In the reality of political life after the murder of Gaius Iulius Caesar it soon became obvious that Gaius lulius Caesar Octavianus, the adopted son and heir of the murdered dictator (since January 16, 27 bc, honored with the title Augustus = “the sublime”), was the best qualified to respond adequately to these not very specific expectations. Octavian took up these vague expectations of a divine savior, but he transferred these ideas onto his own person and made them politically useful for himself (Ramsey and Licht 1997).
Certainly it was very helpful for him that in the eastern parts of the empire the concept of the divine benefactor (euergetes) and savior (soter) was much more firmly established than in Rome. The Greek east already had a long religious tradition of how to deal with such divine rulers, dating back to the time of Alexander the Great. Therefore Augustus only had to step into the role of the Hellenistic kings and the whole system of religious honors that had evolved around their person. Sacrifices, temples, competitions, statues, identifications between ruler and god represented a well-established religious system challenged by nobody.
Thus Augustus could use without hesitation all the religious and ideological opportunities that were offered to him by the precedents of the Hellenistic world. Very soon the tradition was formed that Augustus had been conceived by his mother Atia when she visited the temple of Apollo in Rome and that his real father was Apollo himself. Besides the message to the public that the new ruler of Rome was a demigod and therefore capable of achieving more than ordinary humans, Augustus thus placed himself in a long-established tradition going back to the time of Alexander the Great. According to the so-called Alexanderroman the great king had been fathered by the god Zeus-Ammon himself.
This was a narrative that not only ranked Alexander amid such illustrious persons as Hercules and Dionysus, borne by mortal mothers but with the supreme god Zeus as their father. It was also an indication of things to come. At the end of his human existence Alexander had become a god. By adapting his own policy to the image of Alexander the Great, Augustus indicated what he expected at the end of his life: he would become a god himself.
World History
