#principate

I got assigned an essay topic by my history professor which is

"Cover examples which show that worshipping celtic deities in the time of the roman principate was an expression of cultural resistance."

Now I've been looking all over the place - I found barely any scientific articles that at least scratch on my topic (besides the one article my professor wrote himself in which he concludes that in most cases it probably wasn't resistance and in even more cases we do not fucking know) and I can for the life of me not find any epigraphic or iconographic evidence where cultural resistance seems likely the case.

“... When he was reorganizing the state, Augustus used the Senate’s long-standing and unrivaled authority to convey legitimacy onto his new regime. After two-and-a-half centuries, though, the Augustan system had finally cracked, and legitimacy was not conferred by the Senate, but by troops in the field. You could say that this had always been the case, but it was never so nakedly apparent to the soldiers themselves as it was during the Crisis years ...

Diocletian had thought on how to wrest this power away from the soldiers, and he thought he had hit upon a solution. Rather than looking down to the legions, or over to the Senate for their legitimacy, Emperors should henceforth look up to the heavens. This was a hugely important step in the history of political theory in the West, as it was here in the late 280s AD that Diocletian laid the foundation for 1500 years of divinely-appointed kings ruling over Europe ...

... In his biography of Diocletian, Stephen Williams makes the point that though their policies were miles apart, that at heart Augustus and Diocletian were really the same kind of man. Both were acutely aware that they needed to find a way to restore order after years of chaos. Had their roles been reversed, it would not at all to have been out of character for Diocletian to use the institutions of the Republic to stabilize a new autocracy, nor would it have been out of character for Augustus to argue for divine right following the Crisis of the Third Century.

Neither man was an ideologue; they were pragmatists, more than willing to follow whichever course they thought would best achieve their ends. So, it was not megalomania that led Diocletian to begin telling everyone that he was appointed by Jupiter, and nothing less than Jupiter’s agent on earth. Just as it was not humility that led Augustus to tell everyone that he was merely the First Citizen. It was rather, in both cases, a carefully thought-out piece of pageantry that each believed would halt the entropy that afflicted their empire.”

Imagine a world in which political norms have broken down. Senators use bad faith arguments to block the government from getting anything done. An autocrat rigs elections and gives himself complete control over the government. Even stranger, many voters subscribe to the autocrat’s personality cult and agree that he should have absolute control.

Welcome to Rome in the first century B.C.E. The republic that had existed for over 400 years had finally hit a crisis it couldn’t overcome. Rome itself wouldn’t fall for another 1,500 years. But during this period, it lost its republic forever.

The man who played the biggest role in disrupting Rome’s republic was Augustus Caesar, who made himself the first emperor of Rome in 27 B.C.E. By that point, the republic’s political norms had been breaking down for about a century, and Augustus was in a position to take advantage of that.

Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

The Last Good Princeps

“The empire [after the Severan dynasty and the Imperial Crisis] would no longer be a quasi-republican, magisterial dictatorship. Instead, it would be transformed by Aurelian and Diocletian into a quasi-divine monarchy, almost in the mode of Ancient Persia. Commodus then earns the distinction as the last true Princeps. And since he turned out to be such a disaster, Marcus Aurelius earns the distinction of being the last good Princeps.”

--- Mike Duncan

Alone of the emperors ... he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life.