Imperial Cult from Tiberius to Nero

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED: ROME AND THE CHALLENGE OF EMPIRE
4. The Religion of Empire
(iii) Imperial Cult from Tiberius to Nero

Tiberius was now ‘son of god’: son of the divine Augustus. I have on my desk, as I write this, a denarius of the kind they showed to Jesus not long before his death. It says, around Tiberius’s portrait: TI CAESAR DIVI AUG F AUGUSTUS: Augustus Tiberius Caesar, Son of the Divine Augustus. And, on the back, PONTIF MAXIM: Pontifex Maximus, the senior priest. Augustus had had to wait for the senior priesthood, playing his cards carefully.254 Tiberius had it from the day he acceded to the principate. From here on, the empire-related cults that had developed piecemeal, with different motivations and various forms, would increasingly become a major tool of imperial consolidation. They gathered pace, in fact, throughout the Julio-Claudian
period...