The Roman Imperial Cult: Local Practices and the Reception of the Emperor (The New Antiquity)

This book offers a novel approach to the study of the Roman imperial cult, disrupting the traditional Eurocentric narrative and tendency to relativise the cult’s religious dimension in favour of its political implications.Instead, this collection argues for understanding the imperial cult within diverse local contexts, where it evolved through intricate interactions with existing religious traditions and institutions.Consequently, this volume also contends that the often-promoted, singular narrative of the imperial cult fails to capture its complexity and multipolar nature, making it essential to speak of imperial cults in the plural.This book examines the cult’s flexibility and regional specificity through epigraphic numismatic, literary and archaeological evidence from Greece, Hispania (Baetica and Lusitania), Asia Minor, Italy, the Lower Danube region, Crete and Cyrene, Egypt and Germania, from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE.These sources reveal that the imperial cul