Deification of Mortals
idea · 2 works · 3 mentions · 8 anchored passages
apotheosis · men made gods · consecrated with the honour of the immortal gods · deification of the dead · election into divinity · received into heaven
in the texts
Ad Nationes
The practice of making dead or living humans into gods, criticized throughout via a series of unworthy examples.
If divinity was to be assigned to the dead, surely not to such as these.
Larentina sleeps alone in the shrine, and the woman from the pander's school boasts that she served Hercules in her dreams, and might well, while she contemplated him in her mind, suffer it in a dream.
Therefore, since the same coloring of the consecration of the dead serves them, as if on account of life's merits, we must of necessity oppose the same answer also:
On the Nature of the Gods
The recurring practice, across many cultures, of honoring exceptional mortal men and women as gods after death
And in most states it may be understood that, for the sake of increasing virtue, that each best man might the more gladly meet danger for the commonwealth's sake, the memory of brave men has been consecrated with the honour of the immortal gods.
We ought, then, Balbus, to speak against those too who say that these gods, translated from the race of men into heaven, are so not in fact but in opinion, whom all of us reverence with awe and holiness.
and now in Greece they have many gods made out of men — Alabandus at Alabanda, at Tenedos Tenes;