Cicero and the Rise of Deification at Rome

Building on fundamental re-evaluations of literature and religion in Rome in recent years, this study explores Cicero's innovative roles in debates about deification. By considering Cicero's works in their broader cultural contexts, it tracks changing concepts of death and the afterlife, and re-examines the backgrounds to ruler worship at Rome.

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This book tells a part of the back-story to major religious transformations emerging from the tumult of the late Republic. It considers the dynamic interplay of Cicero's approximations of mortals and immortals with a range of artifacts and activities that were collectively closing the divide between humans and gods. A guiding principle is that a major cultural player like Cicero had a normative function in religious dialogues that could legitimize incipient ideas like deification. Applying contemporary metaphor theory, it analyzes the strategies and priorities configuring Cicero's divinizing encomia of Roman dynasts like Pompey, Caesar and Octavian. It also examines Cicero's explorations of apotheosis and immortality in the De re publica and Tusculan Disputations as well as his attempts to deify his daughter Tullia. In this book, Professor Cole transforms our understanding not only of the backgrounds to ruler worship but also of changing conceptions of death and the afterlife.