the Sibylline books that made the date correct. Horace was commissioned to write the hymn, a chorus of boys and girls sang it, and the whole thing was inscribed on stone so that it would be remembered as tradition. Antiquarianism, in his hands, was a form of construction.

Roman practice had a real problem with ruler worship. In the Greek east, honouring a living benefactor with a temple and a priest was ordinary civic behaviour and had been for centuries; at Rome it was the mark of a tyrant, and Julius Caesar's honours had been part of the case against him. Augustus's solution was to keep the two registers apart and to be seen doing it.

In the provinces he allowed the cities of Asia and Bithynia, as early as 29 BCE, to build temples to Roma and Augustus together, so that the emperor was never the sole object of the cult. In Italy and at Rome the object of worship was not the man but his genius, the guardian spirit that every Roman household head possessed, which was inserted into the shrines of the crossroads gods that the city's neighbourhoods already maintained. Oaths were sworn by his genius; libations were poured to it at private banquets by decree of the senate. The distinction was fine, and it was meant to be fine.

Death removed the difficulty. In September 14 CE the senate decreed his consecration, and a senator swore on oath that he had seen the emperor's form ascending to heaven from the pyre. A temple, a flamen and a college of priests followed, and Livia was appointed his priestess. What had been an awkward improvisation became a procedure: an emperor whose memory the senate approved became a god of the Roman state, and one it did not approve did not, so that the vote itself was the verdict on the reign.