Ancient & modern
WHEN the Nepalese prince Dipendra, who recently slaughtered most of the Nepalese royal family, was at Eton, he was excused chapel after being declared a god. Etonians were properly outraged at this unheard-of lapse in school rules, but if the explanation was that one god could not be asked to worship another, the reasoning was sound.
Gods in the ancient world were worshipped because they were taken to be unpredictable forces, capable of doing much harm and much good. Only regular gifts and honours could win their favour (though even then one could never be absolutely sure). But gods were jealous of their power, and any mortal who presumed to divine honours could expect a speedy blast of divine retribution.
Nevertheless, even in Homer, our earliest Western literature (8th century sc), we find that great men, like the Trojan leader Hector, could be honoured like a god; and a habit of establishing religious cults in honour of powerful humans became widespread in the Greek world. It began with the cult in honour of Alexander the Great, and moved into top gear with the Roman emperors.
The reasoning was impeccable: like gods, emperors were powerful, unpredictable beings, capable of helping and hindering on a large scale. There were economic motives too. Religious festivals meant holidays and big crowds. Any imperial triumph, however feeble, could in theory be celebrated for profit. Indeed, there are cases where provincial governors had to stamp on excessive demands for the celebration of imperial 'achievements'.
The gods remained relaxed about all this. The fact that an emperor was worshipped as a god by foolish humans meant nothing. Emperors might think they would be deified at death, but that was different (at the onset of his terminal illness Vespasian wittily remarked, 'Damn! I think I'm turning into a god'). But the fiction of the human divinity was useful: the people of Ephesus once used it to keep Alexander the Great at bay. The fabulous temple of Artemis (Diana) there had been burnt down, and Alexander offered to fund its rebuilding. The Ephesians were less keen, and rejected his advances on the grounds that it was not appropriate for one god to dedicate offerings to another.
Beaks at Eton seem to have been thinking in the same terms when they excused Prince Dipendra chapel. Now that he is dead, perhaps they should prove their sincerity by building a shrine to him and giving the school a day off every year to pay homage at it.
Peter Jones
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