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1. Fred S. Kleiner A History of Roman Art

211 bce. In that year, Marcellus conqueror of the fabulously wealthy Sicilian Greek city of
Syracuse broke with precedent and brought back to Rome not only the usual
spoils of war—captured arms and armor, gold and silver coins, and the like—but
also the city’s artistic patrimony.Thus began, in the words of the historian Livy,“the craze for
works of Greek art”

According to both Livy and Plutarch, Marcus Claudius Marcellus’s triumph (Latin triumphus;
the celebratory procession through Rome that the Senate awarded to victorious generals) in 211
bce after his victory over Syracuse marked the beginning of the influx of Greek statues and
paintings into Rome and of the Romans’ fascination with Greek art. Livy acknowledged that
Marcellus acted legally, but observed that his action was unprecedented.

REPUBLICAN VERISM These and other surviving portraits of the Late Republic, like the
imagines upon which they appear to be modeled, give the impression—whether true or
not—of being literal reproductions of individual faces, without any hint of an attempt on the part
of the sculptor to beautify the appearance of those portrayed. The subjects of these
so-called veristic (superrealistic) portraits were almost exclusively men (and to a lesser extent
women) of advanced age, for generally only elders held power in the Republic

Unlike the earlier forum, which developed gradually over the centuries without any master plan,
Caesar’s forum has the symmetry and regularity of Republican fora outside the capital

The Forum Iulium therefore reveals the same arrogance and penchant for self-glorification as do
Caesar’s coins. The dictator perpetuo paved the way for all the Roman emperors to follow in his
calculated use of art and architecture as instruments of personal propaganda.

SON OF A GOD More than a decade before he became Augustus, Octavian had assumed a
different title. The Senate had proclaimed his father Julius Caesar a divus (deified mortal) in 42
bce, and the young man who now bore his name began to refer to himself as the son of a god
(divi filius)—although he was always careful not to claim in Rome, where it would have been
unacceptable, to be a god himself

Unlike Caesar’s forum, the Republican forum had no framing porticos and no focus of attention.

Augustus placed the standards recovered from the Parthians in the Temple of Mars that the
emperor had vowed to build in 42 bce when he sought the war god’s aid in pursuing Caesar’s
assassins.
The Mars temple itself, however, had Corinthian columns and a facing for its podium and walls
of gleaming white marble from Luna, modern Carrara, in northwestern Italy. The recently
opened quarries at Luna made possible Augustus’s famous boast, recorded by Suetonius, that the
emperor had “found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.”2 Prior to Augustus, Italian
builders had to ship marble blocks at great expense from Athens or the Greek islands, and it was
used sparingly.

2. Мирослава Мирковић, Римска држава под краљевима и у доба републике (753 – 27. пре
Хр) Историја и институције, Београд 2002.

453 стр за Кембриџову књигу о позно римској историји.

S. R. F. Price, Rituals and Power the Roman imperial cult in Asia Minor, Cambridge University
Press 1984

Initially, it is claimed, leading figures were

not given divine honours; the lesser heroic honours sufficed. But, as
the system of heroic cult was in process of debasement and as the
figures to be honoured grew more important, a switch was made from
heroic to divine honours.

Divine cults of mortals cannot be more than honours: the cults

of the gods which might have lent some resonance were themselves
in decline. There is therefore no need to investigate ruler cults as part
of the traditional symbolic system defining the relationship of gods
and men.

There were great changes in the course of the Hellenistic

period in many areas of political, social and religious life and one
cannot treat the time between Alexander and Augustus as a single
unit.

A new phase of political relations began with the

extension of the power of Macedon, in what is now northern Greece,
by Philip and Alexander over the old cities of Greece from the mid
fourth century B.C. While the evidence for cults of Philip is tenuous,9
contemporary sources show that divine cult was offered to Alexander
in his lifetime

The Greeks
were not accustomed to monarchy and, Isocrates recommends, Philip
should not attempt actually to rule them. Rather, he should adopt
a tripartite system, and be benefactor of the Greeks, king of the
Macedonians, and ruler of the barbarians.
I wish to suggest that the cities established cults as an attempt to
come to terms with a new type of power. Unlike the earlier leaders
and kings the Hellenistic rulers were both kings and Greek, and some
solution had to be found to the problem this posed.

