Before Jerusalem Fell

The Role of Emperor Worship 275
than a year petiorming as a musician and an actor in the four
Grecian festivals, the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian. 75
Soon thereafter “Nero was actually deified by the Greeks as ‘Zeus,
Our Liberator.’ On the altar of Zeus in the chief temple of the city
they inscribed the words ‘to Zeus, our Liberator’ namely Nero, for
ever and ever; in the temple of Apollo they set up his statue; and they
called him ‘The new Sun, illuminating the Hellenes,’ and ‘the one
and only lover of the Greeks of all time.’ “76 When Nero returned to
Rome, he returned to the triumphant praise of the city as he entered
the palace and Apollo’s temple on the Palatine. 77 Dio records the
scene thus:
The city was all decked with garlands, was ablaze with lights and
reeking with incense, and the whole population, the senators themselves
most of all, kept shouting in chorus: “Hail, Olympian Victor!
Hail, Pythian Victor! Augustus! Augustus! Hail to Nero, our Hercules!
Hail to Nero, our Apollo! The only Victor of the Grand Tour, the
only one from the beginning of time! Augustus! Augustus! O, Divine
Voice! Blessed are they that hear thee.’”s
After Nero’s death, the emperor Vitellius even offered sacrifices
to the spirit of the deceased Nero. This matter was so serious that
Vespasian had to make the effort to check this Nero cult.’g
Later descriptions of Nero portray his lust for deity. Book 5 of
the Sibylline Oracles, is a Jewish composition written for the most
part sometime after A.D. 80. 80
In this book of the Oracles “the evil
of Nero has the same three dimensions as the evil of Rome: he is
morally evil, he was responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem (VS.
150), since the Jewish war began in his reign, and he claimed to be
God.”81
The mid-second century Christian pseudepigraphic work Ascen-
75. Henderson, L$e and Priru+bate, pp. 381ff.
76. Weigall, Nero, p. 276. Weigall has noted that a memorial stone found at Kardiza
in 1888 contained Nero’s declaratory speech to which the Greeks responded with
accolades of his divinity. A fuller text of the Greek response to Nero’s speech can be found
in Henderson, Lz~e and Pnm@ate, p. 391.
77. Henderson, Nero, p, 394.
78. Dio Cassius, Rom Histoy 62:20:5.
79. ibid. 65:4. See Weigall, Nero, pp. 299K
80. J. J. Collins, “Sibylline Oracles,” in James H. Charlesworth, cd,, Old Testament
Pseudepigra@a, 2 VOIS. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983) 1:390.
81. Ibid., p. 395, notes y and b2.