Note 152.2 — Chapter V · THE PERIOD AFTER ALEXANDER

Hero-worship and apotheosis.—The idea that was common to many of these mystic brotherhoods, that the mortal might achieve divinity, is illustrated by another religious phenomenon which stands out in this latest period, namely, the worship of individual men and women either in their lifetime or immediately after death. To appreciate the full significance of this, one must be familiar with the usages of the earlier Hellenes as also of the Oriental peoples who became subjects of the Diadochi. We have observed that the Greek of the sixth and fifth centuries was willing to concede heroic honours to certain distinguished individuals after death; in this there was nothing inconsistent with the principles of higher polytheism; and in the earlier cases the grounds of canonisation were usually good and reasonable. It becomes a more serious question about the religious and moral character of a people when divine worship is proffered to a living person. Of this the first example is the cult of Lysander as a God, which, as Plutarch seems to imply, arose even in his lifetime.152.2 The same writer records the story of the apotheosis offered by the people of Thasos to Agesilaos and his sarcastic refusal.153.1 The same kind of adulation was lavished by the degenerate Athenians on Alexander and Demetrios Poliorketes. The most salient examples are derived from the records of the Seleukidai and the Ptolemies, the kings of these dynasties usually enjoying divine honours after death, and sometimes bearing divine titles, such as Σωτηρ, Saviour, Θεός, or God, in their lifetime. Is this merely the gross servility of a decadent age that had lost all real sense of religion? This is no doubt the true account of it in some degree; Dio Chrysostom exclaims against the quackery and vanity of it;153.2 and the sharp-witted Athenians and the educated Greek generally would be under no illusion when they prostrated themselves before these human-Gods. It is natural to suppose that the effect upon the life of the old religion was corrosive when a queen or a courtesan could be publicly recognised as Aphrodite, and that the general belief in Apollo and Dionysos would tend to collapse when the one was identified with the Seleukidai, the other with Attalos. Yet the faith in Dionysos at least was able to survive the strain. And what seems to us mere hypocrisy and blasphemy would appear to many of the Hellenistic communities in another light. It seems that the uncultured Greek in the time of Herodotus was capable of believing in all seriousness that Xerxes might be a real incarnation of Zeus upon earth;153.3 and such an idea would be familiar, as an old tradition in the popular estimate of kingship, to the natives of Syria and still more to the Egyptians. When the Rosetta stone proclaims the Ptolemy as ‘the living image of God,’ the average Greek might smile in secret, but the native Egyptian would instinctively assent to this assumption of divinity by the heir of the ancient Pharaohs.