The Roman Imperial Power
The first feature of Roman imperial power was the willing to take risks. Since he would weave his aspirations in a tangled set of interests. The candidate should have total efficiency in its imposition, using his image and rhetoric.
The emperor was an aristocrat with absolute power and the element of his power was sovereignty. He lived in constant ambivalence, was elected to be the most powerful man, the more it cost him a permanent vigilance against traps and murders. This constant care was to guarantee the continuity of his government.
First Roman Emperor Augustus.
The Roman Republic was not property of the emperor, he was up to his tutelage. The human and natural resources did not belong. His power was to administer, as a herd in motion. The art of shear to peel the skin. So could continue shearing.
It was necessary to maintain the image of the republic since it was the backbone, the pillar. The paradox of a constructed reality, despotism masked by the collective interest, since the emperor was the representative of the community with the mission supposedly granted by the people, graduated senators and legions. In fact, what I would refer this consensus was the efficiency of its imposition.
The Caesars and the gods were a step above humanity. And they were omnipresent, occupying several spaces at once. This brought the theoretical connotation that people walked towards the emperor. Next were actually their representatives, and the people owed them obedience. The emperor was away, the historian Paul Veyne [1] shows the Roman imperial power so great as remote.
This superiority of the Caesars aroused in social relations prudence in worship them. Clearly the gods gave himself a religious cult. The Caesars were not seens as gods, nor were representatives of God, even though he was of the pontificate. The all-powerful emperor was absolute, resided with his cult was not in the ways of religion, but of power, a worship building, more accurately, a cult of coaxing.
[1] Paul Veyne French historian and archaeologist, professor of Roman history at the College de France.
