Dionysus was the god of fertility and wine, later considered a patron of the arts. He created wine and spread the art of viticulture. He had a dual nature; on one hand, he brought joy and divine ecstasy; or he would bring brutal and blinding rage, thus reflecting the dual nature of wine.
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A request to sacrifice to Alexander is not attested, but there are strong indications that by the end of 324 BCE, the king received divine honors. He had already presented himself as Dionysus, and if we are to believe Ephippus (one of his courtiers), Alexander also wore the attributes of Heracles occasionally. It was an act, and he still hoped to persuade the Macedonian part of his army to join: if he pretended to be their god, they could pretend that they worshiped him, and they would have a unified army, court, and state.
The Greek towns were certainly willing to join. The Ephesians invented a nice story about Alexander’s miraculous birth and hired a famous artist to make a painting of Alexander with his lightning bolt; in Priene, the house where Alexander had once spent a couple of nights, became a temple; and in Athens, an altar was dedicated to “the invincible god”.Alexander tried to present himself as a local ruler, for example by sacrificing to the Apis bull, a ritual that the Greeks believed to be important for the Egyptians. Among the royal titles accepted by Alexander were ancient names like “beloved by Amun” and “chosen by Ra”. The important point, however, was the common pharaonic title “son of Ra”, which might be translated as both “son of Zeus” (because Ra was Egypt’s supreme god) and “son of Helios” (because Ra was a solar deity). Both must have appealed to Alexander, who belonged to a dynasty that claimed to descend from Zeus’ son Heracles, and was somehow connected to the sun as well.
The title of “son of Zeus” was immediately accepted in the Greek world. While Alexander was venturing in the western desert, where the priest of the oracle of Ammon in Siwa again saluted him as son of a god, reports about Alexander’s new title must have been carried to Greece on the last ships to cross the Mediterranean before the winter set in. When the sea was open again in the spring of 331, the first ships to arrive in Egypt brought the news that the old oracle of Didyma, which had been silent since the age of Xerxes, had spoken again, and had “unexpectedly” announced that Alexander was the son of Zeus.
Although Alexander the Great was not the first human to receive divine honors, his self-deification set an example for Hellenistic kings, Roman emperors, and other rulers. However, this would not have been the case if Alexander’s self-deification had not been entirely rational and if it had not offered advantages that no ancient ruler could afford to ignore.
Alexander as kosmokrator, "ruler of the universe"
The self-deification had been a rational policy, and was repeated by his successors: the ruler cult of the Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors is well-attested. It was a strategy for anyone who had to create unity in the armies, courts, and kingdoms. But it came at a prize: during the Roman Empire, it was generally recognized that Alexander’s idea that the god-king was not subject to the law, was the equivalent of moral corruption. The man who had conquered the world, had lost his soul. It is possible that the famous remark, made by Vespasian on his death bed, that he feared becoming a god, was not a joke at all, but a serious observation about the corruptive nature of power.
