Sublime

Augustus, was likewise the 'saviour of the universal human race'[

Fifth-century BCE Athens bequeathed the idea of democracy to the modern world, after the Athenian ‘tyrants’ were deposed and democratic institutions established at the end of the sixth century BCE – a chronological match with the expulsion of the Roman kings that was not lost on ancient observers, who were keen to present the history of the two

The senate itself, according to some accounts, was the creation of Romulus, as was the ceremony of ‘triumph’, the Roman victory parade that regularly followed the city’s biggest (and bloodiest) successes in war.

The war that followed was called the social war; the allies of Rome took up arms that they might no longer be allies, but might become Romans.

Tiberius proposed to restrict their holdings to a maximum of 500 iugera (roughly 120 hectares) each, claiming that this was the old legal limit, and to parcel out the rest in small units to the dispossessed. It was a typical style of Roman reform, justifying radical action as a return to past practice.

They dared not take from the plebs the title of citizens, and allowed them to figure in the census.

Christians, in particular, both ridiculed the very notion that the obviously human emperor was divine and occasionally paid with their lives for their refusal to give him any kind of religious honour. But that is not to say that the divine status of the emperor was unproblematic for pre-Christian Romans or that there were no debates and