Was the roman imperial cult anything more than empty propaganda?

Yeah I think there was quite a big questline in morrowind.

It's a shame none of the later games had quite the level of depth.

It was propaganda, but it wasn't empty.

>>993382
Nope.

You factor in Roman Ancestor Worship and its not. Your dead Emperor automatically becomes a fucking God of your state.

Ancestor worshipping states are big on deifying their dead Emperors. Parallel Rome to similar trends in Imperial China and it makes sense.

>>993395
Chinks didn't worship their dead Emperors though, but the Imperial Family did build Temples dedicated to their ancestors.

Just like everyone else in China did to their own ancestors. Only the Emperor could make his shit bigger.

There seems to me an interesting potential to discuss contemporary “meme-culture”—maintaining Baudrillard’s definition of these memes as ultimately rhizomatic examples of units of social capital—as a similarly insurrectionary response to the imperative of sense-making

>>993382
No, it was extremely full.
Very dense propaganda.

You have to understand that in paganism the distinction between mortal and divine is not the abyss that you have in monotheism.

Men can become gods. And, for example in Hinduism, gods can reincarnate as men.

From A History of God:

>The pagan vision was holistic. The gods were not shut off from the human race in a separate, ontological sphere: divinity was not essentially different from humanity. There was thus no need for a special revelation of the gods or for a divine law to descend to earth from on high. The gods and human beings shared the same predicament, the only difference being that the gods were more powerful and were immortal.
This holistic vision was not confined to the Middle East but was common in the ancient world. In the sixth century BCE, Pindar expressed the Greek version of this belief in his ode on the Olympic games:
Single is the race, single
Of men and gods;
From a single mother we both draw breath.
But a difference of power in everything
Keeps us apart;
For one is as nothing, but the brazen sky
Stays a fixed habituation for ever.
Yet we can in greatness of mind
Or of body be like the Immortals.

>Educated pagans looked to philosophy not religion for enlightenment. Their saints and luminaries were such philosophers of
antiquity as Plato, Pythagoras or Epictetus. They even saw them as 'sons of God': Plato, for example, was held to have
been the son of Apollo.

It is no surprise Caesar and Augustus were divinized.

Do you think anyone actually believed that the emperor was god?

>>993441
I'm sure SOMEbody did.

>>993441
Your dad become a god over your family when he dies.

Why not the Emperor?

>>993441
A god.

>>993384
It was pretty shit questline. The Tribunal was much better.

>>993441
I mean the Japanese thought so until the end of WW2

>>993441

One of the reasons why Diocletian left Rome so soon after arriving there, was that the Romans who lived in Rome did not consider him a divine figure, and treated him too familiarly. Based on this it is safe-ish to assume that in the provinces the Emperor was seen as something more than a man, at least by some people.

>>993574
>the Romans who lived in Rome did not consider him a divine figure
He just wasn't ready. Not yet.

He was excessively alive.

Are you asking if the Emperor was really a god or not?