Do men such as Caesar need to think themselves gods in order to rule an empire such as Rome?

I have been reading Quo Vadis, the historical novel set in Rome at the time of Nero. Nero is considered a god by those that surround him. Well, those that know him think he’s a madman, but they act, in his presence, as if he is a god. At one point during the story, I found myself thinking, ‘Someone needs to put this dude in his place! He could use a little humility.’ But then I began to wonder if the position of leader over such an empire doesn’t almost require preternatural confidence, and that is best obtained through belief in one’s own divinity.  

I’m trying to think through why, in so many instances of rulers over large empires, there is this pretense of divinity that prevails. Maybe it’s in part a requisite.

Right after thinking someone should humble Nero, I wondered if I, in humility, could take responsibility for decisions that would affect so many people. I second-guess decisions I make for myself. When I was on staff at church, I remember wondering if the things we were doing were truly the right decisions.

Some years earlier, our then senior pastor had a sense from God that we were to move buildings. We had some indications that doors were opening for us, but things were difficult. He was finding scriptures that talked about having faith in the midst of difficulties. One in particular that I remember was the passage where Joshua crosses the Jordan into the promised land at flood season. It wasn’t until the priests started wading into the river that the waters parted. So based on that, he led the congregation to move ahead and give towards the down payment. There was supposedly another donor who was going to contribute a substantial sum and we just needed to have faith and move forward. My wife and I took some $3000 and put it towards the effort. In the end, the donor backed out, and we, the church, lost the deposit. I didn’t regret giving since we did that in faith, but it wasn’t lost on me that our pastor had obviously gotten something terribly wrong, and it had cost his parishioners substantial amounts of cash and whatever investment they had put in. That’s a heavy burden to carry.  

I was aware that decisions I was making were going to have an impact. And that’s at a very small scale.  

Scale that up to a larger stage and the decisions our leaders make have a material impact on people’s lives. I know that there are no true solutions- in the sense that one answer to a problem will resolve every issue. There are only tradeoffs. Diminishing one problem means another problem will be augmented. That’s just the nature of complex systems.  

In order then to run something on the scale of the Roman, or Persian, or Chinese empires will require decisions made that will have enormous effects on those downstream. That’s probably too overwhelming and paralyzing to any normal human. Perhaps it is in response to the heavy responsibility laid on such a man, that those around him, and even he himself, begins to see the position as requiring something more than normal humanity: it requires at least a lesser divinity in order to enable, and justify, the decisions made.

We are watching a Korean drama right now where the parliament is bombed, killing the president, all but one member of his cabinet, and the houses too. The remaining cabinet member, a humble professor, is called on to lead the nation. His indecision, or slowness in coming to a decision, is palpable. It’s perhaps the same thing: his humility doesn’t help him. It makes the weight of his decisions overwhelming.  

In most of our democratic systems, this is mitigated by the checks and balances built into the system. We no longer rely on one man to be invested with this level of power. But in the older empires, those rulers were invested with such power.

There is also a bit of a chicken/egg problem here: what came first: the power or the megalomaniac?

In the past, I probably would have attributed rulers self-identification as divine to their own hubris.  

But even if the position, according to the hypothesis, requires this preternatural confidence beyond human (hence it being called divine), the fact that it is called divine is itself going to select for those men that feel themselves such and crave that kind of power.

For those men, maybe they don’t even need the convincing. Maybe the ascription of divinity is for the sons, those born into the position who don’t, by nature, have that level of confidence, but who will nevertheless be thrust into the position of responsibility. Maybe they need to be convinced of it, or brought up in such a way as to think their decisions really are worthy of such respect.

Anyway, these are some thoughts I’m trying to process through on the issue.