Document Type

Class Research

Publication Date

Spring 2026

Abstract

At least from the days of the Julians, the Roman Empire witnessed the creation of an imperial cult dedicated to the memory and worship of Roman figures believed to have become divine, a practice which can be traced back to the leadership cults of the Hellenistic world. To the extent that the cult was both a foreign and domestic development for Rome, it was therefore a phenomenon that needs to be examined not just within the context of Rome’s cultural core, but within the provinces as well. Some historians have suggested that the Roman imperial cult represented a uniquely unifying religious and cultural development in a Roman world that was famously diverse and as such had few other sources of centripetal force, while others have recently sought to complicate this view.1 In light of this and other recent efforts to reconsider the history of the frontiers of the Roman empire, this paper will investigate how the imperial cult was received in the Greek East, particularly through a consideration of archaeological findings at Aphrodisias. From this evidence, it can be concluded that the imperial cult played an appreciable role in the creation of hybrid identities in the provinces.

Comments

This paper won 2nd Place in the Graduate Division.

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