We read about how certain Roman emperors were “deified” after their deaths. Unfortunately it is not easy to learn the details about how this process was actually undertaken. I was fortunate to come across a rare description of how the deification (deificatio) ceremony took place in the humanist Biondo Flavio’s Roma Triumphans (Rome in Triumph). This Renaissance Latin work, published in 1459, contains a wealth of information on Roman religion and ceremonies, compiled from a painstaking review of the Latin sources available to him.
