guaranteed the reign of law in public and private affairs. Besides being the only instrument devised by free and civilized peoples for preserving order, administering justice, and collecting taxes, it alone enabled all citizens to participate in politics; and without the intimacy which it produced among its inhabitants the constant interchange of ideas between creative geniuses and the receptive masses, which made the advance of culture steady, vital, and rapid, was unthinkable. Autonomy, however, was thought, in the age of Aristotle as never before, to be essential in a city-state, and the right of local self-government was now protected not only by strong sentiment, but also by the most authoritative political science. It could not be infringed with impunity, and the experience of the tyrants in Sicily and the tyrannical cities in old Greece had by this time proved clearly that lawless constraint would not be tolerated long. Yet the demonstration had been made with equal decisiveness that the city-states individually had failed to meet the need of defense against outsiders, of peace between communities, and of order within them. Accordingly, the great administrative problem which pressed for solution during the rise of Macedon and Rome was how to conciliate city autonomy with a powerful protective government.

Three notable solutions were forthcoming in the century following 356 B.C. One of them was that reached and applied by Rome in Italy. Its essential features were, on the one hand, the incorporation of men as individuals or in groups, as municipalities, into her citizen body in order the better to plant the faithful Roman and Latin colonies up and down the peninsula; and, on the other hand, the formation of the the well-known perpetual treaties with the new and old cities in Italy-treaties by which the "allies" of Rome obligated themselves for all time to render her military aid and to carry on negotiations with one another and with the outside world only through her. Such treaties stopped at the edge of Italy. As Matthaei2 has shown recently, the normal relation of Rome with the Greek world was defined as pax et amicitia (eiρývη кaì þiλía): when a foedus was arranged it was a symmachia of the regular Greek sort, terminable at will, or at the end of a stated time, or on the completion of a given act; and, as the Romans used it, terminated in fact when its own conditions were satisfied. Nothing was arranged in the normal status of pax et amicitia as to contributions of men and money to be made to Rome; nor was any limitation placed on the diplomatic liberty of the contracting parties. Yet in the course of the first generation 2 Classical Quarterly, I. 182 ff. (1907).

3

after 200 B.C. Rome put the same demands upon her Greek amici as she put upon her socii in Italy. In the case of the latter she did not exceed her treaty rights: in the case of the amici, according to Matthaei, she acted without the least regard for formalities or the pretense of justice. This view I believe to be incorrect. Lawlessness of this kind was not only intolerable in a constitutional world such as existed in the Mediterranean areas in the second century B.C., but also quite unnecessary.

Another of the three remedies for the evils of city particularism I shall not enlarge upon here. The federal leagues of the Aetolians, Achaeans, Boeotians, Phocians, Lycians, Ionians, Islanders, and other peoples, need only be alluded to; and it is the idea for which they stood-union for protection against the outside world and one another, separation for all other matters-that we commend most highly to-day.

Of much larger contemporary import and interest, however, was the third, that which Alexander the Great devised. It was a stroke

3 Classical Quarterly, I. 203 ff.

Eduard Meyer (Kleine Schriften, pp. 302 ff.) has controverted, successfully, I am convinced, the view of Hogarth (English Historical Review, II. 317 ff., 1887; cf. Niese, Hist. Zeitschrift, LXXIX. 1 ff., 1897) that Alexander did not, demand for himself divine honors, but that they were pressed upon him by his subjects. It is not a case of either-or, but of both-and. It is of course true that before Alexander's time Lysander (Duris in Plutarch, Lysander, 18), Philip, and others, were given iσófɛo Tiμai by Greek cities subject to their will. The originality of Alexander consisted in turning the need of the Greek cities, as well as the teaching of Aristotle (see below, pp. 37-38), to service in state-building.

Wilamowitz (Aristoteles und Athen, II. 414 ff. and Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen, pp. 151 ff., where he says: "Die Göttlichkeit des Herrschers war eine unausbleibliche Folge davon, dass die absolute Herrschaft, die nur dem Ausnahmemenschen zukommt, zur Institution geworden war "), Kaerst (Geschichte des Hellenistischen Zeitalters, II. 209 ff.), and Bauer (Vom Griechentum zum Christentum, chs. IV. and v.), trace the disposition of the Greek cities to deify Lysander, Alexander, and others, not to the political necessity of legalizing despotism, but to a genuinely religious sentiment felt, it is alleged, by the Greeks for great personalities. That, it seems to me, is to speak, if at all, with Aristotle, and perhaps with Alexander and his diadochi, but not with the generality of people whose ideas eventually prevailed. With them the possession of absolute power was the sole prerequisite. This is, indeed, the inference which Kaerst, despite his theory, has to make from his examination of the available data: "Wir finden fast durchaus die sakrale Verehrung in engem Zusammenhang mit dem politischen Abhängigkeitsverhältnis der Städte zu den Herrschern, so dass der Kult, auch wenn er nicht unmittelbar von diesen veranlasst ist, doch eben ein sakraler Ausdruck des Abhängigkeitsverhältnisses wird” (II. 408). This conclusion, moreover, is not invalidated by the brilliant article of Kahrstedt, "Frauen auf Antiken Münzen " (Klio, X. 261 ff., 1910). We may grant with Kahrstedt that, as wives of kings. queens had no right to appear as goddesses on imperial coins, and that they acquired it only on their death by apotheosis; nevertheless, even though they were not colleagues of their husbands in the government, their power in the state was great and well known to the subject cities. The most powerful queens are the

