Date of Award:
5-2026
Document Type:
Thesis
Degree Name:
Master of Arts (MA)
Department:
History
Committee Chair(s)
Mark Damen
Committee
Mark Damen
Committee
Rebekah Call
Committee
Frances Titchener
Abstract
Emperors and some notable societal figures in the early Roman Empire are known to have practiced apotheosis, a state-sponsored process which confirmed that deceased men, women, and sometimes children had achieved the status of godhood. This process became official during the lifetime of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, who deified Julius Caesar. As the process developed, it came to involve several formalized elements, including senatorial voting, a public ceremony (consecratio), and the production of commemorative images published through various media such as coins, paintings, and honorific statues. The purpose of this thesis is to determine the possibility of existing precursors for this state-sponsored deification in the period before Rome became an empire, during both the Republic and the early Julio-Claudian period. Careful study of existing early imperial texts and material culture, as well as evidence of honorific imagery in the Roman Republic, clarifies the basis upon which deification was made familiar to the people, suggesting that it stemmed in large part from the desires of the common populus, not the elite. I will review the evidence for the lives of particularly well-known and celebrated women who pre- and post-date Augustus’ wife Livia, as measured by the standards of lauded virtues such as sexual propriety, family loyalty, and motherhood, among others. My aim is to explore the ways in which Romans from the late Republic mythologized and moralized the actions and accomplishments of certain women and how this developed into a formalized process of deification that endured for centuries.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Fairbanks, Megan, "Honorata Memoria Prosequar: The Lives of Republican and Augustan Women as Antecedents for Later Deifications" (2026). All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present. 775.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd2023/775
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