The cults of Hellenistic kings were modelled on divine cult.

The conventional view sees

heroic and divine cults as confused, and would not accord much
significance to the absence of heroic cults of rulers.

Ruler cult had a different

explanation; it was carefully distanced from heroic cult and was
played off against the background of the cult of the gods. Some might
argue that this was because heroic cult would have been insufficiently
honorific for a ruler. While a ranking between divine and heroic cult
is clear in the case of the associates of Hellenistic kings, many of the
traditional' heroes' had themselves been kings and this ranking had
force precisely because the option of divine cult for kings was already
being taken.

This reasoning was reinforced by the changing nature of hero cult

in the Hellenistic age.4 5 Changes in the iconography of death neatly
illustrate the greatly increased frequency with which heroes were
created.

The appearance of a cult of Roma at Erythrae is symptomatic of a

shift in the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean, which
resulted finally in the exercise of sole control by the Romans from
Augustus onwards.

The cults of Roman officials have sometimes been seen as a debased

element in a tradition of divine honours: a mechanical routinization
resulted in the awarding of cults to the completely inappropriate
figures of Roman generals and governors.

Hellenistic kings were worshipped

because they were donors, saviours from danger, founders, and not primarily because they were
kings

The significance of the classification of the ruler in divine

terms is that it disguised the novelty of the monarchies and formed
a significant element in the relationship of power between subject and
ruler. We need now to see how the dynamics of ruler cults and the
relationship between subject and ruler altered in the Roman period.
The disorder and strife of the last century before Christ, whose impact
on the cities we have already investigated, was resolved with the
establishment of the new order under Augustus. The poverty, misery
and uncertainty caused by the Roman economic exploitation of Asia,
the revolt of Mithridates, the incursions of pirates and the campaigns
of the Roman civil wars were transformed into almost three centuries
of stability and prosperity.

These explicit comparisons between gods and emperor are the

product of a change in the dynamics of the cult. Whereas the
Hellenistic royal cults were the product of specific royal interventions
in the city, Augustan cults were no longer tied to such interventions.
The assembly of the province of Asia was simply reacting to the very
existence of Augustus and his general activities rather than requiting
him for any specific benefactions.

Mary Beard, John North, Simon Price, Religions of Rome Volume 1 a History, Cambridge
University Press 1996.

In the light of this apparent prominence of religious concerns in the

writing of the first century B . C . , it may come as a surprise that the religion
of this period has so often appeared to modern observers to be a classic case
of religion 'in decline', neglected or manipulated for 'purely political' ends.

The poet Hotace, like

other authors writing under the first emperor Augustus, looked back to the
final decades of the Republic as an era of religious desolation — at the same
time, urging the new generation to restore the temples and, by implication,
the religious traditions: You will expiate the sins of your ancestors, though you do not deserve to,
Citizen
of Rome, until you have rebuilt the temples and the ruined shrines of the gods
and the images fouled with black smoke.

As part of Roman public life, religion was (and always had been) a part of the
political struggles and disagreements in the city.
Lily Ross Taylor, The Divinity of Roman Emperor, Philadelphia 1975.

The divine right which absolute rulers claim as a legitimization

of their power was expressed in the polytheistic religion
of the Romans by the addition of the emperor as a new god
to the unlimited state pantheon. The conception of the
emperor's divinity developed as did the empire itself after the
old republican form of government had proved itself inadequate
to the rule of a wide domain. It grew up at a time
when Rome was in close contact with the ideas of the civilized
world and particularly with the life and thought of the East.

Caesar and Augustus were the

real successors of Alexander, and to understand the basis of
their power it is essential to go back to the monarchy of
Alexander and to consider his position as a theocratic monarch
and the tradition that he passed on to his successors.

When Roman power extended to the East, divine honors for

the ruler had become a fundamental characteristic of the
rule that prevailed in Greek lands. Divinity established
the binding authority of the king's command and as such was
more a matter of practical politics than of religion. Hence
it was readily offered by Greek peoples to the representatives
of Roman power.