of genius. To himself he secured the supreme and absolute direction of ecumenical affairs and the right to interfere at pleasure in every city in his empire by requesting each one of them to enroll him among its gods. The greeting of Ammon, whose influence had waxed in Greece as that of Delphi had waned, gave them an adequate pretext to accede to his suggestion; for, once Zeus through his most authoritative oracle had recognized Alexander as his son, no valid objection could be offered to his deification even by men who, in this age of general indifference, retained their faith in supernatural powers or their aversion to religious change.

When the Greek cities had placed Alexander in their circles of deities he was at once free from all the treaty obligations accepted by him at the Congress of Corinth, and his first effort in his new capacity was to rid his realm of all its homeless and lawless men by requiring every city to receive back its exiles. What a gain to the world that this great problem could be finally attacked vigorously yet legally! Of course, Alexander had become with deification, not a Homeric, but a fourth-century B.C. god-one who had law in his own nature, and operated, not capriciously, but by means of general enactments."

The deification of a living ruler was, accordingly, in its genesis and essentially a political contrivance: it was only formally and secondarily a matter of religion. At the death of the god-king, ones who appear most frequently as deities on the city coins. More than flattery of their husbands or sons is involved. The royal title was unnecessary for the receipt of divine honors even in the case of men. Antigonus I., for example, was deified by the cities of his satrapy while still in theory a subordinate.

Il pоoтáyμaтa, a term which was subsequently used to designate the commands" issued to their devotees by the Egyptian and Syrian deities.

It is not my purpose to trace the history of the religious forms which were used in the worship of the deified kings. In the beginning at least they were not dfferent from those due any other god (see below, p. 38). Naturally, the vote of the sovereign assembly which made the king a god was an addition to the customary ritual, but it was the same electoral act which had from of old legalized the importation of foreign deities, and the consultation of an oracle was its common preface (see the cases of Asklepios and the "heroes" of the Cleisthenian phylae in Athens). The transfer of the god-king from earth to Olympus did not require the manufacture of altogether new machinery. The Attic vase painters knew how Hercules, Dionysus, and Ganymede reached the divine abode. Still, less symbolical modes of transit were required by a less polytheistic and more prosaic world, as Cumont has shown in his recent articles on the subject, "L'Aigle Funéraire des Syriens et l'Apothéose des Empereurs", Rev. de l'Histoire des Religions, LXII. 119 ff. (1910); LXIII. 208 ff. (1911). Naturally, the birthday or the accession-day-Epiphania-of god-rulers was a more striking and significant occasion than anything similar in the careers of other deities. Hence the celebration of the γενέθλιος ἡμέρα (natalis) or the ἡμέρα διαδήματος on its monthly recurrence did not, indeed, bring with it a new religious form, but it emphasized greatly an old one. See W. Schmidt, Geburtstag im Altertum, and Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll, Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, VII. 1, s. v. Γενέθλιος ἡμέρα.

"when he departed the life among men ", as the stock phrase ran, the usages applied from of old to the honored dead were rendered to him—not before. Those err completely who derive the apotheosis of living rulers from the cultus of the dead. Only the departed became "heroes" in Greece; and it was primarily for the purpose of guarding and sanctioning the social and political order which they had established while in the flesh that departed rulers became or remained gods in Alexander's time and thereafter. The legislation of city-states had continuous validity because of its popular source: it acquired its authority through being an expression of the will of the eternal god Demos, as the Athenians phrased it when in 229 B.C. they restated the theory of their state in Hellenistic terms. The acta of a deceased monarch, on the other hand, like those of a Roman magistrate at the expiry of his term, would have ceased to be any longer valid had their author not remained a god. The same necessity led the Greeks to deify their rulers which forces the German emperor to seek in the divine right of kings a sanction for acts which rest upon his own will alone. Deification stood to the acta of departed rulers as the ler did to the edictum of the annual praetor.

