The Divinization of Caesar and Augustus: Precedents, Consequences, Implications by Michael Koortbojian (review)

Our body of evidence for the divinization of Julius Caesar has critical gaps and inconsistencies, but it does collectively cohere to reveal an inventive cultural process in which a repertoire of divinizing strategies gradually gave shape to deification at Rome and set protocols for imperial apotheosis. Since there was no immediate Roman precedent to follow for enacting Caesar’s divinity, his divinization took tentative, experimental courses. Koortbojian explores the multifarious cultural processing that generated this first official Roman consecration with a special focus on one key set of problems: what form would the cult statue of Divus Julius take, and how would the image of the new state god register differently than the erstwhile dictator to represent his move to divine status?

Koortbojian’s rich, detailed, and amply illustrated study places itself in debt to Stefan Weinstock’s seminal Divus Julius (Oxford 1971), and like this pioneering predecessor, it offers a dense compendium of evidence to triangulate toward answers to important—and elusive—questions surrounding the process of Caesar’s deification. The array of comparative data that Koortbojian adroitly unpacks is especially necessary in this case study since no cult images of Caesar survive. This leaves Koortbojian with variants of a coin type as his jumping-off point for nine chapters of intriguing speculation about the Divus Julius cult statue and its impact on early imperial iconography. These coins from c. 36 bce depict a temple Octavian planned to dedicate to Divus Julius. The temple’s cult statue in one type has Caesar holding the augural lituus in priestly capite velato dress, while the other represents the new god also with the lituus but naked to the waist, and wrapped in the “hipmantled” vestment. Koortbojian traces the genealogy of the coins’ augural imagery with an overview of augurs in Roman history and culture before zooming in on representations of the lituus and the symbolism of augural images on coinage. As scholars have long observed, Caesar with the lituus as inaugurating priest would evoke the ur-augur Romulus, the pater patriae distinction they shared, as well as the apotheosis of Rome’s first ruler. It is, however, generally presumed that the cult statue eventually eschewed the priestly augur guise for the hipmantle format, “a clear echo of that used for the depiction of ancient heroes, Greek divinities, and those heroic individuals who had come to be identified with them” (91).

So the purported solution to the Divus Julius statue conundrum is ultimately a rather conventional one. The big break with tradition, Koortbojian argues, is that this is the first official use of such imagery already known to Italian eyes, a familiarity suggested by late-Republican hipmantle statuary precedents like the “Tivoli General.” Likewise, the visage hypothesized for the Divus Julius cult statue (discussed on 94–128) does not involve a dramatic departure from portraiture surviving from Caesar’s lifetime. Koortbojian proposes that the Hellenistic hipmantle convention, although already familiar in Republican Italy (198), gains such an exclusive association with the Divus Julius cult statue that Italian hipmantle images from the following decades are “all . . . quotations” of the Divus Julius temple statue (223). This is perhaps a maximalist assessment of the image’s impact, and describing the customary hipmantle presentation as “that distinctive costume devised for the depiction of Divus Julius” (220) seems to overstate the originality of Caesar’s cult statue if it did in fact take such form.

The reason why a quantum leap was not necessary for the iconography of Caesar’s statue was not only because of the anthropomorphic forms of Roman gods, but also because the boundaries between humans and gods in ancient Mediterranean polytheism were fluid. As Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price stress in Religions of Rome (Cambridge 1998), a conceptual continuum more than an absolute divide separated humanity from divinity. While Koortbojian is right to dispute the thesis of Ittai Gradel, Emperor Worship and...