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A Divine Right to Rule? The Gods as Legitimators of Power

Gartrell, Amber; (2024) A Divine Right to Rule? The Gods as Legitimators of Power. In: Betjes, Sven and Hekster, Olivier and Manders, Erika, (eds.) Tradition and Power in the Roman Empire. (pp. 11-26). Brill: Leiden, The Netherlands. Green open access

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Abstract

Rome’s very first political competition was resolved by calling upon the gods to adjudicate the dispute; the victor then went on to claim the highest position of power in the state. From that moment on, the support of the gods became a way to break into or to climb structures of power and legitimise claims to that power. This first competition was between Romulus and Remus over the foundation of their city: where it should be located, what it should be called, and who should rule over it.1 When Romulus received a sign of twelve vultures to his brother’s six, the city was founded on the Capitoline and named Rome after its first king, whose position of supreme power had thus been legitimised by this display of divine support.2 Not all ancient authors accepted this claimed legitimacy at face value, however. Plutarch’s account includes a variant in which Romulus lied, claiming the appearance of twelve vultures after Remus announced his six, only to be retroactively proven correct when the twelve vultures then appeared.3 A question of the authenticity of claims for divine support is thus present in accounts of the first use of this technique: should these be understood as genuine expressions of religious belief or cynical political manipulations?

Type: Book chapter
Title: A Divine Right to Rule? The Gods as Legitimators of Power
ISBN-13: 978-90-04-53745-3
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1163/9789004537460_003
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004537460_003
Language: English
Additional information: This is an Open Access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY NC 4.0 license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10195372
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