Posted: Aug 10, 2014 10:49 am
trubble76 wrote:There also seems to be a religious element to the issue of royalty. Leaders are assumed to be in power by consent of the favoured deity/s (how could it be otherwise?) and so if a man is so favoured by a god, how could his progeny be "ordinary"? As well as the powerful king being favoured, all that is his or comes from him is similarly favoured. Obviously, his son is more favourable to the deity that the son of some other person.
I think it's a kind of 'trial by combat' stretched out across multiple generations, with the preferred deity of the region as ultimate arbiter.
Indeed. The first rulers of the Near East were also priests who interceded with the gods. The Romans established this with their consuls serving as Pontifex Maximus (the high priest) at least once during their voyage up the cursus honorem. The pontifex was much like the pope of today, an elected position and the priest of Jupiter an appointment for life.
Marius, appointed Julius Caesar to this position as an attempt to circumvent what he perceived as a rival for the position of the "best" military leader potential in him when he was in his teens. This position as priest of Jupiter (flamen dialis) carried prohibitions on participation in war.
In 85 BC, Caesar's father died suddenly, so at sixteen Caesar was the head of the family. His coming of age coincided with a civil war between his uncle, Gaius Marius, and his rival Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Both sides, whenever they were in the ascendancy, carried out bloody purges of their political opponents. While Marius and his ally, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, were in control of the city, Caesar was nominated to be the new high priest of Jupiter, and married to Cinna's daughter Cornelia. But following Sulla's final victory, Caesar's connections to the old regime made him a target for the new one. He was stripped of his inheritance, his wife's dowry and his priesthood, but he refused to divorce Cornelia and was forced to go into hiding. The threat against him was lifted by the intervention of his mother's family, which included supporters of Sulla, and the Vestal Virgins. Sulla gave in reluctantly, and is said to have declared that he saw many a Marius in Caesar.
Julius Caesar in Wikipedia.