Gods and emperors: the Greek language of the Roman imperial cult

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The Greeks under Roman rule suffer from a double prejudice. On the one hand, Hellenists lose interest in the Greeks after the classical period; on the other, Roman historians find it hard to avoid a Romanocentric perspective. This double prejudice becomes particularly acute when the issue is the religious language used by the Greeks to refer to the Roman emperor. For example, the Greeks called the living emperor boththeou huios(‘son of god’) and alsotheos(‘god’). The language looks odd from the perspectives both of classical Athens and of imperial Rome. One way to make sense of it is to treat it as a translation out of Latin. Thus the bizarre practice of calling the emperortheou huiosis seen as perfectly natural because it is simply the translation ofdivi filius. Why natural? Because, as the heirs of Rome, we can attempt to ignore the cultural differences between us and the ancient world. But the tactic of treating Greek as a translation out of Latin does not always work. Calling the living emperortheoscannot be seen as a translation ofdivus, a term which applies only to dead emperors. Modern scholars are therefore forced to treat the usage as ‘deviant’, the product of either folly or flattery. In fact the failure oftheosto translatedivusundermines the first assumption thattheou huiosis a translation ofdivi filius.