by Dr Alex A. Antoniou (https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/alexantoniou/#biography)
I have recently been awarded a RSE Small Research Grant. The project, entitled ‘Imperialism and Emperor Worship: Local Responses to the Emperor’s Divinity’, will run from March–December 2025. This project seeks to challenge the paradigms by which the worship of the Roman emperor (as well as his deified predecessors and his family) has traditionally been understood. Historically, scholars have devalued the experiences of those living under Roman rule. They have assumed that the institutions of emperor worship that were adopted by individuals, corporations and communities across the Roman empire were hollow and sycophantic; mere manifestations of political loyalty with little meaning or importance for the people who directly engaged with them. In so doing, scholars have denied autonomy to those men and women who sought to understand their place in the new realities of the Roman empire.
This project, focusing principally on Rome’s closest neighbours in the Italian peninsula, seeks to posit a paradigm shift for the ways we think about emperor worship. By collating a complete corpus of the evidence for emperor worship in the Italian peninsula from c. 31 bce to c. 600 ce, this project seeks to reassert the agency of subject individuals, corporations, and communities. This project will demonstrate that the peoples of Italy used this unique form of religious expression to actively negotiate or contest their place within the Roman empire and with the divine emperor. As such, this project seeks to challenge our understandings of the interactions between Rome, as imperialist aggressor, and some of the communities and individuals living under that regime.
Funding from the RSE Small Research Grant will first allow me to collate the necessary evidence for this worship by funding a short research trip to Rome and Italy in the summer of 2025. The archaeological, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence for emperor worship in the Italian peninsula is currently disparately published and largely inaccessible; with much of it not having been studied or analysed in depth since its first publication in the late 19th century. Second, the funding will allow me to bring to the University of Glasgow the seeds of a new, ambitious, Digital Humanities project. Once I have collated the full catalogue of evidence, I will then ‘mark-up’ that data using EpiDoc and publish that data in open-access in the University of Glasgow’s Data Repository (Enlighten). ‘Marking-up’ and publishing the data in open-access, intends to open up this otherwise difficult to obtain material into a dataset which is able to be used by a wide range of other researchers. This project is intended to be the first step towards constructing a fully-searchable and cross-referenceable open-access database of all the evidence for emperor worship across the entire Mediterranean, in an effort to greater understand how the communities, collectives, and individuals of the Roman world used religion to understand and negotiate the realities of living under empire.