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Jovius and Herculius

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

Harold Mattingly
Affiliation:
3 Mortimer Road Cambridge, England

Extract

Diocletian, as we all know, included religion in his schemes for the regeneration of the Roman State and put forward a new formulation of paganism, by which he placed himself under the special protection of Jupiter, while his fellow Augustus, Maximian, stood under the protection of Hercules, and the Caesars, Galerius and Constantius Chlorus, appointed in A.D. 293, owned as patrons Mars and Sol respectively. Several aspects of the new religious policy have already been sufficiently emphasized. It was definitely conservative, in that Diocletian did not, like AureKan, claim for the Eastern Sun-God the ‘dominatus imperii Romani,’ but went back to the traditional chief god of Rome — Jupiter, ‘the Best and Greatest.’ It was in accordance with the spirit of an age, which was learning more and more to conceive of the divine powers as companions and preservers (‘conservatores’ and ‘comites’) of the rulers. It took account of the new configuration of the Empire under the Tetrarchy of Diocletian and his colleagues. The divine sphere was to be rounded off, to represent the earthly. And we may add, in all probability, that account was taken of the very Roman conception of the Genius, the spirit of life in the individual, and that Diocletian and Maximian, when they took the titles of Jovius and Herculius, meant to suggest that, though they were not actually identified with Jupiter and Hercules, they bore in themselves the spirit of the two gods. It is tempting to suppose that the ‘Iovi Augg.’ of the coins was intended to suggest just this. The idea would be helped out by the fact that the spirit of the individual woman was actually called ‘Juno.’ I want, in this little paper, to suggest yet another consideration, not quite so obvious and not quite so well observed, that may have entered into the calculations of Diocletian.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1952

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References

1 See Nock, A. D. in JRS 1947Google Scholar. I am still inclined, as against him, to think that in the process the divine world sank in estimation compared with the earthly.

2 Either Minerva, the vice-gerent of Jupiter, or Apollo, his son, ‘young, beautiful and health-bearing,’ could be used as type of the Caesar. Septimius Severus introduced the gods of his native Leptis Magna, Hercules and Liber, as his ‘di auspices’; and, of the two, Caracalla appropriated to himself Hercules, Geta Liber. But no regular expression in religion of the rule of two Augusti had been devised.

3 Arnobius I. 35: I. 38, IV. 6: II. 41: I. 56ff.: I. 65: I. 42.