Ahve, and welcome to Emperor of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me today is Dr.

Rianna Evans, associate professor in Classic Sand Ancient History at Latrobe

University. This is episode CX X L-I, Dayification.

When an emperor passed away, it gave the Roman Empire a chance to reflect on his reign.

If he wasn't terrible and the circumstances allowed it, he might be

deified and worshipped as a god throughout the empire. What made a Roman

emperor good? As we shall see, the bar was fairly low. Here's Rianna Evans.

Defication is basically turning a human into a god.

So sometimes called apotheosis which is just the fancy Greek name.

The process is not that common, although as we'll see it becomes

more common in the Roman context because it's a controversial thing to do. It's basically

breaking the boundaries.

Normal people die. Some special people become gods, which basically means they haven't died.

They're not in the land of the dead. They have joined the gods. They've gone up rather than down. Now we talk about it a lot in the

podcast but that is because it's a podcast, in theory, about emperors of Rome. I know we tend to take a detours quite a lot but if when you're talking about

emperors it's something that happened to emperors but besides that it wasn't all that common in the

Roman context was it? No, eventually members of the imperial family might be deified too, or people who are really close to them, like Hadrian's, yeah. Yeah,

deifying and tenuous. But it's something that is like a lot of honors in the imperial

period kept for the imperial family particularly the emperor and it becomes a

kind of touchstone of whether you're a popular emperor or not. So if you're not

daified, it almost becomes a travesty. It means that something's gone badly wrong during

...