Strangers in Their Own Land: Greeks and the Roman God-Emperor

Abstract

This paper views the operation of the imperial cult in the Roman East as a dialogue, in which the initial offer of worship could be either accepted outright or modified by the recipient to his own purposes, and that response could affect how future petitions were presented. Roman judgements of which cities were most suitable to host their province’s imperial temples often led to intercity rivalry. Hellenic orators and Roman rulers both disparaged this rivalry, but their own evaluations of the relative worth of cities in fact encouraged it.