To sophisticated Greeks of the third century B.C. all the gods were simply departed men. The Athenians sang on a noted occasion: "The other gods are a long way off, or have no ears, or no existence, or pay no heed to us; but [turning to the deified Demetrius] thee we greet face to face, a true god, not one of wood or stone." The other gods might be a reality in the minds of their worshippers alone, as in the new creed of Euhemerus; or they might live apart in the interstices of the worlds, as Epicurus taught; or they might be implicit in the order of the family, state, or nature, as in Stoic pantheism; or they might carouse on Olympus. The essential thing for their recognition as gods was now the gratitude of men for the services which they had rendered. This sentiment, however, might create new gods among the living as well as main

'This is the cardinal error of Kornemann, "Zur Geschichte der Antiken Herrscherkulte ", Klio, I. 51 ff. (1901). It is shared, however, by Wendland, Eurip, Zei schrift f. neutest. Wissenschaft, V. 335 ff. (1904), and by Bauer, op. cit. Wilamowitz (Staat und Gesellschaft, p. 151) in his latest work has emancipated himself from it. Bevan, "The Deification of Kings in the Greek Cities", English Historical Review, XVI. 632 (1901), all but escapes it.

8 Failure to grasp this idea is the one striking defect in the otherwise excellent appendix ("Der Hellenistische Herrscherkult ") in Kaerst's Gesch. d. Hell. Zeitalters, II. 374 ff., and especially p. 414. See also this same author's Studien zur Entwickelung der Monarchie im Altertum, pp. 51 ff.

AM. HIST, REV., VOL. XVIII.-3.

tain the cultus of those already created. In antiquity the third century B.C. was pre-eminently the age of science, enlightenment, and scepticism. Hence it was no accident that precisely this epoch nurtured Caesar-worship.

Deification of living rulers is, accordingly, a product, not of superstition, but of irreligion.10 There is, moreover, nothing Oriental about it; for its origin presupposes a condition which the Orient lacked11-autonomous city-states, in whose midst there was place only for citizens, over whom could preside only gods or tyrants. And as a matter of fact prior to Alexander's time the Orient knew nothing identical with the Hellenistic worship of kings, for even in Egypt, as Wilcken has insisted recently, there was and always remained a difference in idea and cultus between Alexander and the Ptolemies who succeeded him, as the rulers of Greek cities, and Alexander and the Ptolemies as the lords of the native population.12

'On the internationalizing of Athens in 229 B.C. the god Demos-whose hegemon was now Aphrodite-was associated by Eurycleides and Micion with the Charites, and the cult of their common temenos was made hereditary in the family of the two leaders (Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens, p. 212). This act needs no commentary to those who have learned to think Greek. Demos was there to govern Athens; the Charites to denote the gratitude of the citizens to the foreign potentates on whose good-will the liberty of their city was dependent (Haussoullier, s. v. Demos in Daremberg et Saglio). The feeling thus symbolically expressed by the Athenians was the ultimate source of much contemporary so-called religion. It led men to deify potentates who ordered as well as benefitted and saved. The position of authority was, however, necessary since, otherwise, citizens who were euergetae and soteres must have become gods of their native towns (see below, note 26). It is the Roman Cicero who has formulated for us the theory of deification of rulers, as of so many other Hellenistic institutions. In De Rep., I. 7, 12, he says: "Neque enim est ulla res in qua propius ad deorum numen virtus accedat humana quam civitates aut condere novas aut conservare iam conditas." And in the Somnium Scipionis, 5, we read: “Omnibus qui patriam conservaverint, adjuverint, auxerint, certum esse in caelo definitum locum, ubi beati aevo sempiterno fruantur; nihil est enim illi principi deo qui omnem mundum regit, quod quidem in terris fiat, acceptius quam concilia coetusque hominum iure sociati, quae civitates appellantur; harum rectores et conservatores hinc profecti huc revertuntur." 10 Bevan, p. 631.

"The reason why the chief European monarchy, Macedon (like Sicily under Hieron, where the case is identical), lacked the deification of kings (Wilcken, loc. cit. below, note 12) was not because it was out of contact with the East but because it had a constitutional and not an absolute monarch (Tarn, Journal of Hellenic Studies, XXIX. 268, 1909; Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens, p. 190). When it was under Demetrius Poliorcetes it too had a divine king (ibid., p. 148). The view that the custom is of Oriental origin was wrongfully maintained by Beurlier in a dissertation which long remained the only comprehensive treatment of the matter, De divinis Honoribus quos acceperunt Alexander et Successores eius (Paris, 1890).

12 Mitteis and Wilcken, Grundzüge und Chrestomathie der Papyruskunde, vol. I. 1, pp. 98 ff. The same distinction was preserved in Roman Egypt, as Blumenthal has recently shown. ("Der Aegyptische Kaiserkult ", Archiv für Papyrusforschung, The date at which Ptolemy Soter first appointed an imperial

V. 317 ff., 1911.)