Resumen de Gods and men: omens, Legitimacy, and Power in Imperial Rome
Dozens of Roman authors included omens in their narratives, telling of a world of gods and men, of signs of the future and prodigious events. The mythical narrative that rises from those portents is tell-tale of the belief that gods sent signs of what the future held for Rome and its leaders. That collectively imagined world is the focus of this thesis, which attempts to study it through the analysis of imperial omens from the rise of Nerva to the death of Severus Alexander (framing them in a wider reality of Roman divination and its religious construction of power and its narratives).
This thesis focuses on imperial omens as a phenomenon by itself and as a tool for studying the cosmovision and mythology of power in Ancient Rome. The priority is understanding which conception of imperial power (its explaining myths and imagined origins and limits) and which relationship between gods and community (and gods and emperors, the heads of the human community) is expressed in Roman imperial omens form Nerva to Severus Alexander (98-235 A.D.).
From the detailed analysis of imperial omens and of the society and mental cosmos in which they made sense, this thesis reconstructed imperial power as it is expressed in imperial portents. In a world where political power was constructed and imagined in religious terms, that analysis revealed itself to be quite fruitful. Several elements were analysed throughout the thesis: the fundamental function of imperial omens; the ideological consuetudinary continuum in which they partook; their likely origin; their social and geographical audience; what gods are imagined participating in the narrative of power offered by the prodigies; how is the emperor conveyed; and which problems are posed by the Historia Augusta’s omens.
By understanding religion as a mechanism linking the world as lived and the world as imagined, omens are concluded to be a sense-ascribing coping mechanism, a bridging tool of sorts explaining the chaos of human existence and history by overlaying it with a sense-attributive divine narrative. Furthermore, portents are deemed constructive tools of an evolving imperial ideology under constant (re)negotiation.
Another offered conclusion is that Antonine and Severan omens were part of a wider mental continuum in which portents are used to convey divine participation and guidance, imagining power throughout time through religious lenses based on consuetudinary practices and ideas. Furthermore, imperial prodigies are considered an historical phenomenon (not just a literary one) originating from several socio-political sectors. They were tools employed to imagine and negotiate imperial power, its symbolism, its origin and, therefore, its ideological limits. Among other conclusions, the thesis also argues that omens were adaptable to historical change even if they existed within a tendentially traditionalist formula.
Essentially, the thesis attempts to convey that imperial omens functioned, concomitantly, as a senseattributive mental mechanism and as constructive tools of imperial ideology. They existed outside literature, originating from different geographical and socio-political sectors of society and being socially transmitted before being included in literature and put in circulation once again, now through a different medium. They are a historical phenomenon with a predominantly literary persistence. Their survival through literature impacts how they have reached modern days but does not annul their historiographical worth. Moreover, because they offered a narrative on imperial power, they also express an inherent relationship between the emperor and the gods. They construct an imperial ideology in which power is imagined on religious terms, where mythic narratives construct power’s charismatic nature and divine origin.
