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.
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:
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.
On the Nature of the Gods
The recurring practice, across many cultures, of honoring exceptional mortal men and women as gods after death
' Why, then, do we add more gods?
These, then, must be held gods, though born of mortal mothers.
See, then, whether these honours are paid to the virtues of men, not to their immortalities;